Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Miss! Miss! CRITICAL MISS! Miss! Miss! Miss! Miss!

I appreciate your stats, but wanted to focus on this line. This is a bug (or something Larian has decided to change). In 5e, you always do at least 1 damage if you hit. Even if your strength modifier is -5, you roll a 1 on your damage die, the enemy has resistance, AND the enemy has that feat that reduces oncoming damage by 3. You still do 1 damage if you hit.

EDIT: The above is incorrect, don't listen to me. Min damage is 0.

At this point I would assume that even Larian didn't actually know that.

It seems like such an obscure rule.

I wouldn't say there could be nothing wrong. But it certainly is not as obvious as some make it sound. The thing is, bad rolls happen. There are curious streaks of not missing in a row, that's just the nature of any RNG, or dice. However, in the bigger picture of a longer run, this simply evens out (and the good streaks are forgotten, human psychology).




Didn't know that, I only got the 5e starter set. The game for the time being at least treads things that way until patched then, thx (I was really confused by no attack roll being displayed, despite the apparent hits -- it simply says "opposition took no damage" in the log or some such).

Actually, I looked it up after reading your two posts to double check. Apparently I am wrong, and my groups have been playing incorrectly this entire time! Huh.....my bad. Apologies for misinformation

You can do 0 damage.

So it's just an acknowledged bug with the combat log?

Indeed. Heavy Armour Mastery for the win!

Whatever you do, don't tell your DM...

So, is there something obviously wrong with ADVANTAGE then?

Took my shitty elven fighter again and always had her run behind the enemy for advantage. This means her 75% melee attack from the last page turned into a 94% one -- which is also calculated correctly, btw
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/07/12/dnd-5e-advantage-disadvantage-probability/

Remember that the question marks are from hits that rolled no damage -- the game doesn't display the attack rolls from no-damage rolls. This is a shitty fighter with no bonus on her attack and damage rolls, but a -1 penalty from her 8 Strength, so that actually happens from time to time (in particular against opposition with resistance such as here).

16 hit
13 hit
? hit
9 hit
19 hit
16 hit
16 hit
9 hit
20 critical hit
20 critical hit
------------------------
3 miss
3 miss
3 miss WHAT PEOPLE MOST DEFINITELY REMEMBER
5 miss
------------------------
? hit
15 hit
18 hit
13 hit
15 hit
16 hit
12 hit
? hit
? hit
11 hit
11 hit
13 hit
13 hit
? hit
? hit
12 hit
13 hit
18 hit
20 critical hit
? hit
18 hit
? hit
7 hit
11 hit
7 hit
13 hit
17 hit
17 hit
12 hit
18 hit
2 miss
? hit
16 hit
? hit
15 hit
17 hit


TOTAL ROLLS: 50
TOTAL HITS: 45
TOTAL HIT RATIO: 90%


I was actually lucky in that I got one bad streak with really long odds in there. This meant that we finished actually below the expected 94% -- but as you can anticipate, the more rolls, the closer to the 94% you'd be getting.

Yeah your stats naturally lack big data. With a set of 50 one miss has quite the effect on the overall percentage. Still, since you've done it thrice now all within the realm of statistical variance we can extrapolate that the percentages in this game generally work how they are displayed in this game.
You also demonstrated how even with high odds bad streaks can happen without a large effect on the overall statistics. It is anyone's guess if you would notice a 5% difference in hitting with 50 95% strikes.

So what we can conclude thanks to your stats is that the perceived rigging of the dice is a combination of lumping different chances together (a fight will generate a lot of varied hit chances), small datasets (even long fights will likely only have 20-40 rolls), confirmation bias and human psychology (negative outcomes stick in the mind more) and misunderstanding/misinterpreting of statistics and their relevance in an environment like this, while also not personally gathering data to confirm suspicions. Additionally there are other things at play that can amplify the perception, yet have nothing to do with combat rolls, like saving throws, dialogue options and passive ability checks, that are less transparent in their display.

So, I think it is sufficiently proven by you in this thread that in general the combat chances are correct. It would be cool to highlight these posts or sticky them up top, so that players can easily be directed to them or the posts can be referred to in the future. Kudos to you for doing all that work.

Things cannot be as off as people claim either way. I'll later do one on disadvantaged attacks also with a new character (some claimed it had something do with the character, which doesn't make much sense as it's dice all the same) -- which may or may not be another set of data to verify the other ones. Probably gonna take a Cleric or Mage and test their spells/cantrips in close battle disadvantage for a bit of variance.

Doesn't take much time if anybody wants to chime in some... I do this in the first fight of the game in big parts because quickloading when the fight is over doesn't take as much time as in the latter part of the game. So you can get some numbers pretty quickly (50 rolls in perhaps 15 minutes).

It sounds like a character data sheet might be the answer to all this. We know that such things can be tracked within the software, so having a small box on the character sheet showing the various rolls made over the course of a PCs career would settle the question. Present it as a graph and raw numbers, and players could refer to it to see if 'their' dice are rolling particularly high or low.

So, disadvantage. I rolled a dwarven warlock with Charisma of 15 and let him attack the AC7 enemies with his eldritch blast from close distance. At a reasonable distance, this would be a 90% chance (+4 attack bonus vs AC of 7 = need to roll a 3 to hit). However, with disadvantage, which forces us to take the lower of two attack rolls, it's but a 81% chance. Contrary to the advantage test above, it should also increase the likelyhood of critical misses rather than critical hits (spoiler: it did).
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/07/12/dnd-5e-advantage-disadvantage-probability/

This much in advance, this time I was getting reasonably lucky, not so much at the start, but later on.

