Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback skill check dice rolls, a really shit idea (turned savescumming into a core game mechanic)

Meh I think we should be able to "cheat".

Paper RPG allows that ( put extra topping on the GM's pizza :D), "choose your own adventure books" allows that (If you fail, go to page 86... pfsss as if :D).

Still I don't think this needs to be a game feature, just let us use some console code or mod to do it and avoid save scumming (not because I'm against it, but because is time expensive).

Though this topic is pretty old, wanted to add my 2 cents to this topic:

Im not against RNG, on the contrary, I feel with clever design it can be a really cool experience. Im playing Disco Elysium at the moment and its interesting what ways they use to make RNG an interesting mechanic rather than a frustrating one (some of this has been already mentioned by others):

- most of the cases when you see a tough skill-check in a dialogue, the game lets you to get out of dialogue and save before trying that check
- some scenarios doesnt let you to do the above, but the devs managed to make failing these really interesting or fun and the early-hints for this are top-notch, i almost always can feel if failing something will be cool rather than a deadend, its like the game wants you to fail some choices and this is pretty clear really early in the game
- there are red and white checks (white can be retried after skill progression) which is a nice way to give more visibility of options to the player
- most passive checks use the treshold system
- for crucial checks sometimes there is usually another way to achieve the goal even if you failed the check and the game lets you know if there is
- and the one i like the most: the game lets you know from the start that you have to explore things around you to increase your chances for certain checks. for example at the very beginning of the game . You immediately see the bonus earned with that when you look how your chance rate builds up. And that encourages you instantly to explore more ways to abuse this system, you realize if you speak with npcs and read books you will know more about certain scenarios and you will see bonuses for checks connected to those scenarios, its not only your skill/attribute bonuses matter but the way you play. I feel the game rewards me for exploring the world and talking to npcs, a lot of times i only succeed with a tough check because of those modifiers. I have the feeling this already happens in BG3 at some parts but the game doesnt really let the player know which particular actions led to better chances on certain checks?

It would be cool to see the last one being used in BG3 to connect gameplay elements a little bit more to each other.

It depends on your gaming style and what you want from a game. Like you, I found the skill-check system frustrating at first and reloaded a lot, because I couldn't bear to "lose". But when I discovered that losing rarely LOSES you anything - in fact, it often opens up a whole storyline or area that you never otherwise would have discovered - I opened up to the idea. This isn't like most games where there is one obvious direction you are supposed to be aiming for. They've put a lot of work into fleshing out multiple narrative trees, some of which only come into being if you fail at the apparently "correct" route. Having Arabella die, for example, gives you the great scene with her parents at the Tiefling party. If you fail to persuade Nettie to give you the antidote, you can kill her or pickpocket her - or even make your own!

There are a few points when failing a check closes off an important part of the game, or makes getting something not very significant massively harder, and those are annoying, but there are usually several ways round every problem (eg: I just tried sneaking through the hole in the wall at the back of the Zhent storehouse instead of walking through the front and risking being blown up if I fail a dialogue check, and hey, completely different outcome!).

Hey different outcomes are quite fine ...
Most RNG rolls are also quite fine ...

But there still are things that pisses me off, like when you try to crush that tapole wich crawled out of that Dwarf ... and if RNG sucess, you get aproval from everyone ... if RNG fail, you get disaproval from everyone ...
I mean it may make sence from story perspective, but i as a player want my companions to respond with dis/aproval for my decisions, not results of RNG that i cant affect. :-/

This is something they should change.

If you get disapproval from failure rather than choice, they might as well give you disapproval every time you miss in combat.

I have to say that I really love the idea but as someone answered me in another thread...
At the moment failure is not ALWAYS interresting, I have to admit it.

The scene with Arabella is a good exemple.

DICE :
- Sucess : she live
- failure : she die

if we fail, we should probably have an option to :
- Protect her, she live, but the druids become hostile (or a few of them)
- Let her die

We should probably always be able to choose the end even if "how it ends" can change with the dice.

Part of RPGing is the luck of the dice roll. I think that it's perfectly in line with typical D&D to keep it as is. Sometimes you can't control fate. Sometimes, no matter how good you think you are, you fail, and failure can mean people disapprove.

This is quite some understatement ...

Jump betweem girl and snake ... you die, girl live.

