......... *sigh*

ok how can somone come up with THAT idea? But first lets remember where its roots.....

People where unhappy because sometime Rolls can be unlucky (wich is the very NATURE of dice), and as a result things worked out vastly different despite the expectation of the player.

Lets not talk about Dice Rolls in combat as Combat isnt about dice rolls but only about Heigt advantage metagame. So lets focus on the Rolls during adventuring (and thats where many have been save scuming).

Dear Larian..... you dissapointed many people.... not because of your Idea of "loaded dice" (wich is hilarious) but because this openly shows you have no grasp of the idea behind the complaints.
Coming up with "loaded Dice" also shows that you clearly have lost all Touch with comunity as i CANT REMEMBER A SINGLE THREAD where any fan requestet "loaded dice". You became ignorant and selfish and the panel showed that you are more concerned about having PR-Shows, Showering yourself in Glory, and recruitment than actualy making a Game for the Fans. Cant belive i am saying this because i own and loved not only DOS1 and Dos2 but also the earlier divinity titles.

And though we now know you dont read your own Forums i will still make a constructive Critic.

It is not the System to make rolls..... its the situations where you use your Rolling. For example:

A Ranger who walked Nature for many Years is EXPECTET to know a flower or a track in the dirt he sees or at very least have a good idea about it. IF you make take a Roll and then add his Bonus and he fails people think "What the fuck?".

If the same Ranger now is suddenly cast to avernus and comes upon Flora or Fauna he never seen before thats a good situation to make a Roll if he maybe has heard about it or someone in his past told him about.

Or lets take a wizard who discovers some Ancient runes on a Wall that are obviously connected to magical Knowledge. Maybe he isnt able to clearly make out whats the exact meaning but he should be able to at least have an Idea ("theses are Runes of Defence" or "Beware this has something to do with FIre"). But failing the Rol and then saying sorry i have no idea like any stupid Barbarian would say..... this isnt acceptable by a Wizard player. And he will reload.

So making rolls doesnt always have to lead to total failure or total success. Making DICE LOADED is problable the most irrational solution of all.


Another take on the Problem is to put the power into players Hand again. By having a Skill (for example: arcane knowledge) that the player can activly develop by putting points into it and therefore has direct control over how well his Character is profound in certain areas. But yeah i know thats 3.5 DnD and surely forbidden stuff. But i hope you get the idea why "Loaded Dice" is like a slap in the face of Fans.

And yes i am aware that there are some die hard Larian fans who will love the idea of "loaded Dice" as even if you would put a Pink elefant on the Head of their Characters they would applaud for your Creativity.

Loaded dice are fine, as long as there is an option to turn them off.

Larian probably does need to fine tune the failure modes so that they lead to more interesting results, AND so that they acknowledge skill on a missed roll. In other words, a player with Arcane knowledge who misses the roll will get a somewhat more informative answer than a player without who misses.

Adding skill ranks does nothing to solve the problem, because you will still have a chance to miss the roll if RNG works poorly for you that day.

I'm against the idea of loaded dice too, but they said it will be an on/off basis only for the people who want it.

I will probably never use the loaded dice, but if ppl want to use it, then they can turn it on. I agree with having the dice rolls for certain situations, or even if failed you would get "some" information out of the roll. The problem is trying to implement that into a computer game. In PnP, the DM decides what information is divulged. In a computer game, the game itself needs to determine that, and that's A LOT of variables to consider, and as such a great deal of time implementing those different variables based on the different characters, skills and the dice roll itself. If you fail by 1 or 2 points, then more information should be given then if you rolled a 1 or 2 on the dice. If a barb is trying to figure something out that is arcane and has no skill what so ever in the arcana skill, then failing the roll will probably lead to "Oh, petty letters". Again, there are a lot of variables involved, so not sure exactly how that could be implemented in a not so resource draining manner.

I don't really plan to use the loaded dice and I wouldn't really give a shit about the existence of these as an option in ITSELF.

What worries me is the the nagging suspicion that Larian may consider this "another problem solved once and for all" and not work on addressing the underlying issue.
Which is not about cheating to pass the roll, but having a game that keeps things interesting (and doesn't just cut you away from a portion of content) regardless of how certain rolls go.

