Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Loaded Dice.......

......... *sigh*

ok how can somone come up with THAT idea? But first lets remember where its roots.....

People where unhappy because sometime Rolls can be unlucky (wich is the very NATURE of dice), and as a result things worked out vastly different despite the expectation of the player.

Lets not talk about Dice Rolls in combat as Combat isnt about dice rolls but only about Heigt advantage metagame. So lets focus on the Rolls during adventuring (and thats where many have been save scuming).

Dear Larian..... you dissapointed many people.... not because of your Idea of "loaded dice" (wich is hilarious) but because this openly shows you have no grasp of the idea behind the complaints.
Coming up with "loaded Dice" also shows that you clearly have lost all Touch with comunity as i CANT REMEMBER A SINGLE THREAD where any fan requestet "loaded dice". You became ignorant and selfish and the panel showed that you are more concerned about having PR-Shows, Showering yourself in Glory, and recruitment than actualy making a Game for the Fans. Cant belive i am saying this because i own and loved not only DOS1 and Dos2 but also the earlier divinity titles.

And though we now know you dont read your own Forums i will still make a constructive Critic.

It is not the System to make rolls..... its the situations where you use your Rolling. For example:

A Ranger who walked Nature for many Years is EXPECTET to know a flower or a track in the dirt he sees or at very least have a good idea about it. IF you make take a Roll and then add his Bonus and he fails people think "What the fuck?".

If the same Ranger now is suddenly cast to avernus and comes upon Flora or Fauna he never seen before thats a good situation to make a Roll if he maybe has heard about it or someone in his past told him about.

Or lets take a wizard who discovers some Ancient runes on a Wall that are obviously connected to magical Knowledge. Maybe he isnt able to clearly make out whats the exact meaning but he should be able to at least have an Idea ("theses are Runes of Defence" or "Beware this has something to do with FIre"). But failing the Rol and then saying sorry i have no idea like any stupid Barbarian would say..... this isnt acceptable by a Wizard player. And he will reload.

So making rolls doesnt always have to lead to total failure or total success. Making DICE LOADED is problable the most irrational solution of all.


Another take on the Problem is to put the power into players Hand again. By having a Skill (for example: arcane knowledge) that the player can activly develop by putting points into it and therefore has direct control over how well his Character is profound in certain areas. But yeah i know thats 3.5 DnD and surely forbidden stuff. But i hope you get the idea why "Loaded Dice" is like a slap in the face of Fans.

And yes i am aware that there are some die hard Larian fans who will love the idea of "loaded Dice" as even if you would put a Pink elefant on the Head of their Characters they would applaud for your Creativity.

Loaded dice are fine, as long as there is an option to turn them off.

Larian probably does need to fine tune the failure modes so that they lead to more interesting results, AND so that they acknowledge skill on a missed roll. In other words, a player with Arcane knowledge who misses the roll will get a somewhat more informative answer than a player without who misses.

Adding skill ranks does nothing to solve the problem, because you will still have a chance to miss the roll if RNG works poorly for you that day.

I'm against the idea of loaded dice too, but they said it will be an on/off basis only for the people who want it.

I will probably never use the loaded dice, but if ppl want to use it, then they can turn it on. I agree with having the dice rolls for certain situations, or even if failed you would get "some" information out of the roll. The problem is trying to implement that into a computer game. In PnP, the DM decides what information is divulged. In a computer game, the game itself needs to determine that, and that's A LOT of variables to consider, and as such a great deal of time implementing those different variables based on the different characters, skills and the dice roll itself. If you fail by 1 or 2 points, then more information should be given then if you rolled a 1 or 2 on the dice. If a barb is trying to figure something out that is arcane and has no skill what so ever in the arcana skill, then failing the roll will probably lead to "Oh, petty letters". Again, there are a lot of variables involved, so not sure exactly how that could be implemented in a not so resource draining manner.

I don't really plan to use the loaded dice and I wouldn't really give a shit about the existence of these as an option in ITSELF.

What worries me is the the nagging suspicion that Larian may consider this "another problem solved once and for all" and not work on addressing the underlying issue.
Which is not about cheating to pass the roll, but having a game that keeps things interesting (and doesn't just cut you away from a portion of content) regardless of how certain rolls go.

I actually want to test out the loaded dice. It was implied it was set-up to reduce streaking not give the player better odds. We probably got loaded dice since Larian had been considering pseudo RNG since before Early Access. And, was ready by patch 4.

I want to find out if it actually does either:
A) Reduces streaks
B) Tilts the distribution in favor of the player

Humans are really really bad at undestanding randomisation. Weighting dice is the best way to stop people thinking you're weighting the dice.

Yeah, it's the same reason the DM gets to fudge rolls.

Tell me about it.
As a passionate XCOM 2 veteran I've been through years of reliably dominating the game at Legendary while listening to people bitch that the game is "unfair unwinnable RNG bullshit" even played at rookie.
Most of them are in denial when you tell them that the only cheating the game does is actually in their favor (especially on lower difficulty settings).

That was my first thought. However, I had a second thought which is that this *could* mean that they will be willing to implement mechanics closer to pnp now that the "rng problem" is mitigated.

100% agree.

I won't believe that there is an actual problem with the current (pre patch 4) RNG until I see a detailed statistical analysis of a huge number of rolls. Humans just can't do this "by eye".

Incidentally someone already did that in an old thread and posted the results. And guess what?
Yep, the average distribution of rolls matches the expected numbers.

Loaded dice is actually a very table-top-like thing to do. How many DMs "fix" the dice rolls so they don't have party members constantly dying? I'd bet a large amount. How many times do DMs allow their player to do something ridiculous without having to roll for it just because it was creative and fun?

D&D is suppose to be fun, not just an XCOM-esk tactical simulator. I want to role-play, not fight against the game's systems. that said, if everything is too easy, that eventually takes the thrill away.

love xcom - fan of the long war 2 mod? maybe that goes without saying, lol

Actually not particularly.
I have yet to give a fair chance to Long War of the Chosen, but I didn't like vanilla Long War 2 a single bit.

I'm way more fond of the official expansion War of the Chosen, on the other hand.

Haven't played since the initial EA release, but I don't recall much angst over the RNG in this game. Now, Pathfinder:Kingmaker on other hand? Driving me crazy. I would like to be able to export the combat log in a game like this so I can parse the data to comfortably put the matter to rest.

I too worry that they'll balance it so loaded dice is needed instead of building stuff like multiple rolls to get the best outcome so it's almost impossible or not making sure that failures have interesting twists instead of leading to total failure.

Tell that to Larian.
They seem to have made almost a point of honor about "fixing" shit no one complained about while ignoring the issues are driving the community on the verge of madness.

I get the impression if a barrel is not exploding or you aren’t doing critical levels of damage every turn, Larian thinks it’s boring.

I will have to remember that the next time I am in Vegas.