Visible Dice Roll Mechanic: The visible dice roll mechanic breaks immersion for me. In table top role-playing, rolling dice is an integral part of the gaming experience, not just in terms of the mechanics and what it accomplishes, but also in terms of just time spent gaming. We spent a lot of time rolling the dice when we gamed in person. However, in a computer game, one of the benefits of Baldur's Gate series was that the dice rolling was handled in the background. Our attack rolls, our saving throws, etc., were all handled by the computer, so the gaming experience was seamless. I am playing as a character in Faerûn: I don't want to be constantly jolted out of the immersive and beautiful gaming environment that you all have created by this meta-mechanic dice roll. If there’s already an option to make these dice checks without having the dice actually appear, I would really appreciate it.
Undecided on this one. I've had several high DC conversations where I've felt a great moment of excitement and then relief as I rolled high. Getting that 20 on my DC 19 conversation roll would've been a lot less exciting if I didn't see the DC and the roll.
Multiple Dice Rolls per Conversation: While I’m talking about dice rolls, multiple dice rolls in a single conversation makes for a difficult gaming mechanic. The Dice Roll mechanic in conversations is meant to determine whether I am able to persuade/intimidate/etc. someone. If there are multiple dice rolls per conversation, deciding at what point to choose a new dice roll seems to be rather difficult. Is the rule, every time I have to convince the person I’m speaking to of something I have to make another dice roll? I mean, if that’s the mechanic, then if I fail to convince them, why not just try to convince them again with another dice roll? And if that fails, can’t I just roll another dice to see if I can convince them to listen to me after having failed? If the rule were just: one dice rolls to see if I can persuade this character. I can see having multiple dice rolls if I have to persuade, then garner an insight, then having to deceive them. But overall, let’s try to cut down on the number of dice rolls needed for conversations.
Their take on conversations is a bit weird, it almost seems like they've misunderstood how likely you are to fail with a DC of 10-12. They're over-relying on persuade big time, and we should have multiple chances of success, not multiple checks to see if we succeed.
Party Member Participation in Conversations: However, if we are to have conversations with so many checks, I would like my party members to chime in and help me out. If I’m a wizard, and cleric begins to speak with me, I would really like my cleric companion to be able to chime in at appropriate moments, to help out with Religious checks and what-not. One example comes to mind: when I entered the idyllic, ‘lamb’ cavorting area surrounding the hag’s cavern. If I failed my check to discern the illusion, why couldn’t my other party members roll a check to help us out?
+1
Dice Roll Mechanic and Lore: There’s a sense in which the dice roll mechanic breaks apart once we get to questions of Lore. For instance, how is it that the roll of a dice determines whether or not I know what an intellect devourer is? How is it that this is something I do know if I roll a 17, but something I don’t know if I roll a 2? Put another way: How is it that what I know is random? And how random is my knowledge? Or what parts of my knowledge are random? Do I know my own past randomly? When employing a skill, I can see that people can perform skills along a spectrum: you could perform well (i.e. I roll a 19) or poorly (i.e. I roll a 2), but skills do not work in the same way knowledge does, and to treat them the same is a bit bizarre. If the dice roll for Lore is just measuring my capacity to recall the information, then I suppose we could have a skill called Memory (although that’s pushing it… I don’t how much sense ‘Memory’ as a skill makes), and then have LORE be something that you acquire through gameplay and backgrounds. For instance, if you have a Sage background, you have a large store of Arcane and History lore, but Religious lore is something you’d have to acquire through gameplay, or the people in your party with Religious lore could pipe in at appropriate moments.
Actually this is pretty close to "rules as written". A DM can accommodate for partial success, but that's very much a houserule - a houserule that's also deviously hard to implement properly in a computer game. So I'm fine with this implementation.
Safe Jumping: If I’m jumping, I would like some sort of alert as to whether I’m going to go prone and succumb to damage. I thought the white circle indicated the “safe” places to jump, but I still find myself taking damage and falling down prone, but sometimes it’s okay… Please give me some way of knowing whether my jump trajectory is safe or not.
Yes please
