After browsing the steam forums + reviews and reddit, I've seen lots of players, especially those who played Divinity series or other RPG, complaining about not being able to get desired results during the dialogues.
I know that a lot of people do love the dice rolls and I must say, that they are a core feature of Dungeons and Dragons games. So, to have everyone happy, right before we start the campaign, we could select:
- option for static rolls, like in Divinity 2 OS, when the skill check is always the same and instead of rolling the dice + applying bonuses, only our bonuses thanks to proficiency selected during the creating (like +2 to persuasion rolls) and ability bonuses count. (levels could also play a part)
- option to reduce the rolls by dividing the difficulty check by 2 and rounding it down (same being applied to the roll), so that your bonuses due to having proficiency and ability bonuses + artifacts are felt as more powerful.
If DC is for example 15, our base chance to succeed is to roll 15,16,17,18,19,20 . (30% Having +3 bonus adds 12,13,14 to the list, increasing the chance by 15% to 45%.
With halved DC, and halved roll, we would need to get 7 or more, to succeed (out of 10). Base chance is 40%, with +3 from persuasion increasing it to 70%.
- same system as right now, to satisfy hardcore dnd fans.
- option for unlimited re-rolling of the DC
The tadpole power would still work no matter what system the player would select, due to providing alternate dialogues, with more information being told to us, and giving the player additional experience (thanks to mindreading), at the cost of storyline consequences. (representing increased power at the cost of personality)
My personal thoughts were:
- Some of the options have unrealistcally high requirements for the skill check, which effecively locks the option from being used. Example -> checks requiring you to roll 20 or close to it. It's almost a dead in-game content atm, to have 5-15% of getting desired result, so that if a certain dialogue interaction interests us, we have to save-scum or check youtube to even know about what is it. If we do not choose to save scum, and we replay the game for 6 th time, on same dialogue, we can still fail and not see the desired result. This discourages trying to explore the game again, on a different path.
- Game encourages picking high charisma/intelligence characters way too heavily to minimise the "murder-hobo" style of play. Allowing companions to roll the dice for us, in specific situation would fix the problem.
- Locking out less of the options behind the DC could make it a little better
- Adding the possiblity for more dialogues, to use another DC if the one that we selected has failed, like if we do not convince NPC to tell us what we need, we can intimidate him to do so.
- Storyline and player choices having connections to DC could make sense -> example is
Gale being conflicted due to us siding with goblins, but we have high/medium approval. Dice roll is easier then, if we choose to persuade the wizard. This is already implemented in certain cases - if you romance Minthara and treat her well, game shows that she is conflicted and attached to us, so we succeed every time with persuasion check, no matter what do we get as a roll (I had +4 bonus from the priest of Loviathar, the DC was 5. Without the buff, DC was 1, so it's guaranteed success)
- More quests should provide the points to re-roll the DC
- Saving during the dialogues, which is planned for now, will make save-scumming, if someone wants it, less tedious. Or just check what the other option does.
- Possibly adding some of the re-roll points right at the start of the game.
What are the thoughts of the others about this not so easy and certainly controversial topic?
