Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Several dicerolls for one outcome is bad

Honestly if I had the same issues on my first run through as I did with this exchange on the second, I would have asked for my money back. Trying to role play a good character I felt I was being railroaded into attacking Nettie. I lost count of the number of reloads I had to do to get through this. RNG was c**p for me, which just made things worse.

I have thought about this problem quite a bit. What I think they should do for these scenarios, is require "different" dice rolls. Have the NPC try different tactics against the player, not just force a repeat of the last BS ability check. Maybe start involving Nature/Arcana/History as well as other stat rolls.

The Nettie situation has you just trying to persuade her a bunch of times if I remember, which has you rerolling the same check. Nettie already wants to kill you, maybe she asks you a question that requires a medicine check to maintain the persuasion like "I want to believe you but can you convince me {that you just havent noticed the symptoms}{that the transformation wont take place} at which point the player can explain the "Day 1, Day2, process of ceremorphisis that Gale explained earlier" as a medicne check resonse rather than another generic Cha check. Conceptually this is her trying to resolve your presuasive argument.. rather than require more persuading, she evaluates the one roll you did with further information. (Oh yea, some medicine words ought to show her I know what Im talking about... ah maybe if I toss some Aracana jargon she will believe I can keep it under wraps and wont transform) OR she wants to know that you know enough about your condition that you would at least kill yourself before changing, like "Do you know when the right moment to do it would be? (Medicine check) if you wait too long then you will transform and you wont be able to end it"

I remember the Necromancy book being equally annoying... I didnt even save scum it, I just let it go after it failed the second roll that was exactly the same skill check

I can't help but wonder how many here going "+1, we shouldn't have to roll more dice rolls to do this" feel like they didn't get enough chances to persuade Kagha? I was in a nice little dialog for about 12 posts, where someone was trying to convince me that that dialog should have been much longer, giving players every possible advantage. I guess they, as I, failed all their dice rolls for Persuasion? It's funny how "but the outcome" seems to sway this dialog back and forth, isn't it?

I can't help but feel like Larian tries a couple of times to force you through several roles to increase the chance of just dropping you into a failure situation. Maybe that's just to get people used to 'failing is fine and fun', but to me it didn't feel like it. I don't trust Larian the way I would trust a DM to not screw with the party. I don't mind failing dice rolls with a DM at the table if I can trust him to not use it just to screw us, but to make something special happen. If a DM increases the chances of things go south to tell the story - like in Nettie's case - I'm fine with it. If they just add dice roll after dice roll so that you fail and end up fighting that's when I call the DM out - and it feels a bit like this is the case we have in EA.

If so, they failed as failing is not fun in this game

Kahga is a different kind of railroading issue than what this subject is about.

With Kahga, you only need to pass one roll. It's a ridiculous DC 18 Persuasion or DC 20 Nature, but it's one roll. I would like additional options for that situation, such as making an Acrobatics check to tumble the child out of the way (and possibly take the hit yourself), or Animal Handling to grab the snake before it can strike, or a Medicine check to save the child if it gets bitten, but it's not what the thread is talking about.

The thread is talking about the same check being rolled in the same dialogue multiple times in a row where you need ALL passes to win, and ANY fail loses.

Agreed. To me it all feels a bit like the 'play evil' in EA - but all of this seems to end up in being a murderhobbo, which to me personally has no appeal whatsoever.

4E had skill challenges and I do miss them.

The idea was there was a series of rolls needed and you have to get like 3 successes before you had 3 failures. The number of success / failures could be varied to adjust just how difficult a skill challenge is.

I would love them to adjust these to be you get x number of failures before you failure the whole task.

Wonder if that's what happens in this game, hmm

Their current implementation and design philosophy is awful, and it was awful in the DivOS games as well. It didn't have such a big impact because it didn't have to account for the kind of mechanics and lore that exists in D&D which is bringing it to the forefront. The unfortunate irony is that the older games had superior implementation for a multitude of reasons, as well as other games having better interpretation. RPG and D&D veterans have pointed this out to them and offered them solutions but I highly doubt that we will see significant changes based on how other features such as dialogue have been implemented.

Thanks for clarifying exactly what I'm talking about. "But the outcome". Ironically, the fail state has as much to do with a situation that is beyond your control, and should be, how the child reacts. Kahga isn't planning to kill the child after all, just lock her up until the ritual is complete, or about to be complete, and then releasing her. She panics. Success is sweet there, I've done it twice, no save scumming, in three trips through it now. I was heartbroken that I failed and the child died, but my first thought wasn't "I'm going to keep doing this until I get it" but more "well, that's what happens". The same with Nettie, although I have only talked to her once, so far. In my other saves, I had already decided that I was going to try other things anyway.

The argument is the same, inherently: Where a player can't get their desired outcome in one roll, they want multiple, and where they get multiple it's "but I only need one". I used the example of the discussion here for a reason: I failed all of my Persuasion checks on the forum trying to convince the other poster to come around to my way of thinking, and they too failed all of theirs trying to sway me. How boring things would be if one post was the answer to everything, yes?

How so? Wondering what you mean when compared to DOS series.