2 miss
11 hit
7 hit
8 hit
5 hit
11 hit
2 miss
4 hit
14 hit
3 hit
13 hit
12 hit
16 hit
9 hit
11 hit
3 hit
--------------------
1 critical miss
19 hit TWO CRITICAL MISSES; WHAT PEOPLE MAY REMEMBER
6 hit
1 critical miss
2 miss
----------------
10 hit
8 hit
16 hit
3 hit
12 hit
8 hit
8 hit
7 hit
7 hit
16 hit
6 hit
7 hit
13 hit
12 hit
16 hit
15 hit 29 HITS IN A ROW -- WHAT PEOPLE WON'T REMEMBER
8 hit
5 hit
4 hit
9 hit
5 hit
8 hit
11 hit
3 hit
3 hit
15 hit
7 hit
9 hit
5 hit
--------------------

TOTAL ROLLS :50
TOTAL HITS: 45
TOTAL HIT RATIO (90%)

At least 100 throws would naturally be a better data set (sample size). Unless I just mistyped, the 29 hits in a row on a 81% chance are a 1 in ~450 chance which should not be that common, but will happen a very reasonable amount of time if you consider the number of rolls on a night, even a playthrough or even multiple playthroughs. Edit: Speaking of which, loading the save and doing my next four attacks immediately rolled two critical misses, so there.

One thing to note here: Today I rolled a miss on a 96% chance three times in a row (standard attack with Lae'zel from behind). Now that is extremely unlucky, but I reloaded before each hit. On the fourth reload I used a different skill (the AE-Swing with the longsword) and that did connect. Because of the long reload times I did not reload again, but could it be that the outcome of the roll is calculated, for each skill, before you actually use it?

This is going to be my last, the ambiguous fifty-fifty chance (well not quite). Apparently that ALWAYS misses.

To simulate it, I picked a Tiefling wizard and gave her Lae'zel's short bow, which the Tiefling wizard has no proficiency in (plus no dexterity bonus). That means she doesn't get any bonus on her attack rolls with the bow. To hit the AC7 opponent, she needs to roll a 7. Now if we range-attack those opponents from close range, that is a disadvantage roll, which means it's but a 49% chance. That's how we rolled and attacked. As we were disadvantaged all through, the low attack rolls plus exclusively critical misses as opposed to critical hits were no mistake, but by design, er disadvantage.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/07/12/dnd-5e-advantage-disadvantage-probability/


---------------------
2 miss
5 miss
5 miss "I JUST KNEW IT, a ~50% chance ALWAYS misses!"
6 miss
---------------------
10 hit
16 hit
4 miss
1 critical miss
10 hit
14 hit
5 miss
5 miss
1 critical miss
9 hit
1 critical miss
10 hit
1 critical miss
8 hit
7 hit
5 miss
13 hit
16 hit
2 miss
11 hit
8 hit
7 hit
5 miss
-----------------
? hit
7 hit
13 hit OR DO THEY?
11 hit
13 hit
11 hit
----------------
5 miss
10 hit
---------------
4 miss
3 miss
2 miss PLAYER RAGEQUITS
6 miss
2 miss
---------------


OVERALL ROLLS: 40
OVERALL HITS: 20
TO HIT RATIO: 50%



No, I've first done that actually, reloading after each attack. Additionally, I get different outcomes on the first attacks of my reloads in general, -- I finish the combat rather than reloading each roll now (goes quicker).

@Sven

Since you are doing the tests could you try it with these parameters?

Fight the goblins at the top floor of Selune's temple ruins.
No hiding or cheesing.

Party consists of Wizard, Rogue, Warlock and Cleric.
Cleric: Autoattack and Cantrips
Wizard: Only Cantrips
Warlock: Eldritch Blast (OT 36% hit rate when in front of the target?)
Rogue: Sneak attacks, off hand strikes and auto-attack

This was the setting where I saw the phenomenon.
Like I said, before the 2 bug bears destroyed me I had cleared the entire courtyard of goblins with little to no difficulty.
Something happened up there that inspired this thread.

It is an early access afterall. Things are not working properly all the time.

Do you have a save of that? I needed to do an altogether new save and level up first, and can you be more specific what you saw? Eldritch blast gets a disadvantage if the opponent is too close, for instance (e.g. standing right "in front of them"). However, the percentages displayed take this into account correctly.

The next time something like that happens it may be an idea to keep a (previous) save or some such, also for a possible bug report.

I am afraid not.

Well I'll keep an eye on it when I get there again. Do you mean the drunken and sleeping ones at the top of the entrance?

I was curious, so I started a new game and tracked the results of the displayed rolls. At the time of this post I got so far:
Character: Warlock (The Great Old One)
Companions: Shadowheart, Astarion, Lae'zel
Progress: Cleared Ruins, Visited Grove (Killed Harpies), Cleared Blighted Village, Cleared Spiders (the series of "80"s at the end is from cheesing the spider queen with Astarion^^)

I have gathered my results in a google sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...DK2Kg9oZhCCaNZ6p8ijWPM/edit?usp=sharing.
The "Stats" sheet contains the analysis of the raw data in the "Data" sheet. 100% chances are not recorded. I admit the statistics I employ are a bit dirty.

But as far as I can see it seems that the probabilities/rolls in the game actually work out. The error charts show that very well. The error between actual and expected rolls gets smaller with an increasing number of rolls.

yea, the obscurity is that 0 damage still counts as damage and breaks effects like sleep or fulfils the requirement to maintain barbarian rage (you have to attack or take damage each turn or the rage ends, 0 damage is still damage taken, even if it does not effect the health bar it effectively still hit for damage... so a wizard could feasibly keep a barbarian in rage by spanking him for 0 damage... useful for out of combat usage of the resistance it provides)