Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback hit percentages are garbage

I hate to sound like a jerk but your hit percentage displayed are crap. 94% - miss. 79% - miss. on and on and on. unless it says 100% it's probably going to miss.

is there any reason why you can't just show a d20 required to hit and let the roll show?

Fix this or I'm done.

I've see other people have grievances about this and I don't get it.
A "hit percentage" is nothing else than the summary of your chances with dices (for instance a 95% chance means you'll hit with any D20 roll BUT a critical failure), so this admittedly strikes me as an incredibly stupid, petty and pointless thing to complain about.

There, I said it.

What's exactly the difference between "roll a 7 or more" or "70% chance to hit" in practical terms? Absolutely none.

The fact that it's just a direct representation of the chances with the dice, which, for attack rolls, you can check in the event log... any yet it causes so many people to complain, should perhaps be taken note of itself, by Larian.

There is a difference between "AC 13, +5 to Hit" being displayed, and "Advantage: Unseen attacker" and the player going 'so I have to roll an 8 or better at least once' in their own mind, and then rolling... and seeing a 6 and a 5 come up...

And the player seeing just "87% chance to hit" and seeing it miss.

The difference is purely psychological, but it is real all the same. Our minds, generally, see the first result and rationalise it quickly and contentedly (we might be unhappy or dissatisfied, but we don't generally trigger a 'that's unfair' or a 'you cheater' mental reaction from something like that.). On the other hand, seeing ourselves miss on a reported 87% chance to hit *Feels* nastier, and is far more likely to make us *feel* like it's being unfair, even when it's not.

If our second attack rolls a 7 and a 2, the first display method will certainly still lead to us feeling unhappy, or even unlucky. It *might* even lead to some feeling like the game is fiddling the numbers behind the screen... but not many people will lean that far, unless it happens a lot. On the other hand, the player that say that first 87% chance to hit miss, and then tries again and sees a *second* 87% chance to hit miss, *Again*, is far, far more likely to throw their hands up and accuse the game of cheating or bias.

From an emotionless, feelingless perspective, it's not rational, no. But, we're not emotionless, feelingless people, and we're playing this game for fun... so when a way of presenting something has a more profoundly negative psychological impact on our experience than a different way of presenting that *exact same information*, the designers absolutely *should* take note of it.

I'm in the camp that says that the immediately presented information should be your hit bonus, and the ac of the target, or your own DC and the save bonus of the target. Show the percent chance for your success in the secondary window - as a highlight that you can check if you want to, but don't innately see. Even though it makes zero tangible, mechanical difference to anything in the game, it would change how the information hits people ,and for many people, it would improve their experience of things and make them less likely to feel as though the game is cheating against them.


I DO want to point out that there IS a bug with the displayed hit percentage at the moment, despite all of this.

Your chance to hit is NEVER 100%. It should NEVER claim to be 100%. And yet, it does sometimes. If you want to check, go start a new file quickly, and take Shadowheart up to the intellect devourers. Have her climb up for advantage, and target one of them with a guiding bolt - it will claim that your chance of hitting is 100%. It's not.

I think of it like, seeing the percentages is a cherry on top of seeing some kind of perception of how an attack would go. But the cake would be a decent combat log and seeing my actual dice roll. And currently the cake is not all that great.

Let’s not forget the simple fact that this game is supposed to be based on 5E D&D, and you almost never use percentages in D&D. Showing a roll target feels more D&D, but really the player shouldn’t even know what the target is unless they’ve had some help (eg. the Know Your Enemy ability battlemaster fighters get). Maybe on an Easy mode it could show you the percentages/targets.

It strikes me that this may be fixed by simply showing the dice rolls. Though, to be fair, if it is using dice rolls, then it is impossible to get 79% or any non-multiple of 5% if going by the rules and 79% suggests using percentage die instead of a D20.

You get unusual percentages when you start factoring in advantage and disadvantage, Veronica - in the example, you might have a 13-in-20 chance of rolling 8 or over an a d20 which is a 65% chance, but if you have advantage, the 'expected probability of getting 8 or above on at least one die, of the two, jumps up to 87%; the pool of possible rolls has increased from 20, to 2p20 (possible permutations of 2 results from a bracket of 20 numbers), which is 400, while the number of successful combinations is (13 x 20) + (7 x 13), or 351 possible combinations of two die that would be a success; 351/400 is ~87% (88 if the game rounds normally).