Too much is left to dice rolls and too little is up to player choices, whether it is conflict resolution or your companions' opinion of you.

A case in point:

When Gale finally tries to ingratiate himself to you to ask for magical items to eat, he gives you a list of things you did that earned his admiration. The list goes,
1. You peacefully resolved the conflict between Zevlor and Aradin
2. You peacefully resolved the conflict between Arka and the goblin prisoner
3. You saved Arabella from Kagha
4. You saved the boy from the harpies

Out of the 4, only the last one is not completely due to a roll of a die. The first three are completely left to the whims of chance. Your companions basically do not care about your intentions, only the results, many of which are left to dice rolls.

Another example:

You see the tiefling struggling with his sword practice. You try to help him. Your companions don't care that you want to help. They only care that you succeed, which, again, is left to chance. And if the dice roll poorly for you, they all show their disapproval.

Some more:

You try to kill the tadpole crawling out of the corpse's eye. Your companions don't care that you are visibly struggling with the mental control of the tadpole. They only care that you succeed in killing it, which is, again, completely left to chance, and you have to succeed two rounds of dice rolls. And if you fail at either, ALL your companions look at you with disdain as they display their utter disapproval.

At a table top, the GM's goal is to let the players have fun with making choices in the freedom that a table top game allows, with the GM using the rules of the dice to provide some structure to the resolution of the players' choices. This is the most important thing. Having fun from making choices. And the GM has to think on the spot to allow the players to use their freedom to achieve their in-game goals. To use the tadpole example again. A GM might, upon the player rolling badly when trying to overcome the tadpole's mental influence, say that the tadpole is wriggling away, and the party can roll for Dexterity to catch up to it if they want to. And if they still fail, the tadpole might then infect someone else, and the party now has the choice if they want to help the new victim to cope with the situation some way, or try to kill him too, to get at the tadpole. New choices open up upon the result of dice rolls.

Not so with BG3. The player gets as much freedom as the developer allows, and, as with most CRPGs, BG3 has very little of it. But what exacerbates this is that the game makes your character feel defeated when the dice rolls badly for him, with no other way to try to resolve the situation. Other than save scumming, that is. So the dice did not favour you. The tadpole wriggled away. Everyone in your party shows their disapproval. You can't do anything about it (except reloading), and walks away feeling defeated, for something that was determined by dice rolls. So I gotta ask the developers: is this supposed to be fun for the player? To make the player feel like he has lost, because the dice rolled one way? Why do this? How is this fun?

You can save Arabella as a druid by asking the snake for help, which doesn't involve any rolls. It requires animal speech, but I haven't checked if it works also with another class.

However, I am not sure if you actually need any of the above with Gale. My evil warlock hasn't done any of the above, has raided the druid grove, and - after telling her how terrible she is - Gale now said he has something to confess. I guess my warlock will know once she finds something he wants.

The example of talking to the snake and the different dialogue we get from Nettie could be signs that Larian is starting to understand that players want to be rewarded for choices, not penalised for dice rolls. Time will tell if this new insight leads to better dialogue in other areas.

As for Gale, the point I was making was that his approval of you, for the reasons as enumerated by him, has so much to do with pure chance.

Apart from his romance (which I haven't tried, so no idea), how much impact do these options have on your interactions with Gale, though? Even when going with the rolls (and I don't bother with some, e.g. Arka) I never had any companions leave due to low approval. The (dis)approval messages are quite annoying and feel like spam, so I'd like an option to turn them off. But feeding Gale magical items was enough for him to be very approving of my characters regardless.

Tbh, I had the impression with some of Gale's dialogues that he is just buttering the main character up.

I think BG3 has a serious problem with framing and contextualisation. It's silly and goofy and you can throw barrels and push monsters off ledges and now pass a speech check or this young girl will be executed.

It doesn't work. That's not a framework where failure generates an interesting consequence, it just generates dissonance. Water finds a path and BG3 has to do a lot, LOT better before players are going to be comfortable just letting bad dice rolls stand.

Mechanically, those options don't affect his approval of you much since there are many other occasions to earn his approval, even with the approval cheese fixed. But narratively, because he listed them, they must have left an impression on him.

