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.

I think we'll feel our character's impact/specialties in a particular area more as we get higher in level.


No. I even found their dialogue system in DOS2 to be boring, where if you had the right skill level in an area (easily obtainable) then you auto passed. No fun. If you want to keep reloading for every little outcome, that's on you.


As interesting as that is, I don't think any major changes are going to come.

Maybe add a TLDR to the post next time, im afraid not everyone will read it due to its length.


Not...really. What you want to do and how high the test is depends on alot of things. It depends on the difficulty of the task and how you approach it. The DM manual says the following about skill tests: A 5 is very easy, 10 is easy. 15 is moderate, 20 is hard, 25 is vrery hard and 30 is nearly impossible.

The DM manual even says that a DC test of 5 can be safely disregarded most of the times because of how trivial it is. And as a player I concur. They then say that just using 10, 15 and 20 can work just fine and honetsly ive only ever seen a DC 15 test once and nothing above that. Guess my DM's and myself arent sadistic enough *shrug*

That said I wouldnt want to see characters who are proficient in something automaticly pass them. That would make things completly irrelevant. And make rogues and bards insanely overpowerd.

That said, I agree on the fact that the tests atm are very frustrating. Even more so because failure is a 100% failure. Even in DOS 2 if you failed something you still got something out of it. A good voice line for your trouble or something, but at least something. It also rarely completly shut you out of dialogue as far I can renember. Which for example at Nettie the game does as soon as you fail once. I think thats also why we (or at least I, and I never did this before...) reload a save as soon as we fail something because failure is absolute and its all tied to a trivial dice roll that we dont feel in control over.

TLDR: Agree that rolls could be done better. In pnp DND you can roll with your failures and it writes a better story. In bg3 atm that isent the case. Failure is absolute and the player has little control over it, which doesent feel very dnd to me.

There is a simple solution here: Increase the bonus you gain from a proficiency so it feels more rewarding to have them.

They do go up every four levels gained. And some checks double the proficiency bonus. The difference will show up the more we level.

We're going to have +20% or maybe +25% better odds from proficiency at max level, depending on where Larian land, but check difficulty will likely also increase. I don't think that will make the core issues go away: the pass/fail result will still be very random, many characters will have the stats and skills to reasonably achieve either outcome, and one outcome will still be significantly more interesting than the other.

I'm aware this is not going to see any massive changes, hence the "tilting at windmills" comment, but I do think the current design is a quite naïve translation of the rules as written and doesn't work very well in practice. It is probably my biggest gripe with the game as is. I am hoping that at least Larian will choose the failure results more care for future content, even if they have less care than they do with the successes.


Personally I'm very fond of 13th Age's fail forward ethos for checks, where the interpretation of a failed roll isn't necessarily that you out-and-out do not succeed at your goal but can also be that you succeed with some unexpected side-effects if that's the more narratively interesting outcome. I adore their canonical example: a suave rogue attempts to schmooze a ship's officer. He rolls 4, needing 15. The outcome is that, oh yes, the ship's officer is very interested in you. He requests your presence for dinner ... while dropping multiple hints that he's a recreational cannibal, and dinner includes the boarders you just repelled.

Assuming that we're going to be using the D&D rules for this D&D game, there's little we can do with the mechanics of Skill Checks, they are what they are. I'd love more gear and/or consumables that could temporarily boost your odds but I think that this very much hits the nail about Skill Checks:

i

I made a post on a related topic where, say, the fate of an NPC's life is in the hands of a single die roll and the success or failure of saving them is just "will the computer give me a good number" rather than "this person died because I made bad choices" or "this person lived because I made good choices". Which sort of makes things more frustrating than either tragic or triumphant.

I'm struggling to think of any other D&D computer game that actually implemented out of combat skill checks naïvely. Certainly none of the Bioware or Obsidian games did. I think DDO, maybe? DDO isn't exactly a strong single-player narrative though. I can't remember what ToEE did, it was pretty groggy being ToEE, but I think they just had simple thresholds.

[E:] Thinking back the Bioware NWN might have done them, actually? Pretty uncommon in the video game implementations, in any case.

Clearly there's no requirement that you must roll d20s for everything or you're not a D&D game. That the game is run on a computer with a fixed set of possible outcomes should -- must! -- have impact on the design. You can debate exactly what should be different, but since you're starting with a rule system explicitly designed to leave aspects up to human interpretation a fixed translation will have to make some judgment calls. I think this is definitely one of those things that should be impacted, and that previous games opted to not take the BG3 approach for good reasons. Equally clearly not everyone agrees with that.

Imo the fact thst we have checks isent the problem, its the fact that we dont have degrees of failure and some have very harsh consequences.