I actually want to test out the loaded dice. It was implied it was set-up to reduce streaking not give the player better odds. We probably got loaded dice since Larian had been considering pseudo RNG since before Early Access. And, was ready by patch 4.

I want to find out if it actually does either:
A) Reduces streaks
B) Tilts the distribution in favor of the player

Humans are really really bad at undestanding randomisation. Weighting dice is the best way to stop people thinking you're weighting the dice.

Yeah, it's the same reason the DM gets to fudge rolls.

Tell me about it.
As a passionate XCOM 2 veteran I've been through years of reliably dominating the game at Legendary while listening to people bitch that the game is "unfair unwinnable RNG bullshit" even played at rookie.
Most of them are in denial when you tell them that the only cheating the game does is actually in their favor (especially on lower difficulty settings).

That was my first thought. However, I had a second thought which is that this *could* mean that they will be willing to implement mechanics closer to pnp now that the "rng problem" is mitigated.

100% agree.

I won't believe that there is an actual problem with the current (pre patch 4) RNG until I see a detailed statistical analysis of a huge number of rolls. Humans just can't do this "by eye".

Incidentally someone already did that in an old thread and posted the results. And guess what?
Yep, the average distribution of rolls matches the expected numbers.

Loaded dice is actually a very table-top-like thing to do. How many DMs "fix" the dice rolls so they don't have party members constantly dying? I'd bet a large amount. How many times do DMs allow their player to do something ridiculous without having to roll for it just because it was creative and fun?

D&D is suppose to be fun, not just an XCOM-esk tactical simulator. I want to role-play, not fight against the game's systems. that said, if everything is too easy, that eventually takes the thrill away.

love xcom - fan of the long war 2 mod? maybe that goes without saying, lol

Actually not particularly.
I have yet to give a fair chance to Long War of the Chosen, but I didn't like vanilla Long War 2 a single bit.

I'm way more fond of the official expansion War of the Chosen, on the other hand.

Haven't played since the initial EA release, but I don't recall much angst over the RNG in this game. Now, Pathfinder:Kingmaker on other hand? Driving me crazy. I would like to be able to export the combat log in a game like this so I can parse the data to comfortably put the matter to rest.

I too worry that they'll balance it so loaded dice is needed instead of building stuff like multiple rolls to get the best outcome so it's almost impossible or not making sure that failures have interesting twists instead of leading to total failure.

Tell that to Larian.
They seem to have made almost a point of honor about "fixing" shit no one complained about while ignoring the issues are driving the community on the verge of madness.

I get the impression if a barrel is not exploding or you aren’t doing critical levels of damage every turn, Larian thinks it’s boring.

I will have to remember that the next time I am in Vegas.

I was saying from personal experience. I am interested to see what I think on my next play through - which I was hoping would be after this patch, but it doesn't look like there has been enough substantial development to make it worth it. It doesn't feel like we're "testing" anything.

I have to say, I am not a fan of the loaded dice. But I get why they did it. But at the same time, I do concur with the previous poster that I hope that the loaded dice does not act as a crutch to stop fine tuning the base mechanics of the die.

Vegas does use that system - they are allowed to change the odds for randomized games, e.g., slots, based on recent high wins (lowers odds) or continual losses (raises odds).

For myself, loaded dice will always be off because it addresses the wrong underlying problem.

Yeah, I think the loaded dice are probably a good addition to have, but I personally would have expected such things to come in later in the process when they were closer to "finished" with difficulty balancing.

this topic made me think about the role of DMs and how a game like Rimworld uses these AI personalities that generate events in the gameworld. It'd be interesting to see BG3 with different AI GMs that treated the players differently. Maybe "Robbie Rotten" could be the ruthless AI that gave no loaded dice at all while "Bob the nice" would be more forgiving, giving the player more friendly rolls. Could be a fun way to implement an option like loaded dice.

The Casinos hire people who DO understand RNG though, so don't get too ambitious.

