Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Persist Roll Results

Hi All,

Apologies if this has already been requested/mentioned, but what do people think of an option to make identical rolls persist when you reload?

Reasons are fairly self-explanatory: remove the temptation of scumming but also a situation where you may just incidentally reload say you die just after a favourable roll in some conversation and then have to reload but get an awful result in the roll, that feels kinda cheap/annoying).

I'd rather keep the save scumming TBH. Having the result persist would be frustrating if I was really trying to get a specific result on a play through and I got blocked from it. Could legitimately ruin a run cause this is a video game and right now failure is blanket failure while tabletop things are more fluid and failure can become a whole new adventure. In tabletop I had three nat ones in a row with arcana summon a demon and start my character down a really messed up path he would not have gone down. Three nat ones in BG3 however would just fail and you wouldn't have such a dynamic alternative story pop up.

I am a big fan of save-scum prevention - for my own good. In general, I don't think it should be on be default, but an option would be welcome.

I could see this being part of an optional Hardcore mode or part of tactician mode.

I think its horrible idea ...
I really feel kinda sory for people who would welcome it, but that is their decision ... i would hate it with burning passion, honestly. :-/

I'd rather savescum until I get the result I want, roleplay-wise. If I have a character, an idea of what would/should happen in the story or conversation with a companion, it would be so frustrating to be locked out of something important halfway through the game just because the dice said so. After all, it's not a tabletop DnD game where you defer to the will of the dice, it's my personal computer game and I'll play it how I want to. :P

If I want a "ruled by the roll of the dice" game I would set aside a separate playthrough and see where lady Luck takes me.

A contemporary D&D video game has the option of preserving your roll seed on reloads, or not, and it's easy to toggle on or off in your options. It's a feature that is much appreciated over there, and if it were an option - as long as it's an option - it would likely be an appreciated one here.

Absolutely not; certainly not as any sort of mandatory or default setting, at least. I am somewhat intrigued by the number of times this subject comes up, however (I mean speaking on a personal basis, not in the capacity of forum mod, before anyone gets the wrong idea) as I'm strongly in the "well just don't do it, then" camp. And I write as someone who's definitely not any sort of hardcore player...

This doesn’t work for me. The thing is when I have an opportunity to savescum I tend to take the game lightly. This is why I like all kinds of ironman and legendary modes which limit savegames, thus making me to immerse more. What I don’t like about these modes is they are too punishing. So yes I agree with the OP, an option to eliminate savescumming is highly welcome.

As long as it is an option. I like my savescumming for role-playing reasons a lot and would not want to do without it.

I find long* load times to be all the disincentive I need.

* for quite short values of "long". I'm impatient.

The problem there is that sometimes you simply NEED TO savescum. :-/
For example, when i will get to that scene, where snake endangers little tiefling girl ... with some of mine Lawfull Good characters ... i would stand/jump between the girl and the snake imediatly after failing persutation ... or once the girl is bitten, i should be able to imediatly cast healing spell, or resistance for poison, or revivify, or use the scroll of ressurection ...
Yet, the game dont let me do any of those things. :-/

So my only way for Lawfull Good character is suceed in that roll ...
And if i dont, i simply reload ... not bcs i want the game to be easier for me, but bcs there is no other way im allowed to act in that situation. :-/

Precisely the point I made in another thread.
Limiting available actions based on a die roll is very limiting and will invariably lead to save scumming. Regardless of save scumming though, i believe that limiting options in this way is less than ideal. Failure can and should simply open up other avenues to still have the desired outcome. In the Tiefling case I believe we should have the opportunity to violently intervene and either have another pursuasion check to sway others to our cause last second, or fail and end up fighting everyone. If we kill everyone, now we have to get creative about getting the girl AND US out. The point being trying to persuade should not remove the decision to fight, I was just trying to avoid it.

Or maybe I cannot intervene quickly enough, but seeing that I was prepared to fight we are detained. Later one of the druids has us released and says there is a way to bring the girl back and we open up a side quest option. We can choose to ignore it of course, or we choose the revive manner prented to us to ultimately have the outcome we want to see, just with other story consequences (what if the girl causes more mischief later on down the line!)

Hard black and white on a die roll will almost always lead to a reload, whether it be for a story outcome or an item. Especially on items, don't make me miss it, just make me have to get it another way.

There is many plotholes in this specific situation ...
Even if you loose the persuation roll, and your character decide to "punish everyone" and start fight ... you have litteraly no way to "punish everyone" since half NPC from that room wil simply run away, before first turn even starts. :-/
Then they warn everyone outside, and you start even greater carnage, just bcs Larian didnt give you any other way to save little girl, than bein sucesfull in single roll. :-/

Yeah I think part of the issue is the TTRPG effect that Larian want to copy, the DM giving you a tense moment, drum roll, roll the dice and... kinda effect. The problem for me is that in TT that works, you have that suspense whilst you shake those dice in your hand, wondering what will happen, but you also know that as players you can dynamically try to react to the story and if your DM is not set on black and white, your story can shift, evolve and flow off of that one decision. So whilst the outcome cannot be reloaded and tried again, with a good DM you aren't cheated out of persuing the story further. If the girl dies, I want to plot to retrieve the body and get her ressurected, i am not going to rest until I have made this right or failed gallantly. What I am not doing is going out to her parents and saying "well I tried to say something, but you know, meh...".

