Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Reducing MISSES in combat

I’m not too concerned about misses if it gets tweaked to be more like core D&D. Misses become less frequent at higher levels, we’re not even fifth level in the EA.

Also, I’m in favour of the idea of a change in the terminology and animation so it feels more like the attack was deflected or dodged. Calling them misses makes you feel more inept.

5e has two different styles of damaging spells. Depending on what you're fighting, you might want to prioritize one or the other.

Some of them work like weapon attacks - you roll to hit and, if you do, you deal damage. These tend to be things like firebolts and rays, where hitting or missing makes sense.

Some of them (usually, but not always area effect spells) the target rolls a saving throw to reduce or avoid the effect.

It's not that that's less of a thing in 5e, and more that Larian's vision has focused exceptionally heavily on attack roll spells, and their tweaks to the rules have all been around attack roll spells and abilities, with complete disregard and lack of thought for what that is doing to saving throw spells.

MOST damage-dealing spells in 5e ARE saving throw spells. Many cantrips have attack rolls, but beyond that, it's actually a very small number that use attack rolls. The vast majority of spells of 1st level or higher all force saves, and in most cases, the target(s) still take half damage on a success.

However, even with the current system, Larian's design has increased monster HP (this weakens saving throw spells by relation), decreased monster AC (favouing attack roll spells and doing nothing for saving throw spells), increased monster stats marginally (which in most cases has improved at least one or two of their saves, weakening saving throw spells further), made advantage free and all the time for everyone (favouring attack roll spells which benefit from this, but doing nothing for saving throw spells), and also as a result, removed a large portion of the tactical incentive for using leveled spells, many of which serve a controlling or advantage-giving purpose, which is now mostly redundant most of the time.


Please, while folks debate what can be done about an unhappy number of misses in combat, consider all of the repercussions and elements that need to be considered - Larian didn't; Don't make the same mistake. Please avoid just suggesting fixes that only talk about rolling to hit, Ac and missing - that's only one part of the game, and Larian have already hamstrung another part of play in the process of changing it.

Regarding misses themselves:

The RNG that they use is a very poorly written one - you can even watch and observe the wave pattern that it goes in. People notice their misses a LOT more when they have a number of them clustered together, which is currently what will happen at the low ends of the wave... and having a visible wave like that also increases the percentage of times that you'll miss on an easy advantage, because, if you are in a low trough, you're far more likely to get two rolls under 5 for that advantage where you only needed 6 to hit.

At the risk of inciting Tucco, I'll also point out something else: Whether Larian admits it or not, there is already a subtle dice bias going on, and you can test it: Enemies on low HP (below 20%) and boss creatures (the 'head' of any fixed encounter, and named enemies) get a slightly fudged RNG. I checked 200 rolls in combat situations, and despite feeling like I was missing more often than felt good, the actual reality was that the numbers rolled on the dice themselves more or less (within an acceptable margin of variation), lined up with what one would expect of a standard distribution. What was strange, and outlying, however, was that boss creatures and creatures below 20% of their hp received an unacceptably large margin more of the misses than anything else - this doesn't mean that rolls against them were always low, but they were frequently, more frequently than acceptable margins, just low *enough*.

Compared to this, testing that I've done with a couple of other games that use an RNG to determine outcomes (NWN, NWN2 and Solasta), over the course of 200 rolls each on various early-game enemies, also displayed a more or less standard distribution of die results, but did not display the obvious wave motion of peaks and troughs, and (possibly as a result) did not leave me coming away with any points where the amount of misses felt unfair or annoying. They also didn't show the odd favouring towards nearly dead creatures and boss creatures.

I think if they used a better RNG algorithm, that would actually clear up many people's impression of missing a lot; there would be slightly fewer high advantage misses, which we always noticed badly, and individual misses would be less clustered up, which we also notice badly... so even if folks were missing more or less the same amount of times, the conscious awareness of it, and feeling of frustration surrounding it, would likely be lessened for many people.

I don't really want less misses. I just want the misses to be more... alive, for the lack of a better word. What we have now is the same boring whiff animation for every miss where the missed character just phases out of the way, and that is so monotonous, trite, and just straight up unexciting. I want to see characters parry and dodge, catch weapons with their shields or armour and deflect them, I want to see ogres and big enemies just grabbing your weapon and stopping the attack, I want animations that makes it feel like we are fighting. The current whiff+phase dodge animations is literally the lowest effort spent option, a direct model of the abstract nature of the game mechanics, not even bothering to aim the slightest for visual immersiveness or embodying the abstracts into a narrative. It is something that could be excused if it was a strained budget indie game, not what I expect from an AAA game.

Totally agree, specialy critical misses (1) should have a particular animation like for example a fire spell that just puff away, or a warrior that slips and fall. Same goes for the natural 20 critical hits, I remember one of the few things I appreciated of Skyrim was that critical hits had their spectacular animation, the gold dice is a nice touch but there's a lack of an animation that highlights the exceptional feature just accomplished.

Agreed +1

rolling low shouldn't just be "the player doesn't get what they want". Low rolls are another opportunity for entertainment.

