BG1/2 demonstrated that its certainly possible to make a compelling D&D computer game where every roll is basically hidden from view and the game just winks at you like "trust me."
As long as the gameplay shows the average player exploding enemies into puddles of goo often enough to be satisfying, I'm probably going to let it slide in that sort of game. I'm sure there were plenty of reloads to write scrolls or get max hp in BG before those were added as game settings options, were you could curse your luck. But otherwise, I wasn't counting for clustered 1s, because it just wasn't the defining feature of the gameplay. If a critical miss can be followed by a vorpal pwning with like a 2 second delay, you tend to just brush it off. Take that same thing, slow it down turn-by-turn and put big flashy dice rolling animations on the screen for every other thing, and it definitely then becomes a defining feature.
If they're going to lean into dice as the main thing, they should make it ironclad, so there's no question about running it under the "core rules" mode. They can do whatever in they want in "please make this less painful" game settings, but first do the rng due diligence so its air tight for people who don't want skynet pulling punches.
Ps. Incedental, but I think I might be kind of an oddball here for totally enjoying D&D on a computer, but also not really being the biggest fan of Role Play if its detached from gameplay. I like it to be a game, first and foremost, and so I appreciate play-acting elements and that kind of creativity more as a flourish. But I'm not a huge theater person, so that's kind of on the DM or the gaming group I guess, whether its fun times for me on a nuts a bolts level. I need consistent rules and systems I can parse and limits to what we can do on a gamey level in order to keep it engaging for me. The dice can serve that function for people like me on the table top, but there are other ways to approach it as well if the medium is a videogame. I was pretty satisfied with BG1/2 as a D&D story product and I can't recall ever once rolling dice in that game after character creation. They just didn't highlight it as the thing. But this game doesn't seem to be making fidelity to the earlier BG games a priority, instead 5e and the table top turn based experience is what they promoted, so pretty understandable that we see the dice all the time in that case, or gripes if it departs from the TT expectations overmuch. I just don't know that it makes for particularly great BG game, since its a very different sort of experience. For whatever that's worth
Last edited by Black_Elk; 21/02/21 01:38 PM.
