Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Remove Height and Backstab as Sources of Advantage/Disadvantage

Sorry to be picky, but it's not more or less. It's correct lol.

In order to calculate an advantage for a roll, you just take the roll percentage evaluated with a max value of 1, which for 50% is 0.5. Then you reformulate what you are looking for: "Finding the chance you succeed an advantage (to succeed at least one roll of two with 50% chance each), it's the same as finding the chance you won't have two failures".

The chance not to have two failures is 1 - the chances to have two failures. So: 1 - ((1 - chance to succeed) * (1 - chance to succeed)).

Which in the case of 50% is: 1 - (0.5 * 0.5) = 0.75 => 75%.

In the case of a 60% roll it's: 1 - (0.4 * 0.4) = 0.84 => 84%.

Some hope comes from Sven mentioning loaded die. If they implement it, they could not only apply it to dialogs, but also to d20 rolls during combat and casual players would be very happy to see 50% attacks hit 80-90% of the time.
I can see Sven's loaded die rules working fairly well: 1d20 for disadvantage, 2d20 for normal, 3d20 for advantage and 5d20 for Elven Accuracy.


from: https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-early-access-changes-player-data-feedback-larian

I don't get your way of reasoning. In the case of a 10% roll it's: 1 - (0.9 * 0.9) = 0.19 => 19%. This is an increase of 9% (or 90% depending on what you are considering to be the base). What's messing with numbers are criticals. You really can't reduce advantage or disadvantage to one precise or flat number. It's not that simple. What is important that we agree the bonus is significantly huge

It almost feels like a lot of the non-D&D players are reading "Advantage" and "an Advantage" as the same thing, not realizing that "Advantage" is a specific, mechanical effect. From that fundamental misunderstanding of the rules, they construct entire edifices of reasons why getting advantage from Height/Backstab is good.

In previous editions of D&D there were dozens of different ways to get bonuses, and they would stack together to massively improve your odds of hitting. However counting all of this up, and making sure that you counted everything was time consuming, and tedious. This is why 5e does away with most of those things with just flat "advantage". The big change here is that ADVANTAGE DOES NOT STACK. Once you have advantage, getting it again is pointless. Moreover, Advantage and Disadvantage cancel each other out, regardless of how many stacks of one or the other that you have. This vastly simplifies combat in a way that speeds things up at the table. But this is not true when playing a CRPG.

It is for this reason that getting Advantage from height is bad, but getting an advantage is fine.

Turn based combat is an approximation, and one round is meant to happen all at the same time. This is why reactions exist, since everyone being paralyzed when it's not their turn becomes very silly very quickly. This is also why D&D uses Flanking and not Facing. The assumption is that your opponent has the ability to turn to face you as you circle around them, but once your buddy shows up, they can't face in two directions.

This is also the logic behind a rogue's sneak attack. They get sneak attack damage when they have advantage, or when an ally is adjacent to their target. That is, when their target can't give their full attention to preventing a more precise and thus dangerous attack. This is why attacking from stealth gives advantage, but just walking to an opponent's rear facing does not. The assumption is that any given character has their head on a swivel during combat. That they are aware of things all around them to simulate the ability to turn and look at something. It's why you can use a bluff check to pull an enemy's attention to get advantage.

The key difference between flanking and backstab is the need for a team mate. Many of the changes that Larian has made have reduced class specialization. Many of the Rogue's abilities have been given to everyone. Between flasks and special arrows being so common, and the fact that everyone can use scrolls with no penalty, there isn't really any need for party diversity.

The action economy of D&D is one that requires multiple encounters per day. Healing out of combat is a resource that dwindles. Resting is not free. The way spells recharge mean that magic is supposed to be powerful but limited, while weapon damage is reliable, and constant. The changes to accuracy changes the required hit points for enemies. Which changes the power of spells, which changes the action economy. Which changes the...

The D&D "purists" aren't saying that there should be no changes to the 5e rules. They are saying that every change has knock on effects that can't be ignored. If feels like they are being ignored right now.

No one says getting advantage is bad. Its the lack of "opportunity" cost thats the problem. Like someone mentioned when "King of the Hill" battle is never wrong its becomes a boring requirment.
When your Rogue sneaks into a ruin and find with perception a way to climb a pillar thats a viable spot for Advantage approved from a GM thats okay. You can use a athletic check to climb and thats the reward, a advantage position before starting a fight.
Or a barbarian can use a strength check overturn a fire bowl to kill a bunch of goblins and create a ground effect.
The GM interaction is important but its a "small" local effect and no general mechanic. Without Strength you cant overturn the fire bowl, without athletic you cant climb the pillar. But King of the Hill is easy and possible by all without requirments.

