Bit of a tangent, but on the topic of "making failure fun": even if Larian succeed in making every path that can result from a roll a fun adventure, the fact remains - you failed. This is something I think they've overlooked. If you see "check failed" on screen, you don't feel good about it, no matter how interesting the outcome and how well-developed the path. I'm betting that most of the time, players won't even connect "I'm having fun with the story right now" with "I failed that check". Meanwhile, it feels good when you see "check successful". "I won!" That's a reward in itself, inconsequential as it may be.
Agreed. I'll say a little more about it below, but for now I'll mention that like you said, it works both ways, and success is great. I think it's a matter of quantity and significance. In any RPG I played you fail in stuff during combat sometimes, but you have so many opportunities one single failure is not so bad but one crit is fun. I'm not sure it's possible to translate it to dialogue.
As for die rolls in general: I don't really want to say it, as I like this whole "roll the dice like in tabletop" thing, but there are problems with this. Success/failure, story branching and RNG are all mashed together, which... I'm not sure is a great idea. I don't think much room is left for player agency during dialogues, if the most important branches are hidden behind RNG rather than behind actual decisions or roleplaying the character. The "success" is not a result of the player's cleverness or being prepared in some way; it's random. With some modifiers, but still.
True. There's a reason it has been a part of dnd forever but only now we get it in video game form. I assume other companies who adapted tabletop rpgs to video game just realized it and preferred to make are success or failure totally dependent on our stats.
And, as per what you say, even the execution of the "fun failure" design leaves a lot to be desired.
Agreed. The Mintara case is an exception. Usually failure in this game is useless unless you wanna kill everything you see. And like I explained, even the Mintara case doesn't really work that way right now, which means that unless they'll try to make things like I suggested, it is quite the same.
