Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks Sleight of Hand +1 vs. advantage on Sleight of Hand checks

What is the difference between Sleight of Hand +1 (Gloves of Power) and advantage on Sleight of Hand checks (Gloves of Thievery). Can I theoretically have 10 dexterity and then only need the Gloves of Thievery because I don't need to worry about a high dexterity value anymore. I don't really understand it (yet).

Alright. So let's do the math.

With no bonuses, you try to pick a DC10 Lock, you need to roll a 10 or higher. On a 20-sided die, that's exactly 50% chance.
If you add a plus one bonus, now you need to roll a 9 or higher to get a succes. So, add a one-in-twenty, or 5% increase to the odds, putting you at 55% cahnce.

With advantage, you're rolling two dice instead of one, picking the higher number.
You have 50% chance of rolling 10 or higher, twice - putting the odds that at least one of them goes to 10 or over, at 75%.

If you were to have disadvantage, however, tghat's the other way around. You roll two dice, but have to pick the lower result, and that, then, puts the odds for that same lock at 25%.

The highest chance with straight up modifiers you can have on a single Die roll is 95%, as a 1 always results in failure.
So, 5%, or one in twenty auto-fails.
But, with advantage, the odds of both rolls resulting in a 1, is 0.25% or 1 in 400.
So, with a +18 Bonus to a skill or attack, the odds of you succeeding with advantage is 99,75%

To illustrate with a real-in-game scenario.
There is a vault door somewhere. You can open it with a puzzle, or try to pick the lock. The lock's DC is 99. No amount of bonuses you accrue in this game puts you *that* high, but you can still manage that door by going for crits, or natural 20's.

Rolling a single die, that obviously, statistically, would cost you around 20 thieves tools before you get in there.
WIth Advantage, however- your odds are doubled - you now 10% chance at succeeding per roll. And it would probably cost you around 10 thieves tools before you pick the lock.
So, getting advantage on things *really, really* offsets the odds.

For quick and dirty, think of advantage as +5.

What? No. A +1 bonus is +5% chance.

Oh, wait, yeah, I see what you did here. BUt that doesn't really stack up later with bonuses and so on.

Please don't. It's much more nuanced than that. If you need to think of advantage as a flat bonus, +3 is much closer to the average value.

A more accurate way to think of advantage is that it is more useful when you need a middle value to succeed and less useful when you need an extreme value to succeed. For example, rolling against a DC 20 with a +0 modifier - with advantage, you've got a 9.75% chance to roll your 20 and succeed. A simple +1 bonus gives you a 10% chance since you succeed on either a 19 or 20.

For combat modifiers, advantage is often more powerful than modifiers due to 5e's bounded accuracy - you usually need a value in the middle to succeed. For skill checks, especially hard ones, you'll often be better off with a modifier.

Not sure what's the confusion here, the difference is basically you either get +1 to pickpocketing or an Advantage to pickpocketing.

• Gloves Of Power grants you a mere +1 bonus to pickpocketing, not worth whatsoever.
• Gloves Of Thievery grants you Advantage on pickpocketing, meaning you roll two dice and go with the highest dice rolled

Gloves of Thievery are the absolute necessity if you're stealing items, because you're rolling two dice. And since most items worth something require a DC 25-30 checks, the chances of surpassing those checks is higher with Advantage since you have two chances to roll a high dice.

Not to mention that with Advantage your chances of rolling Natural 1 are much lower, because one dice can roll 1 but the other anything but 1. Couldn't believe my luck when I failed to steal a [Dye Remover] (-5 Roll required) because both dice rolled 1. A Ranger with +16 to Sleight Of Hand rolls Nat 1 on both dice >.<

So basically; always use Gloves Of Thievery no matter what, because regardless of how high your Sleight Of Hand is, you can still fail checks by rolling natural 1. Advantage = less chances of failing a pickpocket roll and better chances of reaching the high DC checks.