That can't happen so easily in a PC game and that's fine, we all understand the limitations, however, the big die in your face with a black and white result = frustrations. It's slow and you have little influence over what failure of said roll even means. Even if the outcome isn't as bad as say a Tiefling child dying, if the outcome seems worse, you will reload. The way round that is to have positive negatives. What if out of that failure something else opens up to tempt us (good or bad alignment based).

So again, what if instead of a side quest to revive the Tiefling girl, Kagha overhears and bribes me with a different quest to retrieve an artifact that only she knows the location of? Maybe that doesn't fit thematically with the grove, but the point is that immediately after a perceived failure (at least for a good character), I am tempted with something positive for me. Hmm now I have to think, do I really reload the game? Or do I go with this new opportunity? Ideally both options are still open to me, revive or go for the Kagha bribe quest. Maybe I still re-load and that#s fine too, but I have done it from an RP perspective, knowing that I will miss out on a cool item or quest, but I am happy with my decision and feel as though that's an avenue I might explore on a subsequent playthrough because it sounds interesting.

Alas the downside here is it can take away from the dramatic moment I guess, but you ar relying here on players "accepting" bad luck and rolling with the punches. That can be fine, but nless you like a hardcore approach, that can get pretty tiresome if die rolls don't go your way.

I don't see it as "hardcore" argument - it's just RNG can be frustrating. And while some players want to be able to reload when that happens, I like to be forced to deal with it. When XCOM kills my favourite unit, be it through RNG or my stupid mistake, it is tempting to reload. It is very tempting to reload when my rogue specilizing in lockpicking rolls 2 and fails to open the chest. Currently, I am playing through Solasta and set-seed definitely stopped my from reaching for quick-load buttons couple times - and outside initial frustration, it didn't make my experience any less enjoyable - if anything it helps the flow of the game, if I get a bad roll, I know I just need to roll with it. So I would appreciate an option for preserving random seed, but by no means would I want it to be mandatory, or even part of higher difficulties or "hardcore" mode.

I like having to deal with the RNG if failure is interesting. In tabletop games, when you fail a social roll, the DM can let you fail forward - the story direction might change, but you are still moving forward in it and it's engaging.

Because video games typically have to have a more bounded story (there's no DM to react to every crazy thing that players are going to come up with), there's a risk that failing social checks will result in "well, you just don't have access to this part of the story any more". I recognize that handling this well isn't easy. While I personally am not interested in save scumming, if failure is too punishing, I can see why people would want to have it as an option.

While I can certainly see why people would prefer this suggestion to be an option/a hardcore feature, I think "well just don't do it, then" should really stop being an argument. You can always choose to make a game harder for yourself by not doing advantageous things, but that doesn't make the gameplay rewarding. For me, knowing I could just use cheese to solve an encounter actively devalues my enjoyment for playing traditionally, because I'm choosing to play "poorly" for no-tangible benefit. Why should I feel fulfilled beating an enemy after 7 grueling rounds when I know that I could have just one-shotted the enemy with a trick? It makes me feel like I'm wasting my time/making my characters weak by being original with my gameplay, rather than doing the gimmick the devs built into the encounter.

So I can understand why people may prefer to make some changes optional if they happen to enjoy the trick/cheese, but simply saying "don't do it then" ignores the fact that intentionally playing a game sub-optimally, or knowing that the boss you are fighting can be defeated easily with a gimmick, actively destroys many people's enjoyment of the game even if they don't use the cheese themselves.

If I get that frustrated I just throw my PC out the window or sulk about it for months. Admittedly the former hasn't quite happened yet (though I think I did once throw a mouse across the room; ISTR it was the end of Act 1 of the Witcher when I was absolutely unprepared for it, so not really the mouse's fault, but it was a horrid mouse anyway) but I have often gone on a sulking spree. About three months for Morrowind after first getting pwned in that cave outside Seyda Neen and the indignity being multiplied by the same thing happening with one of the Thelas Sisters and her rats. I'd taken it personally and not realised I'd experienced my first "oh, that's just what Morrowind does" moment. And then there was Bioshock Infinite and its checkpoint-only saves which took at least six months of sulking.

I suppose I did a similar thing with the "prevention" approach by installing a mod on Oblivion that prevented fast travel (and others which had actually dark nights and mandated getting enough sleep etc) which IMHO paced the game much better compared to my former "action and adventure all hours of the day and night" playing style. I eventually uninstalled it as some quests were too annoying to repeatedly traipse across Cyrodiil and back just to deliver a message and nonsense like that but by that time I'd trained myself to just sauntering around rather than using fast-travel points.

I never play with such options.
I'm 100% fine with RNG (and eventually with save scumming).