Example: players want to haggle to get a little bit more gp for their loot so try to haggle with a blacksmith. Succes would give them abit more gp. Crit succes would give them the same price hike and better prices in the future. Failure you get what the merchant offers or take it elsewhere. Crit fail you insult the blacksmiths ancestry and not only dont you get any gp. Roll initiative b**ch!

With larian we only have normal succes and crit fails.

I tend to feel that this is a big part of it....like in a conversation where you are determining the life and death of a child, it shouldn't come down to a single arbitrary die roll.

I like the skillchecks, generally, as long as they do not lock me out of content and just make a new solution to an issue possible or give me a small piece of extra information. For example I found the hunter near the hag hut and there is quite a difficult skillcheck asking him about his prey. I just wanted to know what it is, since I figured this might be a sidequest that opens up that I might otherwise not find. Well it turns out it updates one of my quests, and I do not know if I would otherwise could have updated and solved that questline.

Something else I thought was strange are multiple skill checks for the same outcome. Nettie is an example for that. I am fine with doing an athletics skillcheck, for evasion and a persuasion skillcheck for convincing her to stop. That makes sense. However there is another persuasion skillcheck attached, for the same thing, which makes little sense, apart from making the total skillchecks needed to pass rather hard.

Another thing that I noticed is that while my bonuses for my checks are shown when mousing over it, the maluses are not ( I assume there are some, because I rolled a 4 on a persuasion check that I had +4 with). I would like to know my chances beforehand, so I can always just disengage and explore another topic. Also I think passing them should give XP.

Otherwise I like skillchecks, also how they are implemented in this game. As long as the "reward" is something similar or the resolution to the story is just another aspect I think it adds replay value. Like say you can convince a villain to not harass anyone instead of fighting him, so you do not get his loot, but get a different reward, because you chose another route. In that way it all evens out in the end.

NOONE makes people do anything! It is the choice, and only the choice of the one choosing to save scum, or do what they are about to do.

this only changes if your life is being threatened. What your friends holding a gun to your head, saying 'RELOAD and get the interesting one' no, then stop. Just stop.

As a DM and player there are times I can't roll worth a shit. In five hours of one night I rolled (mind you it was at disadvantage for most of that time) 3 20's, a 17, an 18. everything else out of some 20 rolls not counting the fact I was rolling twice was below 12 with my modifiers. Did anything cool nope, we just shook our heads and went on. Dying, death, escaping death, barely surviving a fight, and at times nearly every fight. Is part of D&D, it's what makes D&D d&d.

Note about Disco Elysium = Disco Elysium is yes another RPG, it's checks are indeed many and massive. It is also for all intents and purposes a text based game, with graphics to add flavor. BG3 isn't about a particular story, it's world is far larger, it's combat is different. It's made to target a different audience. I know many gamers that love rpg that hate the way Disco Elysium is, 'it's to much reading', 'why can't I kill everyone', etc. Because of it's targeted audience DE can have massive amounts of checks. BG3's audience isn't the same, so it needs spacing.

Again noone in pointing a gun to peoples head forcing themto use the powers of load save. Or other super powers are at hand. It's the people and only themselves that are choosing to do this. If we create games exactly how people that want to save scum want. Well I'd stop playing games, the games would all be boring. Exploits (which save scumming is) out the ass, everything simply dies as you walk past, very little story, among all the other stupidity that I dislike.

Why is this? because the vast majority of gamers nowadays simply want to run around and kill, they want everything handed to them on a silver and gold platter. In short they want to win immediately and they don't care how they go about it.

Good to know that I still have the power of divination


I'm not saying anyone is making anyone else do anything. Most players just consider some conversation outcomes to be failure states, in the same way they consider some combat outcomes to be failure states. When in the failure state, they reload. Every video game with saves is designed with that loop in mind. You can wish it were otherwise, feel free, but that doesn't really change how people work (apparently you need a fortress' worth of regret for it).

In the combat case, I think it's fair to say that the majority of crpgs have combat encounters that are way harder than anything a GM would regularly throw at people, because the game designers recognize that players can simply redo the combat if they dislike the outcome (i.e. they die horribly) and challenging encounters that can and do kill you are fun for players to solve. Do you also refuse to reload the game after party wipes? If you're OK with combat being more challenging since you can save and reload, why shouldn't dialogue be similarly impacted?

Simply saying that gamers nowadays are just entitled and want things handed to them on a silver platter is rediculous.

In bg ive had plenty of dialogues go south and end in combat and so long as i dident have my entire party vaporized I was fine with it. Bg dident require you to roll dice every single difficult conversation however. You could fail because you said the right things or pass because you said the right things.

In bg3 however its basicly that all those conversations are replaced with skill checks. Skill checks like that should be rare and a perfect example how not to approach dialogue is nettie.