Well, without even doing the math, Advantage is of course much better than just +1 to the end result, BUT +1 to the end result can make you win rolls that are otherwise not won.

Thanks to a 20 now being a Critical Success now, this bonus is kind of smaller than in the past.

The most important thing about Advantage is that if you have a spellcaster who can afford to waste a level 2 slot to give you Enhance Ability: Dexterity, you already have advantage and getting an item as well is completely superflous. So then the +1 bonus would be better.



How much does Advantage gain you ? Well:

You roll 2 d20 and take the higher result.

If you roll a single d20, there are 20 possible rolls, and every end result has the same 5% chance.

If you roll two d20 and take the higher roll, then there are 400 possible rolls, and the likeliness of higher rolls is accelerated.

In 39 of these cases, either of the roll was a 20 (19 cases of one being a 20, 19 of the other being a 20, plus the case of both being 20). So your chance for getting a Critical Success raised from 5% to 400/39 = 9.75%, so its almost doubled.

In 37 of these cases, either of the roll was 19 but the other wasnt 20 (again 18 cases of one number being 19, 18 of the other being 19, and one case of both being 19). So thats 400/37 = 9.25%

So the general rule is that (n+n-1)/400 is the chance for the specific roll.

Meaning that every lower roll is 0.5% less likely than the higher.

20 = 9.75%
19 = 9.25%
18 = 8.75%
17 = 8.25%
16 = 7.75%
15 = 7.25%
..
02 = 0.75%
01 = 0.25%

Since 9.75% + 9.25% + 8.75% + 8.25% + 7.75% + 7.25% = 6*8.5% = 51% > 50%, your *average* result is now slightly better than 15 now, instead of being 10.5 before.




Um.

Thats already wrong though.

If you roll a d20, so equal chances for any integer between and including 1 and 20, your chance to roll each possible result is 1/20 = 5%.

If you roll a 1 to 9, you would lose. That 9*5% = 45%.

If you roll a 10 to 20, you win. Thats 11*5% = 55%.

So if you have no bonus or malus whatsoever, its a DC 11 lock that is a 50% chance.

Again, just get a spellcaster who can concentrate on Enhance Ability: Dexterity (Cat's Grace) and suddenly any fixed bonus is better than another, redundant source of Advantage.

Since Enhance Ability is tier 2, and Bard, Cleric, Druid and Sorcerer can cast it, thats doable from very early on.

So no this is doable with level 3 characters already.

Of course what you otherwise really want is a Rogue with level 10 (guaranteed minimal roll 10, thus also no chance for Critical Failure), Sleight of Hand Expertise (+8 for level 9+), Dexterity 20 (+5), Guidance (+1d4) and Bardic Inspiration (+1d10), and really any other item that can push the skill.

And in the end you always have Player: Reload to fix mishaps of course.

It's unnecessary to waste a spell slot for Enhance and even worse maintain concentration, when the gloves are literally a piece of equipment that provide free Advantage that one can easily swap to before doing any stealing, which is what I do personally. I have the ring and the gloves for Sleight Of Hand placed in the Custom hotbar, ready to swap to and from any time I intend to pickpocket someone.

It's as intuitive as it can be, which allows me ease of mind by not depending on a limited spell resource and concentration. So to me personally there is no point in using Shadowheart or any other spellcaster to waste spell slots and depend on them when it's just a simple matter of swapping the gloves/ring on the hotbar. Plus I already use Shadowheart's Enhance for Charisma checks so it's not an option, while Guidance I gain from the Harper amulet equipped on Karlach.

I care about resource management and not resting every 5 steps of the journey, so I play this way. My pickpocketing checks constantly roll between extremely high 30-37, so that +1 from the other gloves is not even needed.

Oh, everytime I do not have to fiddle in the inventory is a win in my book. Enhance Ability on Gale with Guidance on Shadowheart works like a charm for just about any situation. You don't cast it for a DC10 Lock if your rogue has +7 to sleight of hand.

