Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Reddit Repost: Karmic Dice and Armor Class

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGat...erturn_off_karmic_dice_at_launchwhy_400/

Newer players may not know about this, so I figure it's worth a reminder PSA.

Quote from original post by /u/akdavidxy, found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/zwqaem/psa_having_the_karmic_dice_setting_turned_on/

PSA: Having the "karmic Dice" setting turned on (which it is by default) increases the damage you receive by up to 400% (full data of 1369 rolls and charts linked in post)
TL;DR: If you have the "karmic dice" setting enabled, enemies will hit (and crit) you significantly more often then they should (they "cheat"). The effect increases with your armor class. With an AC of 23 you will take 4x more damage than you should at this AC - making any tank build effectively useless. (charts in the provided link at the bottom)

Background:

I recently did multiple solo playthroughs, and when I wanted to do an "as defensive as possible" playthrough, I noticed how it was quite a struggle. Of course the game is not intended to be played through with a single character, however, having completed the EA with mutliple other builds, I noticed that this playthrough was significantly more difficult and I had to reload a lot.

With wikis etc. I researched my setup beforehand quite well, and I achieved an AC of 23 early on, which should have made me basically unhittable for most enemies, however, even early enemies still hit me with around 30-40% chance. This is when I started to analyze what's going on.

Data Collection Method:

I only recorded one encounter (the two goblins standing south of the blighted village: One melee, one Archer (which summons a Worg Companion), and let them hit me over and over again. I picked this fight, as there are no casts, no saving throws, or advantages, just simple attack rolls.

All rolls have been manually transcribed into a sheet, including the attack modifier used by the enemy.

No game mods have been used.

Character used:

Level 4 Halfling, 21 Str (elixir) 20 Dex (+hags) , 16 Con, 10 int, 14 Wis, 8 Cha

Data Collection:

At least 100 attacks for AC 15,17,19,21,23 both with Karmic Dice enabled and disbled.

Total Rolls counted: 1369

Data Analysis:

Since I "only" wrote down around 150 rolls for each dataset, there is some uncertainty. However, the data is quite clear.

Non-Karmic Dice:

The results match quite closely what you would expect. The AC of the character is respected, the dice are random and fair. (Confirming that the collected data is not too far away from the result which we would get when collecting more data).

Karmic Dice:

Now this is the big one: I knew that they added this feature long time ago "to smooth things out". In the beginning it was only to the favor of the player, later they added this to enemies as well. As far as I read it was stated that the effect is rather small, so I never really bothered to turn it off.

In reality, if you look at the dice rolls, you will see that enemies hit you more often than they should - and not only by a bit, but actually significantly. The dice results were consistently too high (the average dice roll should be 10.5, however it was around 12.5), and the higher your AC is, the more critical hits I take (up to 15% instead of 5%, meaning enemies have crit me 3x as much as they should). And since crits do double damage, the effect of this in terms of damage is actually two times as strong.

It is a bit difficult to grasp the data at once, this is why I calculated back: From the number of hits generated with the karmic dice rolls, I calculated to which AC this would correspond, if the enemies were using normal dice.

Example: If I had an AC of 15, and the enemy had a modifier of 0, he would need to roll a 15 to hit, and a 20 to crit. So the expected hit chance is 25%, and the expected crit chance 5%.

Once we collected the data, we notice that we got hit in 45% of the attacks, and crit in 5%. We can then say that this corresponds to an AC of 11 with a normal dice.

In short: In that case: AC 15 + Karmic Dice = AC 11 (with normal dice)

The most important result:

Equipped AC Karmice Dice Observed AC (rounded) AC Penalty Damage Multiplier
15 11 4 1.25 - 1.6
17 13 4 1.3 - 1.8
19 15 4 1.3 - 2.3
21 17 4 1.4 - 2.5
23 17 6 1.8 - 4
An AC Penalty of 4 - 6 might sound bad at first, but not too bad. However, if you do the maths, this actually increases the expected damage vastly - the higher your equipped AC the stronger the effect. I provided the damage multiplier as a range, as it depends on the hit modifier of the enemy (full data in the link).