We all understand that it should be difficult to pursuade her. But as it stands its nigh impossible and not because players dont approach it well but because its multiple rng tests in a row.

Why restrict us to just skill checks vs allowing us to pursuade her by making good points about why she should release us with maybe 1 or 2 hard tests depending on how we want to approach it.

Man you actually find people desperate enough to let you DM for them? Oof.

Agree on everything the OP says pretty much. The inflexibility of a crpg without a DM needs to take this into account. Nothing wrong with failing as long it's done in an interesting way. In dialogue it should not completely shut the whole thing down but leave at least some clue or hint of how to get to the solution you need. While I would love to have as interesting a system of checks as Disco Elysium has, I think it could prove to be too much work considering how far along the development already is. A threshold system seems like something more achievable at this point.

I'd hide unsuccessful perception checks etc. too... It kind of goes counter the whole point of failing those checks. Combat related checks don't really even come into the whole issue.

Divination lol nice.

I can see your point on failure states, and it's going to happen on every game. Yet we don't know the full outcome until we fail, (are there repercussions down the road?) or until we succeed (is there repercussions to succeeding) how each affect the story (that isn't finished) further down the road. If your trying to beat everything you'll never know what happened if you failed. In combat it tends to mostly end the game. What about conversation skill checks, if you fail to beat the wisdom needed to read Gales mind, does it cut off a future story branch down the road, or does it open something else up. If you simply reload your not going to know. Yet people chose to reload, and in cases of rpg lose out on alternate paths, or endings. So their divination is flawed they only want the best, the greatest outcome with reloading saves on failed checks.

The thing about difficult are nearly impossible combats are they tend to end the game. That is the one and only outcome should you lose, unlike in conversations where your failure may have impacts down the road. May make the next roll in the conversation harder, or may cause a companion to leave you. (Currently the rolls in conversations need work.) Yet combat reloading and conversation reloading are two different things. One combat has only one outcome, game over. Conversation can have multipule outcomes if you fail, one being combat.

I think you may be missing the point Clavis.

People who like RPGs are not usually the people concerned with outcomes. They want a deterministic game which responds to their choices. When they find themselves restricted from making the determinations and decisions they feel compelled to follow, their joy is diminished. The point is not the destinations per se, its about being able to travel the road you want and exploring the destination you arrive at as a result.

I have to agree and say that the skill checks sort of already tell you whats going to happen if you pass or fail which makes it hard for me to just accept failures when I know that failure means fight for instance. But what I'm most irritated with is the multiple skill checks for a single outcome. Some have already mentioned Nettie, and it's irritating that I have to pass 3 skill checks for the peaceful outcome but failing any 1 of the 3 fails the whole thing (where you either fight or stuck in the room). I thought I could deal with it as its not a big deal and I do see, possibly, the desire to show how difficult she is, but then I faced another of these situations with the necromancer's book which I decided to unlock. With that dialogue, I had to pass a few skill checks 1 after another that got increasingly more difficult and if you fail any of them you fail the whole thing (as far as I know). I got lucky my first time through and passed each skill check and I got upset because it didn't even tell me what my reward was, I THINK I got a talk to dead spell and thats it. I don't feel very accomplished with that and definitely didn't like having to pass so many skill checks that are super random where even if my DC is like 5 I could fail it...

I feel that they are concerned with outcomes, but they want only theirs to come about. Which is counter to most rpg's, you can't always 'win' that would be boring. You can't always succeed when your going up against another person, or even magic. If you could what would be the point in playing? You already know whats going to happen in the end. You wrote the story in your head, word for word, because only your choice matters, making the need for fully fledged npc's with there own goals, and motives absolete (blah can't spell). Which in turn would break the immersion, because you the player already know the outcome to every decision. YOU WIN.

When you playing and everything happens just the way you want it to, there won't be any big suprises cause those surprises, will just work in your favor. Again you already know whats going to happen. If your a murder hobo you kill it all, it dies. Why even have a roll in combat, or chance to die. same goes for conversation why even have them. Just have a list pop up, chose your action. If it's nettie dies, she simply slumps over dead for example.

What if you fail with Nettie (knock her out) come back to her apologizing, or her having turned the entire druid circle against you. Maybe she leaves and tries to hunt you down? Could be you failing, knocking her out, and saving the other druid has a repercussion with that other druid. (halsin I believe) He hears about Nettie trying to poison you, you knocking her out, and you coming to save him. Shows that even though your not good at talking, you still are good, because you didn't kill her when you could have, and you saved him. Creating further depth to the story and your own character.

This creates stories within stories, and depth to an otherwise image on a screen. Pulls you in and makes you think about alternate choices in case you fail.