Originally Posted by mrfuji3
Originally Posted by Zenith
"They're doing an amazing job with RNG in dialogues". Speak for yourself, I'm not particularly interested in reload spam for important dialogue choices like saving Arabella, convincing Kagha to turn on the shadow druids, or diverting Dror Razglin's interrogation of a mindflayer. No thanks. Whether I see the druid grove frescos with the history of Ketheric's defeat or not just based on a dice roll or not. Whether I get to reveal traps via perception or not or blow myself up.

This has everything to do with dice rolls. Some of us appreciate what Larian has done in their previous 2 games, and given the success it deservedly got them, I'd rather they stick with known quantities than some tabletop gimmick that has forced them to waste time on even a feature called "weighted dice" because obviously the RNG is unpopular.
Larian had to implement weighted dice because their base rng system is bad and leads to streaks. If you get one bad roll, you're much more likely to get subsequent bad rolls.
Larian's "weighted dice" actually just corrects for this problem and is more consistent with a truly uniform distribution.

It has nothing to do with dice rolls. Dice rolls are almost exactly the same as percentage rng, just with less precision. There could be an argument that everything is left too much to chance, but the solution for that is to decrease the AC of enemies and the difficulty of dialogue checks, not necessarily throw out the d20.
Similarly, one could argue that failing isn't fun (one of Larian's stated goals), but that indicates a problem with Larian not providing fun failure options.

RNG has always lead to streaks. Putting in bad luck protection is just curtailing what RNG is. You don't just make one side of the coin heavier so it favors landing the face you want more often and call it still random, because then it isn't. And that is the crux of the argument, that you could reduce the AC of enemies or difficulty dialogue checks, but getting that 3 roll on a 5 roll is still equally aggravating and the outcome is the same, you end up staring at the loading bar again. Same for missing 30% of the time instead of 50%; that miss feels like total ass regardless, especially on limited spell slots. They could mitigate it by making it so if a spell misses, the spell slot isn't consumed, but that is currently not the case, and even if it were, spending the Duegar boat fight against same level enemies with the best magic gear by the end of EA missing over half of Gale's spells and feeling forced to use Magic Missiles as the only remotely reliable damage delivery for a spell caster feels absolutely horrendous.

What is a fun failure option with failing to persuade Kagha to not envonm a child to death? What would be the fun option to failing to convince the Zhentarim to release the captive artist? To me the outcome of failure is pretty obvious. The point being that regardless of what "alternatives" they offer in failure, you're still not getting your desired outcome, which prompts the save reload BS.

Last edited by Zenith; 29/03/21 08:04 PM.