Just as Crash Bandicoot had comedic death animations to keep the player entertained and coming back. In DnD, the DM or player makes humor out of low rolls. I've mentioned before that certain parts of Baldur's Gate 3 feel empty and this is part of it. Low rolls should be just as entertaining as the high rolls. (Whether it's combat or dialogue).

just seeing "miss" gets dry over the campaign.

I'm not convinced by this one, characters are going to miss a lot and I don't see those animations holding up after being seen thousands of times over the course of a game. Does anyone have an example of the kind of thing they mean in a turn based RPG? Crash Bandicoot is difficult but I can't imagine seeing him die as many times that dice rolls forsake me in Baldurs Gate.

Shin Megami Tensei IV has multiple outcomes for combat.

You can battle them or negotiate. And from this stems a lot of hilarious outcomes you can ask them for money which may result in retaliation, you can paralyze them and loot their money and the demon will complain and insult your morality. You can even recruit them into your party. The enemies all have personalities with unique responses to your actions.

The animation would be only for critical misses (that is 1 on 20), something that, unless you really have really bad luck you, would be a rare ocasion.

AI needs to think faster so combat isn't painfully slow. It makes missing more annoying when you have to wait for your turn watching a screen where nothing happens.

Misses need more exciting animations like blocks and armor deflections. To accurately reflect the concept of armor in D&D, in that it soaks all or nothing. Which is ok because also HP are an abstraction.

Once those two haven been taken care of, I don't think the actual amount of misses is any kind of problem.

I think it was in Neverwinter Nights when I saw for the first time in an RPG that an opponent or your own character did actually lift the sword and block an attack or moved it's body to dodge it.

I was awestruck back then, I thought it can't get any better, this is great! The characters don't just stand there and hit or miss, no, they actually fight!

So yes, something like different (short and fast) animations happening when you (critical) miss would really upgrade and improve the flow and feeling of battle!

Many people already asked for this, and I also want it 😁
+1

Yup it doesn’t need to be a comedic skit on every miss, even just having the enemy deflect, block or straight up tank attacks that are ‘misses’ would go a long way. This makes more sense than having a miss dodge animation for a lot of enemies.

I absolutely would love to see more nuanced animations as well, however I could also understand if that change would totally fuck their production pipeline. They would have to like quadruple the amount of animations for every single enemy type in the game.

Granted new animations are a "nice to have", how the player perceives what is happening is important too. A lot of crpgs used to leave the animation to our imagination and we still remember them fondly.

It would be a band-aid fix, but what would happen to player perception if the word miss was replaced with...

Attacks reliant on AC
Melee attacks (roll a d3 for outcome)
Dodged
Blocked
Deflected

Ranged attacks (roll a d3 for outcome)
Dodged
Blocked
Missed

Even this feels like a (small) step in the right direction. When you’re playing D&D you don’t want to think of your hero swinging wildly or aiming poorly the whole time (maybe on a 1). Attempting to hit an AC is so much more than that – eg. the enemy blocking arrows with their shield.

Here’s an idea which seems complex for tabletop but for the purposes of a computer game could be programmed pretty easily.

If you roll less than 10 on your attack roll, you miss – at high levels you’ll never “miss” unless you roll a 1
If you roll between ten and their base AC from armor (say, 11 to 14) the attack is deflected
If you roll between their base armor AC and their Dex mod (say 15-16) the attack is dodged
If the enemy is using a shield and you roll within 1-2 of their AC the attack is blocked

This could be built on for other scenarios (eg. Mage Armor, rings of protection etc but you get the idea). You could even have a tactical mode (which would be truer to D&D) in which the player doesn’t know the enemy’s AC and needs to use these clues to assess how well they’re doing. If their attacks are being deflected a lot and they’re rolling reasonably well, they could deduce the enemy has a strong natural armor (as an example).

Food for thought anyway.

+1

This is a really good approach IMO. It telegraphs how close the roll actually came to hitting without having to check the combat logs, and it would help create variance in animations.

It's a nice way to keep the player engaged in combat, deducing AC with the outcome (deflected, dodged, blocked).

This is a great idea that would lead to combats a bit less frozen and repetitive even if it wouldn't solve the issue reported by many players.

I have no problem with missing legitimately i.e. the dice is as true/unbiased as possible. I read Niara's post - if the dice really have been rigged to not obey a normal distribution, I would rather they fix their RNG (and the other things they have changed to compensate - too much advantage etc), as opposed to making hacky tweaks to make people hit more or less. That can be done as a non-core rules option for those who don't like it. As people have pointed out - you should hit more as you level - we are capped at level 4, so you should expect to miss more often (of course, the easy access to advantage works against this somewhat....). I think people coming from other gaming traditions don't like the randomness - but it's a core part of D&D and that is the game system BG3 is built around, as advertised.

As for deducing AC, sure, you shouldn't really know what your opponent's AC is t the outset, at least until you have defeated them or worked it out yourself. Other D&D games have you making skill checks to figure out that kind of enemy info as you fight/before - I'd like that idea. Of course, they could display other animations for categories of misses (like graze etc.) but that adds a lot to the animation burden/cost. Every model would need these extra animation cycles. I think there are more important things for them to fix - bugs, core mechanics issues, balancing, possible party size changes etc.