Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Save Scumming

The girl's actions are outside the control of the players. This should be hard, yes. But when you reduce things to a single die roll, that's not hard, that's arbitrary. You're replacing actual difficulty with random chance. This should be a dialogue tree puzzle, something you have to think through and consider. The die rolls should open up paths to make things easier, but they should not determine success or failure in and of itself. Not on such a plot point.

By saying, well, this NPC did such and such and etc etc, so you have to make this one die roll that might as well be a coin flip both robs players of a chance to feel like THEY accomplished a thing and punishes them for what is essentially the GM's actions. Both are things that breed resentment and frustration.

That conversation oozes potential to be interesting and clever, but it is instead reduced to a single die roll.

By comparison, the single die roll of the meeting with the Githyanki as to whether you get Lae'zel to play along with the dragonrider or not is fine. That IS a detail in the story, it is not a crossroads. Regardless of the results of that roll, the dragonrider is marked as Lae'zel's enemy and you don't get closer on your quest to deal with the tadpole. The only difference is whether or not he leaves aware of Lae'zel's annoyance with him or not. By and large story trajectory has not changed.

Now, if this encounter were prefaced by an encounter with Arabella where you can talk to her and your dialogue options with her result in her trying to do this then suddenly it IS a result of player choices and that one die roll is a last ditch chance to recover from their own mistakes.

But this feels like "The GM feels like you should randomly roll a die."

It's even worse that this is a quest that is solved essentially by walking to a place and rolling a single. No challenge. No difficulty. No thought. No puzzle to navigate. Just a die roll.

I hate to say this, but it would have been a better decision just to have no quest and simply have the girl die as an establishing fact rather than do this half-assed encounter. (EDIT: I don't want this to be their answer...I want them to expand on this encounter, not eliminate it.)

And yes, eventually, such a dialogue puzzle would have guides published somewhere, but that is the same for any puzzle in any game.

A random die roll is not a substitute for making things difficult. A high difficulty single roll can be a good end-cap to a "you made a mistake, this is your last chance" or "you've worked hard to open a slim opportunity at a nearly impossible task."

It a terrible thing to do for "This is the first influence of any kind you've had on this matter have a die roll and that'll be the last influence on the subject at all. Oh did I say you'd have influence? I lied, the die will have all the influence.""

Make me work my way up to that die roll. If it were prefaced by several different dialogue choices with that die roll maybe being at the cap of a number of badly chosen arguments and be that last ditch effort to save the girl. Make the better chosen arguments lead to just saving the girl and the middling arguments lead to a moderately easy roll. Then I'll be happy.

Allow for other skill options, maybe an Acrobatics roll to snatch the snake before it strikes. Maybe Athletics to snap the girl up and get bitten yourself, requiring you to waste resources of some kind on curing the poison.

These will all improve the encounter.