I'm being vague because I'm assuming I'm talking to fellow knowledgeable people about deep implications of 5E mechanics. Aka, I don't feel I should have to prove something that should be plainly obvious to someone well-versed in the topic. I will admit a mistake on the 5%. It's more like 10-15% averaged out across all results. The bonus granted by either drop off sharply outside of the 7-15 result range eventually granting zero at the extremes both high and low.

The game design reason for advantage and disadvantage is to ensure your outcome is representative of the situation and not solely of the dice. It is to ensure a middle result and negate natural 1s for advantage and to ensure a middle result and negate natural 20s for disadvantage. At level 1, an average 10/11 die result should hit goblins and most other CR=level enemies with your proficient weapon. The only particular oddity here is Larian's choice to lower AC but buff HP. That means you'll almost always hit regardless of the situation. The only thing advantage is giving you is a safety net from low rolls. In the game, it also makes things like sneak attack much easier to achieve. Which...

On negating advantage, all you need is a single source of disadvantage. There are tons in the system. Blur is only a level 2 spell, for instance. It's not like you can get 2 sources of advantage, have one source of disadvantage, and somehow still have a source of advantage. It's all negated and is treated like a normal roll without either adv. or disadv. The same is true in reverse.

I don't see why critical messes with numbers. What I am calculating here is the percentage increase of chance to hit in case you are having an advantage. And my calculation is accurate according to probability laws.

And yes, if you have a 10% chances to hit, when you have an advantage, it makes it 19% indeed. I am not talking about dice results here, just probability to hit in terms of percentage, which is what they give us in game. That's why we get 56% or 87% in the tooltip sometimes, because it's the raw calculation of our chances to hit.

Besides, on a computational standpoint whether you check 2 random numbers against their respective targets or you calculate the final probability and check only one random number against it, it remains the same. We don't know if they actually 'roll' 2 dice for advantage/disadvantage. The only thing we see is the result.

Come on man please, just admit you don't know what you're talking about.

Adv/Dis = +-25%. This isn't up for debate, it's math. Accept that.

You say an Average 10/11 die result should hit goblins?

I agree!

If you roll a 10, and have +2 proficiency and +3 from your attack stat, that means your average To-Hit is.....................*wait for it*...........10+2+3 = 15! What's the AC of a basic goblin in 5e rules with a shield equipped? I'll give you one guess.

Come on, let's do as the mod suggested. You are wrong here, we've proven that via mathematics. The base rules of 5e accomplish exactly what you want them to, so let's use them as the *base* and then adjust from there when needed!

Only for the 11 result. Only. It's all downhill from there. Go ahead and look.

There are 2 ways of reporting these statistics. The majority of people in the past few pages are doing it the slightly more misleading way.
If you have to roll an 11, Advantage will change your chances from a 50% to a 75% chance. You can technically call this a +25% boost. However, this runs into problems when you run into more extreme die values.

The better way to state this is: Your chances have gone up by 50%. Stating it this way-as a ratio involving the old and new percentages-is more intuitive.

Similarly, if you need a natural 20 to succeed, then Advantage doubles your chance of success. (@SacredWitness: You'd say that this is only +5%)
--if you need a natural 6, Advantage makes you 25% more likely to succeed
--if you need a natural 16, Advantage makes you 75% more likely to succeed.
(What's the average of 25% and 75%?)

Thus, on average, Advantage makes you 50% more likely to succeed. This can be stated, for simplicity, as a +5 bonus on the die because 5e is based on bounded accuracy: usually you'll need around a 10 to hit

p.s. You also have to take into account the fact that natural 1s are misses and natural 20s are auto hits (for double damage!), which make Advantage even better by massively increasing your chances of a crit.

Correct. It's not a flat boost. It's a bell curve based on target and difference in roll. As it's a bell curve, it's just wrong to describe it in terms of its maximal value. Of course you're going to have those lucky "1 turned to 20" rolls as well but they are exceedingly rare. I'm speaking in terms that represent the whole array of values because that's just the honest thing to do when you're talking about a curved outcome.

The flat boost option is there for people who really don't want to trust the die. For some, it's better to roll an 8 and being able to "reliably" get a 13 vs. rolling an 8 with adv. and the second roll be lower. The probabilistic result is still random any time you roll a die. So sure, you can say you have a coin toss's chance of increasing your base odds but it can just as frequently not.

