“First thing, we're introducing loaded dice!†- That thing that, as far as I'm aware, no-one ever actually asked for anywhere.
Their reasoning for this is stated as: “So, if you roll a 1 occasionally in table top, It's a bit of fun, But if you do it repeatedly in a video game, you'll get frustrated.â€
It's a pretty glaring non-sequitur that they brush over - If you roll 1s repeatedly in tabletop you get frustrated as well. If you only roll 1s occasionally in a video game, it's a minor thing. If you're failing a lot more in the video game, then loaded dice aren't the answer. This is a band-aid solution to their poorly written RNG. It may solve the perceived issue, but it's not a good fix, especially when it's flavoured and worded as a flat out accusation of cheating against the player, in the name. (And yes, many have analysed it - their RNG delivers the expected spread in a long term test, but it patterns in a visible sine wave that creates issues in actual play, and results in more failures and more strings of failures closer together, and more failures-against-all-odds, than you find in tabletop, or with better RNGs)
Disagree vehemently with your portrayal of this aspect. You even contradict yourself, pointing at sine waves (clusters) of bad RNG as the issue - while dogmatically brushing off the optional loaded-dice (who breaks clusters) as a solution.
People may not have asked specifically for a loaded dice, but you must have been living under a rock on these forums if you failed to notice (and correlate this implementation) to the long vocal opposition to just about any kind of RNG. I suspect, largely by people with no measurable appreciation for neither D&D, nor for Larian's many efforts to combat binary RNG, nor for the imbalances and need for evermore homebrew these efforts likely will entail (ie. skills and skill-focused classes are nerfed by this, staple abilities like the Barbarian's staple Reckless Attack is worse than useless, martial classes are generally strongly buffed, spells like Sleep or Fireball are nerfed).
Let me count some of the ways for you:
1. Larian increased health and lowered AC as part of this, because missing was never fun.
2. Larian virtually guarantees players advantage on attack rolls (two attack rolls instead of one), because missing was never fun/to incentivize tactical movement. AI does use height for their advantage, but the evil enemies are obviously too gallant to exploit flanking like players easily can -- which gives a lopsided/gimmicky feel to combat.
3. Larian implemented "inspiration points", which is opportunities to re-roll.
4. Larian implemented "illithid wisdom" that can guarantee success.
5. Larian buffed cantrip Friends giving advantage on charisma checks against non-hostiles (D&D RAW makes them hostile which severely limits the use).
6. Larian has implemented a layered skill system where the player most of the time has multiple chances to avoid failure. Even failure is a chance to explore fun roleplaying avenues and not some binary game over catastrophic failure.
7. Save-scumming is made a feature by even allowing quick load/save in mid-conversation.
8. Additionally, the soon-to-be implemented feat Lucky, will provide 3 re-rolls per long-rest. Which in the game is really not much of a limitation due to resting being virtually unlimited.
There is a psychological difference between tabletop and digital gaming: People are more untrusting of processes they can't verify with their own eyes, and as a result oftentimes blame AI/devs for cheating when they simply have real or imagined bad luck. People tend to notice failures/misses a lot more than they notice successes/hits (particularly when the failures comes at critical moments) and this causes confirmation bias. This is amplified by social media/internet where like-minded people subconsciously seek out this bias.
"If you FEEL like failing a lot
more in the video game", then this is likely due to this bias or because in the video game you play a more condensed version where more RNG-moments inevitably will be compressed over a short amount of time.
Since we're dealing with a largely psychological phenomenon, there are other ways to mitigate this issue. An old suggestion on these boards is to differentiate between failures in attack rolls. Instead of purely portraying failed attack rolls as misses, we could have the enemy dodge (with some slight alterations to animation) when for instance the dexterity-modifier is the difference between a hit and a miss. The same thing can be done for shields by making block animations when the shield AC is enough to make a hit a miss. The player will feel less failure by not actually hitting the enemy, while also providing more visual variety and feedback that the enemy we fight is quick or skilled/well-equipped.
Slamming Larian for not doing enough to combat RNG-issues, while also slamming them for the unintended consequences and inevitable departure from D&D rules is grossly unfair. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I guess.