It's not intuitive, though, when you think about rolling dice... and abstracting it to that extent can be mentally misleading...

Which is why rolls with advantage/disadvantage should show both dice and highlight which one is used. It would immediately make the whole concept so much clearer to new players. The same should apply to skill checks, incl during dialogue.

Larian i think all your players agree. More dice displaying please.

Hehe sadly this problem doesn't go away by just by showing a dice animation rather than a hit percentage. I mean look at the experience of Trent's team trying to handle Axis and Allies. People always gripe about RNG and how the dice are unfair and how such and such just doesn't align with the probabilities suggested by the calculator.

What they should probably do is acknowledge that there is likely a pretty decent subset of players for whom the experience of rolling dice like they do in PnP is the whole point, and another subset who care less and for whom 'dice rolling' is never going to translate very well in a CRPG... then come up with different difficulty scales or game modes that accommodate each sort of player. A story mode that hedges stuff, where you get a murder ball chunkfest. A core mode that makes everything even more punishing and by the book, and hides or obscures stuff like internal calculators or information that should rightly be available to the GM but not necessarily to the player. There's not really a ready solution, or a Low Luck D&D that we can lean on for this one, that wouldn't dramatically change the sort of game it is. I'm kind of surprised there weren't different difficulty scales at launch, like pretty much every other CRPG has.

I agree.
I'll say it again but just take a look at Solasta please.

Their UI is very clear and very friendly user especially for newcomers.
The audience is not the same but I guess Larian can find something to overhaul BG3's UI for it to be more D&D, more BG, more clean and more friendly user all together.

Showing a %to hit when you target creatures then a rolldice during the attack animation should probably be good.

Unlucky ...
Funny how no one ever complained about NPC missed his character, when they both are in same position ... so they both have the same 72% chance to strike.

I remember a single attack of 96% actually missing its target.
And yeah I felt very down and annoyed about that. For a minute or so.
Then everything proceeded as normal and how god intended.

True RNG can be rough, but changing from percentages to dice won't alter your success/failure rate at all. It is just a means of determining how likely you are to succeed or fail.

Just remember a simple thing: What are the chances of missing a 95% chance swing?

5%.

What are the chances of missing three 95% swings in a row?

Not zero.

The RNG is fine. Working as intended. You might want to sacrifice a goat to Lady Luck, though.

I don't agree at all.
Being able to check "the math behind it" in the combat log is a thing, but the last thing I want is the game's visualization turning out in a board game and showing me a dice roll for every fucking action on screen.

Dice roll displayed for every single attack?
Thanks no!
The TB combat is slow enough.
I don't mind if this turns to be an option to be toggled but I seriously doubt this will cure the underlying psychological problem.

Definitely not an animation of any sort that would add time between actions. I was tying in that opinion in from another thread, addressing the combat log being very bare bones on information. That information being the dice results.

It couldn't add any time during turns.
The roll can be automatic and can happen during attack animation.

I was against the idea before playing at Solasta.
Just check to have an Idea.

Not sure it's really necessary but it's easier to understand and it increase the visual tension of combats (because more things happen on the screen...it's not just a single character moving his arms...)

For consideration: they don't need to actually show the dice rolling, just present the target you need to hit and the result in dice. That would help with the visualisation issue that missing at very high percentages means -- despite dice being all about probabilities I agree that it feels much more grating to miss at 95% chance of hitting than it does to the equally 5% chance of it turning up a 1 on a d20.

The very core mechanic of this game is a RNG 1-20 ‘virtual dice roll’ for just about everything you do (apart from damage rolls). Exposing those rolls to the player more visibly and showing how advantage and disadvantage works can only be a positive thing in my opinion. Remember, this is a D&D cRPG not a RTS game. And no, you don’t need to spend time on waiting for an animation of the dice rolling, as Maximuuus said Solasta handles it well. It’s very possible Larian have intended this all along, but just haven’t got there yet in the conversion from DOS, like other UI elements (hotbar included).