Just for completeness (and correcting minor miscalculations of previous poster), here is a table with probabilities:


target - min number you have to roll to pass
normal - probability of passing without advantage
adv. - probability of passing with advantage
abs.diff - difference between probabilities of passing with and without advantage
rel.diff - relative improvement in chance to pass ( = abs.diff / normal )

@mg666 yes, this is exactly what I was showing! I argue that "relative difference" is a more useful number than "absolute difference", and using this method leads to the conclusion that Advantage makes you succeed 50% more often on average.
(I assume you were referring to my slight miscalculations involving needing a 5/15? If so, corrected)


It's your latter sentence I want to emphasize.
If Larian wants to remove/reduce RNG-frustration, then changing height/backstab Adv/Disadv to a flat (+2 hopefully. I'd settle for a +4) boost would be better than advantage. It also neatly solves the issue of height/backstab advantage interfering with standard 5e abilities/spells.
IN ADDITION, this allows for easy creation of different difficulty levels. Story? Height for player gives +6 bonus to hit. Easy? +4. Normal? +2 Hard? no bonus

These seem like good bonuses for different difficulty levels. I would even suggest to go further and give them unconditionally to PCs. This way 15AC goblin on high ground in story mode would be hit 85% (+2 prof +3 dex + 6 story) of the time and if player really wanted, they could try to achieve advantage (98% hit) by one of the means mentioned by Isaac in the original post.

Sorry but i laughing.
I mean the whole 5e Edition rules where made with the mindset of easy rules and streamlined combat for a better RP experience and needs a Gamemaster.
Now people need an excuse to make it more complex because they lack interesting Encounter design and search for answers in a more complex ruleset.
The bitter reality is Larian needs better Encounter design with Triggerzones, Traps, different AI behavior and destroyable and usable interior.
Or its better to scrap 5e rules and go backwards to a more complex system 3e or 4e without bending the rules and create new construction sites from balancing standpoints.

Its Larian which must provide a Editor which is capable of simulate a Gamemaster when use 5e rules and not the cheap excuse of homebrew rules because the editor is not capable of something such elemental tasks.
Maybe use the Starcraft RTS Editor next time plus we have animated portraits.

The game is developed with the permission of Wizards of the Coast. There's no chance they'd let an official D&D game use an older edition.

The truth is somewhere between what Isaac and SacredWitness are trying to argue. Advantage does not always grant the same bonus, true. But it remains significant pretty much always because bounded accuracy ensures that the target roll on the d20 stays around the middle third or so of the bell curve in the vast majority of situations. This is especially true for the low level content that BG3 features so prominently.

Regardless, as pointed out in the OP, easily accessible advantage devalues too many class features. Larian can choose to change or replace them of course, but that's ultimately creating more work for themselves and also too many potential balance issues from further homebrew.

The solution, as has been pointed out multiple times on these boards, is pretty easy. Because 5e hasn't actually done away with all flat modifiers to rolls (see: cover system, which is currently missing from the game). All Larian has to do is replace the adv/disadv on height with flat modifiers akin to that subsystem.

+11

Main concern is balance in my opinion.
Under the 20Mainstat cap for +5 Attackroll Modifier it devalues Statpoints alot. A "small" +2 Bonus is valued 4 Statpoints.
But when you are maxed out and hardcapped at 20 the +2 Bonus will very strong like a second Bless spell.
That mechanic in my opinion very prone to Min Maxing to reach you cap of 20.

Thats a generel problem with D&D. You have no peak you have only a cap.

Its literally useless to use a weapon without Proficiency.

And thats absurd because when i switch to a Warhammer to inflict damage to Plate wearer because
im not reliant to hit the small weak spots i dont hit him easier and without Proficiency only worse.

And at the same time you cant be a "tin opener" which has Proficiency to kill armored targets.

Larian have consistenty made it plain that they are basing the game on 5e, but will change anything that, in their opinion, does not make for a good video game experience for the majority of players.

If you want a totally RAW experience, you would do better to request it as an additional game mode for release, rather than continually imply that Larian don't know how to make video games.

I'm not defending their choices, merely their right to make those choices, based on their commercial and artistic wants and needs.

The purpose of EA is largely for them to experiment to see what works and what doesn't in the context of the video game they are making. If you wan't to convince them to make changes, you'll have a better chance by showing how particular game experiences would be improved, rather than engaging in statistical analysis of a ruleset that doesn't actually cover all the elements of their game.