Yes, there's every reason to believe he was buttering up the player character, but the point is that he did not say that he believed you were a good person because you tried to do the right thing. He only cared that you succeeded in doing those things, 3 out of the 4 of which were determined by dice rolls (pre-Patch 4).

This is the point I was making: results that are determined by dice rolls affect your companions' approval of you, but not your intentions.

RPG's are supposed to simulate real life while giving players the ability to put themselves in the role of their fantasy character. In RL, you may have good intentions, but you may not always succeed at something.

If I was DMing this story, as I am a DM, I would make players make rolls to determine if they succeed in persuading people, in resisting the influence of the tadpole, etc. It's all apart of D&D. You succeed sometimes and fail others. Sometimes you are a hero and make epic rolls and are like, "Yeah! I needed a 15 and I rolled natural 20," and other times you need a 5 and roll a 1. The story is then affected by your RNG dice rolling. That's how an RPG is supposed to be done.

In a computer game version, you can cheat by savescumming. So if you want to cheat and be a hero every time, save and reload for every roll. That's tour choice.

I am saying this because I feel that this is something Larian is doing right. If you make all the dialogue choices and so forth all player picks and not RNG, the game will be more boring. The whole point of these rolls is too make you grit your teeth and think, "Oh gosh! If I fail this roll, what will happen?"

Spoiler. The first time I played the game and the snake killed Arabella, I was like, "What the crap! That sucks! No. I'm reloading. Not gonna happen." But then I took a moment and realized, "That's how it should be. You waltz in and try to persuade a Dark Druid to not kill a thief who stole her idol, you are more than likely going to fail even if you are a skilled negotiator. Snakes are fast, and you weren't thinking she was going to do such a thing, so being able to save her is also unlikely. It is also likely that Gale would be upset with youbfor failing. All this makes sense for Larian to do and it wakes player up real quick. Some actions have serious consequences.

So please don't take this element of the game away from me. Put a difficulty setting in for people who don't want true D&D experiences but don't take away my authentic RNG RPGing. I really enjoy having 1 playthrough where one character succeeds at something and I get to see what happens when you succeed and then another playthrough 1 character fails and I get to see what happens. It really makes this game more fun on additional playthroughs.

I'm not sure I follow. For me a narrative difference means the game's story takes a different turn depending on the outcomes of an event. In this case I'd expect a different result depending on whether you suceed at these quests. But out of the examples you gave, I don't bother with Zarka and I usually kill Aradin (if the goblins don't manage that). Yet Gale still confessed and asked for magical items. The only narrative difference to his quest I have seen so far is now on the evil playthrough, but this is the outcome of going the evil route from the start.

Gale speaking a few nice words doesn't necessary mean you have made an impression on him. That is in the realm of character interpretation, and, based on my own playthroughs, I don't interpret his words as such.

You're free to interpret what it means to make a narrative difference or what his reasons are for saying the things he says, but the main point that I've kept having to repeat is that, intentions don't matter to your companions, only that you succeed, which depend most of the time on dice rolls.

And so far I haven't seen any consequences of failing apart from not getting the few congratulatory words from Gale. Which is why I don't see failing to e.g. crush the tadpole as an issue. It doesn't seem to impact the companions opinions of my characters as much, because mechanically there are options to raise it anyway.

1) If you are Tiefling, you can solve problem without dices (if i remember corectly)
2) This one is funny ... since if you step between Arka and Sazza, and then instead of dices, you simply step out of the way ... you still get aproval from Gale. It seem he didnt cared about the goblin at all, he simply admired that you have courage to interfere in first place.
3) Im not quite sure about it, since its quite some time (2 patches cca) when i tryed it, but i believe that if you fail, Gale will tell you that he likes that you TRYED to save the kid. But as i say, its few months back when i failed last time, maybe im mixing things up. :-/

Conclusion, theese things dont even need to exactly "change" ...
All Larian needs to do is simply move approval gain before the dice roll, not after ...

I just wonder how would it look if we get split approval to two groups ...
First "half" we would get when we try ... and another one when we success ... you know, something like "at least you tryed man".

While you can get high reputation with Gale by (successfully) doing good things over the course of Act 1, the process of gaining said reputation needs to be fun. I've already elaborated on why the current system of successful dice rolls being responsible for gaining approval is not fun. If you find it enjoyable, then good for you. Sadly, this aspect of the game is a misstep for me.