Conclusion:

Even though the data set might not be large enough for precise results, it is quite clear that in the current version of the game, karmic dice impose a massive penalty on the player, in particular if you try to run tanky (high AC) characters. You take up to 4 times the damage which you should - meaning that you easily get wiped out in a single round - when you actually should have lived for 4 rounds (giving you the options to heal etc - meaning you wouldn't even die at all).

If you want to have a somewhat fair experience, you have to turn karmic dice.

(If someone from Larian reads this: I would suggest to rework the karmic dice system, or to make it disbled by default, or to make it a lot clearer to players what the effect is. I'm currently not sure if most players are aware, that the effect of this option is as large as it is.)

Full Data + Charts:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...JpkP9anhPshxjVinoXwKdYByYhQkhIxm/pubhtml

Karmic dice are an abomination unto Nuggen.

It's hard enough teaching Maths without having computers fudging things to reinforce false preconceptions.

I understand why it is there, it is not fun to miss all the time, but I think many people, including me, don't realize this also applies for your enemies.

And because you typically are stronger than any individual enemy and have higher armor class, this works against you a lot more than for you. It makes you a bit more accurate, but enemies A LOT more accurate. Especially if you have a high AC.

As discussed above, for tanks, this realistically means you take 4x damage.
I think many just don't realize how drastic this is, so I wanted to bring awareness to it

The Karmic Dice also work in the opposite direction. Commander Zhalk, without the Karmic Dice activated, becomes almost impossible to hit with regular attacks. In general, I believe they are a senseless feature as they undermine the very foundations of D&D.

Also, fwiw, Karmic Dice was originally implemented by Larian because their base rng system was actually terrible. It made it more likely that low rolls would be followed by more low rolls (same for high rolls), making BG3 feel terrible to play.

However, since then they've fixed their base rng system...so there's no longer really a reason for Karmic Dice.

hmm, so if you're trying to fight an insane enemy way above your level, karmic dice 'might' give you a chance, but for enemies your level or lower, they're really not helping that much?

Are there any downsides to turning them off? As far as I understand that setting only exists to make sure you can't get too many of the same rolls in a row...and I mean sure it would suck to get five nat1s in a row but that setting also prevents you from getting five nat20s is a row. For real, karmic dice should just not exist at all.

Also, my analysis of these-plus-other rolls is that Karmic Dice works similarly to Advantage (unless you roll a natural 1, in which case that result stands). Effectively, the Karmic Dice system gives you an X% chance to reroll if you miss attack, which obviously happens more often against higher AC creatures.

This is supported by the detail that, when using Karmic Dice while making attacks at Advantage, it doesn't give any significant benefit.

My guess is there is more to the algorithm the game uses when rolling those weighted dice than pure advantage or disadvantage. They're probably more along the lines of "advantage but..." and "disadvantage but...". My guess is they really don't want to give too big of an advantage or disadvantage and the neutral is likely still weighted just a little bit in favor of the player because a lot of people who are completely and utterly clueless about D&D will be playing this game and they'll already be in way over their heads just by virtue of not having any idea what they're doing or how to build their characters so just a little bit of help applied here and there because unlike being at a D&D table there will be no other knowledgeable people around to help them out, tell them how to set their characters up, etc.

Looks like I should have brought my thoughts here instead of making a thread in the help section, but some of you may be interested. For one thing I describe a method of obtaining 'karmic dice' that is simple and works to achieve a 'less streaky' distribution that is otherwise equivalent to rolling dice.

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=860125#Post860125

Interesting idea that the karmic dice distribution depends on what it's actually rolling for (i.e. on the AC needed to overcome for an attack roll). That's completely off the rails compared to what I thought the intention of the karmic dice system was.

Did you do the tests in some sort of order? (i.e. all the AC 15 non karmic then all the AC 17 non karmic, etc). I'm interested in obtaining a large data set that's in chronological order to test some time series features.