Until I find something better, I tend to use the Gloves of Power on my main, even if he's not the dedicated lockpicker. The melee bonuses on these glvoes are pretty good, and I don't have to switch to a thief for every lock I come across.

Ahhhh more dice rollingI should have known it... Ok, but Gloves of Thievery actually seem better then. I mean, I don't plan on being branded, so Gloves of Power are negligible anyway. The description is totally stupid and inaccurate. If I hadn't played the EA, I wouldn't know what's wrong with the Gloves of Power... I had to search through threads to see if the flavor text was forgotten to change. But then I checked that Bane is not triggered at all, so you must have the brand... However thx guys for enlighten me.

This Forum stability...

...is a great mess!

Agreed.

In full release they removed that part from the tooltip so it doesn't mention at all that the gloves do not work unless the player is branded, instead the lore description of the gloves subtly implies it. So weird considering every other Absolute item has some sort of obvious tip stating that the brand is required.

Is there any point to getting the brand, other than a few items?

The shield, the amulet, and the gloves?

You get a slight bonus from those three items. Is that all there is to the brand?

Seems like a big decision for something that basically disappears so early in the game.

Gloves of Power work fine on my Bard, and I'm definitely not branded.

For clarification; the 1d4 Bane effect of the gloves does not work without being branded by Priestess Gut, it says so in the lore description of the gloves.

The +1 Sleight Of Hand does because that's just a bonus stat.

I just Wacked Astarion upside the head twenty times to see, but apparantly, I'm not baning him, indeed.
I am looking to get that brand, though. I'm running a Barbie and with Reckless Attack, that Bane effect will become priceless.

The effect shows up in the character sheet of my character.

If its not working, then there is some kind of bug. Either a display bug or an implementation bug.

Naw, advantage is god tier... lets say you are using a rogue with proficiency to sleight of hand, and mastery, and a +4 dexterity modifier... so you are already running around with a natural +10 lockpicking rogue
you rolling 2 dice is insurmountably better than rolling just one, as breaking a lock with a value of say, 20 is already 50-50 moreover a critical failure goes from a 1/20 chance to 1/400 which means your critical fail change is almost entirely negated. any trap with a DC under 10 will ALWAYS succeed. and succeeding doesn't consume your tools in BG3
if you are trying for a roll over 20, you can buff your character and still have a very good success rate. for example, I found the lock to the seal of lysander... this was on my first playthrough where I went in blind without seeing any guides, DC on the lock is 30 and a 30 with a natural +10 is still a nat 20, but I added a blessing for 1d4 and another buff for a +2 to a skill of my choosing. so my buff was +13-16 which meant I still needed a fairly high roll of 14-17 minimum depending on the D4 roll... but because I had advantage, I got through the lock on the second try.

Advantage is a god-tier buff regardless in D&D, if you have advantage on attacks, or your opponent has disadvantage on attacks, it makes a huge difference in battle... you have probably noticed the dice being green and red, and either missing alot, or hitting just about every shot. this is the exact same principle, but being used for a different dice roll. Because BG3 is a D&D Dice game at the base of everything you should know that everything is based on your dice, even when you aren't shown the dice roll.

now, several people compared a second dice to a +5 and a +3... these people don't understand mathmatical variables... consider the second dice to be equivelent to 50% of the required DC if you need DC10., than a +5 is the equivelent of the second dice. but if you need a 20, then a second dice is equivelent to a +10 bonus when the DC exceeds what your own dice are capable of, however, it still gives you a 10% chance to succeed no matter how difficult, which is a x2 bonus compared to your 5% chance of success without advantage on a roll that exceeds the value of your dice and bonuses.

ADVANTAGE IS ALWAYS BEST (because honestly, you aren't going to be choosing between gaining advantage and a +5 bonus early game, and late game, everything will be wanting that +10 equivelent)