Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Some dice rolls are unbeatable

I've loaded at least 30 times trying to beat a dice roll interaction. I need a roll of 9 or more to be able to pass the check (having solid bonuses, which would add up to the actual 15). At this point it's quite obvious that this die roll has intentionally been made unbeatable.

Do you have a weighted dice option enabled? It progressively diminishes a chance for a failed roll and could help you.

I'll try that, thanks.

Still doesn't explain the predetermination of this outcome, because after all 30-40 attempts there is absolutely no probability that a roll of 9+ would have not occurred.

I just checked and it seems I had the weighted dice on by default. After I disabled it I was able to beat the roll check. So I guess the weighted dice works both ways.

What's the roll for?

Other folks can say whether they've run into the same problem in that situation or not.

It's the [Wizard] [Arcana] roll at the entrance to the Putrid Bog. I have 5 solid bonus and 1d4 from guidance so it should be quite easy to beat a 15 required. Like I mentioned in the edited post above, after disabling the weighted dice I was barely able to beat it with a roll of 8 and a 3 guidance roll.

Ah, that's what happened.

The weighted dice work both ways, I believe.

They help you succeed when you've been failing... but they also work against you sometimes if there have been a steady stream of successes.

You were in a weird place where the weighted dice were hurting your next roll, and that didn't change from one reload to another. Your next roll always would have been bad.

I can't prove this is the case, of course, but I'm almost positive that's what was going on.

It's definitely the weighted dice. I'm no mathematician, but I strongly believe that the probability in this case for not hitting a 9+ roll after 30-40 attemts is just non-existent.

It's also likely that there is some sort of seeding effect going on. If you're only reloading and repeating the same single check, then you could also be loading the same (or a similar, depending on how time passed between reload and the check) seed that governs the rng output. Many TB games involving random chance have a difficulty option "seed preserved? y/n" which prevents or allows reloading to get a different result.

Perhaps turning off weighted dice reset the seed and/or unweighted dice makes use of the seed differently.

The game's RNG doesn't manage its chaos inputs nearly well enough - you would eventually pass the check with determined reloading, but while you're reloading to the low swing of the algorithm (and it seems to return to the same state upon reloads, or at least to being at the same stage), it's going to take far longer than it 'should' under normal expectations.

This is hard to verify in any concrete way, given that probability is exactly that, even with machine rngs, but there is a strong correlation of this phenomena.

Be prepared also for numerous people to chime in on the topic of confirmation bias, and about their various successes with the check you were stuck at - I've passed and failed every check in the game, variously, and none of them are 'rigged', per se, though a couple of them do seem to have an in-built bias, behind the curtain.

Yes, it works both ways. That's one of the reasons I generally play with weighted dice turned off.

Also, failing certain checks can lead to new and interesting situations, so it's not necessarily a bad thing but your mileage may vary.

Weighted dice doesn't really worth both ways, I think there's a lot of confirmation bias going in here.

Weighted dice just makes it harder to fail consistently, for you and NPCs. In effect whatever has a lower probability to happen is boosted. In most cases this just makes the game easier.

I suspect this instance of rolls is just randomness and the human desire to see patters where they might not exist, or some seeding issue.

I've seen Larian advertise this a number of times in the early days, and I've seen a few forum-goers repeat it as a defence a number of times over the course of EA, but never really witnessed it myself.

Could you give me an example of where attempting a check and failing it provides an outcome that is actually different from just choosing one of the auto-fail options and/or simply not trying at all? I cannot think of any.

Is getting captured by Gut a failed skill check, or is it just a choice? That's the only possible one I can think of.

There's no outcome with Gut (before being captured or after) that involves a fail tat you can't simply choose to take with dialogue options and no checks - the result is identical.

It's not the same as choosing an auto-fail option or not trying at all... it may not actually be a different outcome, but from a RP-perspective it's very different. And in a RPG, even a cRPG, that's one of the things that matter to me as it may change the way I play a character.