Well, it's nice everyone on the internet agrees with you.

Actually, it's nice that they don't. That's where fun conversations about things spring up. It's also the point of the post you quoted here, that sometimes we're not going to agree, and that's fine too.

А мне у Нетти понравилось. Я благополучно провалила третью проверку. Обиделась. Обокрала саму Нетти, спёрла всё, что плохо лежит, со злости, а потом вскрыла потайную дверь и свалила в подземелье. Богатая тётка и такая рассеянная... Так что может и не зря все эти проверки.

DivOS2 was designed to tell an epic overarching story in one game. The BG trilogy told the epic overarching story over three games while each game had it's own epic adventure and story that related to the overarching plot(prophecy of Alaundo and time of troubles) and used this story to create extremely interesting stories, ideas and characters. OS is telling one story, the trilogy told hundreds and hundreds of stories. OS was designed to be a game, the trilogy was designed to be an experience.

PS: I'm not comparing it to something like Arcanum or Torment because the writing and depth and story in those games nukes OS games from orbit.

This would make it also easier to include teammates and decrease dependence on certain proficiencys to solve problems, by broadening the applicable skill-checks.

An issue that's much more relevant, when you have multiple players controlling different characters. Their aid/inclusion could really drive the group experience in conversations. Larian has here a very good opportunity to push mulitplayer to the next level.

Came here to say this.

Multiple skill checks where any one is a failure is the exact same thing as disadvantage, except you can keep arbitrarily adding checks past merely 2. If you've hit 5 or more checks the chances of failure, even if only a natural 1 fails, is now 20+%.

This was fine in systems like NWN and other 2.x or 3.x DnD builds, because the chance of failure really could be 5% on each check if you were a specialist, so adding an arbitrary string of them just made failure possible again-and besides, one of the best roleplaying dice checks in recent memory, the NWN 2 trial, was structured in a way that you didn't need to make all, or even any checks to succeed-the number of successes just determined how well you succeeded, in conjunction with the number of sidequests you did.

In this game, where even the most optimal persuader has 50-50 odds on some of these checks, the chance of rolling at least one failure in 4 to 5 checks approaches 100%. However many of these checks are fake, and don't actually do anything-meaning that it's merely completely pointless.

Here's how you actually do this, as a DM, by-the-by.

First, do single checks when possible. Make them appropriately difficult-for instance, convincing the ogre to fight without pay is an absurd DC, as it should be. Failure doesen't trigger combat though, which is precisely how it should be in that instance.

Second, ideally do 3-4 checks only if the system is supposed to be difficult, or a gradient of success is possible. You're on trial? You can get anywhere from guilty kill 'em, guilty imprison 'em, innocent insufficient evidence, to "Wow, they were framed, arrest the prosecutor!". You can then gate the different results behind a ratio of passes to failures, making incredible success only possible for specialists, but allowing mediocre characters to stumble through and potentially swerve to their strengths if it comes to that (trial by combat as a last ditch to avoid guilty).

Third, when doing multiple checks and there is only one outcome-an intentionally difficult skill challenge-make it so that the first checks don't decide the outcome, but do impose momentum. DnD 5e has a simple way to do this, advantage and disadvantage. The first check is to determine if they second is at advantage, and if you fail the second the third and final is at disadvantage (and if you succeed both previous ones the third and final is at advantage). In this way the other checks matter because you can end up with advantage or disadvantage, it's less random than a single die roll, and you're not making it arbitrarily difficult by accident. It also feels more like a dramatic conversation, where the momentum is building up to a crucial point-detective procedurals come to mind ("Here's circumstance, here's evidence, and there's the slam dunk").

There are a few other ways to handle this, but that's the basic idea. Only add long strings if you have a gradient of success or are using a momentum building system.

Right now even someone with 18 charisma is just a little more likely to succeed than others

Reading your post was a breath of fresh air. Fantastic to see someone who knows what they are talking about.

That being said, seeing as you are well informed, I'd be interested in what you think about using clever ways to circumvent how artificial these mechanics are. I've also been a GM for a long time and I very rarely offer more than one check and it's usually in the favor of the players because they've had extremely poor RNG at a very crucial moment and I'm not sure I've ever been in a game where the variance or standard deviation from the actual roll and the DC wasn't used to judge the gradient of success. Personally I think they should try to hide mechanics like this, such as by clever implementation of in game features.

For example, if you meet the criteria for a save in conversation if you could use the take ten rule of classic D&D then the game should treat it like an automatic success. This can also be used to circumvent incessant checks of almost any nature while making your build and specialization more important and requiring you to have a party with varied focus in specific skills. This is one of the instances in which I believe a 4 man party would actually work in their favor and be better than a 6 man party as you might not be able to fill every gap and still have to roll in certain circumstances where doing an automatic roll in the background when interacting with an object or choosing a specific dialogue choice that has only appeared because you've reached a certain skill threshold. I suggest all of this because every great GM I've ever seen has never told their players if they have succeeded or not keeping an air of uncertainty and extending the suspense. This would double to keep these mechanics out of your face and give you longer and more sustained 'free play' time without constantly shoving non diegetic features in your face all the time.