Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Skill checks aren't interesting

Possibly this is tilting at windmills and something that's just too late to address but: pass/fail d20 checks as implemented in BG3's conversation trees are not a fun or interesting mechanic. I think they should be rethought.

The way skill checks work out mechanically in your typical d20, including 5e D&D, is that by default a normal person on a normal difficulty check has somewhere near a 50/50 shot at making it. Task difficulty and character skill will move the bar a little bit, but guaranteed success are rare since ±2 from proficiency or whatever is ±10% chance. If you're good at something you'll succeed maybe 80% of the time, but you're still going to be at 50% for a difficult task. BG3 follows this in a straight-forward manner.

This system works reasonably well in pen and paper because you have a GM who can ensure that no matter what the roll is, the outcome will be interesting. Failing rolls can be a lot of fun, and lead to very interesting scenarios! You can also have nuance in how you fail, with an infinite degree of partial results depending on your roll. BG3 -- any crpg, really -- faces two big obstacles here: first, you cannot have nuance and an infinite degree of partial successes and failures because there's no human GM. Second, the presence of save games effectively mean that a 40% chance is actually a 100% chance with extra tedium if the player decides that they in fact want to or deserve to pass some particular check.

Because of those facts skill challenges have to be handled differently in video games than they are in pen and paper. I think that currently BG3 has made a few major mistakes in its implementation.
- The current failures are uninteresting. Failing an arcana check doesn't mean something goes wrong in a cool way, it means the game goes "neener, neener, you don't know that!" even if you're a highly intelligent wizard. This feels unfair, fails to reinforce character choices and, most importantly, is very boring. It makes people reload saves to get the interesting outcome instead.
- Checks are infrequent. If you want to have highly random outcomes then the only way to reinforce character concepts out is to have a lot of checks so the statistical advantage the intelligent wizard has on arcana checks is actually felt. BG3 has very few checks, which means that the random nature really stands out. It also makes reloading comparably easy. Contrast with for instance Disco Elysium, which has a similarly random system but has a constant barrage of checks so your character concept is still always evident.
- The differences in outcome are often both very significant and very random. As a result I don't feel like my character choices matter much, since I have little choice in how a situation resolves. The "dice luck" and "load savegame" powers available to everyone are both far more powerful than the "nature proficiency" power I actually picked.

Looking at other games I think there are a couple of common solutions. The easiest is to do what most the old IE games did and just not have significant non-combat checks. Non-combat skills weren't even implemented, and only rarely were class or ability scores checked in dialogue: the smelliest dwarf with the lowest CHA could charm their way through Baldur's Gate by clicking the right words. The next step up is to do what Torment and most modern cRPGs do and have thresholds instead of random rolls, or at least significantly less randomness. The final and hardest approach is to go full Disco Elysium: embrace the randomness but add a lot of non-combat skill checks and make failing skill checks lead to outcomes that are equally interesting and occasionally even preferential to passing skill checks.

My personal suggestion -- which really doesn't matter, but it's an effortpost -- would be for the game to just go with a simpler thresholding system. For instance, if your character has persuasion proficiency, they just pass all persuation checks. This reinforces the player's roleplaying choices and keeps non-combat skills meaningful while minimizing frustrations where the game feels unfair. It doesn't require any changes to recorded dialogue or what checks exist, it's purely reducing randomness so character concepts are strongly reinforced and reloading to force outcomes just isn't possible. The other realistic option is to keep the system as is but make sure that the failure outcomes are considerably more interesting than they are currently. If you want failing a check on something a character is good at to be a common experience in the game then it should be equally enjoyable and interesting to fail that check as it is to succeed.

TL;DR: BG3's implementation of d20 skill checks is straight-forward in a way that's frustratingly random and often leads to uninteresting outcomes. Aspects of it should, I think, be rethought.


To pre-emptively address some inevitable critiques:
"Players should just roll with their failures!" - There are two problems here. First, the failures are still mostly boring and it's reasonable for players to prefer interesting outcomes. Second, as any good GM knows, it doesn't really matter what players should do, it matters what they actually do. The reality is that most players will reload if their charismatic bard fails an 80% persuade check in the same way that they'd reload if their party got wiped out, because in either case reloading is more fun than the alternative. The game's design should make doing the fun and interesting thing easy.
"That's the 5e rules as written!" - Even ignoring that part of pen and paper is that the rules as written are a guidelines that you should ignore when it makes narrative sense, the rules are also written that way because 5e has a GM and does not have save games. If 5e was written to be run GM-less and with save games, it would have different rules. Video games have those things, so they should also have different rules.
"You just want an easy game for babies that gives you all the rewards on a silver platter!" - For me personally it's not about wanting to win easily or anything, I'm fine with check failures being painful and punishing. I just want them to be narratively interesting. I also think my weak and inattentive wizard should just not get any perception or athletics options in dialogues, unlike right now where I can just pass all of them if I really wanted to.