The thing is. We are playing an adventurer. We are aspiring Conans, Gandalfs or Galadriëls. Aragorn 's Andúril misses the orc 3 times in a row while being shot at with poisoned arrows and fire, but fortunately Iluvatar can reload the saved game and retry.
You can have a fine distribution after 100 rolls. Hooray, the RNG is good. Only, no combat lasts that long. So, we don't want to play mindles sword swingers who randomly hit opponents and reload when the dice go wrong. We want to be a hero, who can fail, of course. But not because of a streak of bad dice rolls. A DM will prevent this from happening.
And there are quite a lot of these streaks , too many, from my experience with the game. So, a RNG that performs OK over large samples is not necessarily OK for a game like this. (my opinion)

!!! I didn't know LWotC was a thing. I will need it to give it a go at some point. But yeah, I didn't get into LW2 nearly as much as LW1 too much focus on stealth.

mhmm - i get that, i probly prefer lw1 over lw2 myself as well as i do think lw2 suffers from some inbalance/snowballing features, but that could also be related to my mod list maybe lol.

i actually havent tried vanilla war of the chosen yet, but will have to check it out before collecting a mod list for a long war run - dont really have any interest in try out phoenix point tho, the epic store exclusive was kinda a turnoff.

If the die rolls are truly random then there will be streaks. A set of die rolls that have no streaks is simply not random. Your intuition on this matter is fairly common, but it is really what Rack meant above when he/she stated that Humans are really bad at understanding randomisation (or at least part of what they meant).

If you don't want streaks then you don't want random rolls.

Exactly, that was indeed what I meant to say. "Blind" randomness is not a good system to decide combat in heroic fantasy role playing environments. The system came from wargames where line infantry and cannon face eachother and get to do some amount of damage, which can be simulated by a die roll. For one-on-one combat, as an episode in a long term campaign, I'd like the combat to be more in line with a fantasy novel.

On the table top, the DM can't fudge the dice rolled in public, but if the party really has bad luck and is on the verge to be wiped out in a very non-heroic way, he/she may figure out some ways to intervene on the opponent's side. (Morale breaking, another monster entering the scene, lots of movie cliché's are available) OK, maybe it's not the general view of RPG gamers, but my concern is getting immersed in a heroic story.
I can't seem to express very well what I mean exactly, but inedeed, we agree that I don't think that pure , unmitigated randomness does a favour to fantasy RPG"s and that it is not the best mechanism to use. I will certainly try out the loaded dice patch.

Apart from "the streaks" I feel that there are still some other wacky things going on with hit resolution. The percentages shown just don' look very accurate. I already posted somewhere that L4 Lae'zel ususally has between 80-88% hit chance with the sword of Tyr on an average opponent, but misses perhaps once in two. My observation is that my raven familiar has a higher hitrate than Lae'zel.
Shadowheart's guiding bolt usually comes around 65% but hits very rarely.
My ranger has a very good bowshot and usually comes out around or just over 90%. From this level on, the percentage seems to match well.

@Ido58

I think this is why Larian has expressed a dislike of dice rolls to hit, and did not use them in DoS 2. The problem is that rolling dice is central to Dungeons and Dragons. If you remove the D20 you are basically creating an entirely different game.

You may be able to construct a really good argument that dice are bad for games, but I do not think that you can construct an argument that a diceless video game can be faithful to 5E D&D (or to be honest, any edition of D&D).

I disagree that dice rolls are what make D&D, D&D. Besides, there are different options other than you fail to hit/you hit. A roll of 1 could mean you graze the enemy and do 20% damage, while a natural 20 could remain a critical hit. The percentages could go up or down depending on the difficulty setting. Many games that are inspired from D&D give extra stats/chances to hit while keeping a very D&D feel. Of course it would be wise to have a "core rules" setting, where the dice are as brutal as real dice can be.

GMs already ignore certain dice rolls so would you say that they're not really playing D&D? I don't think so.

I think the problem is what constitutes "Faithful", and how important that is. From what I've seen, Larian has no intention of being faithful in the sense you're talking about. That ship has long since sailed.

I don't understand the OP but yet again , I don"t understand most posts I don't care a bit about D&D , as an old gamemaster , I played maybe a couple of games in thirty years and consider it a sub-par game as best with only the respect due to old games that paved the way for the real games to come. More on topic , loaded dice is an option , I don't see how the community is even allowed to complain unless they have zero self-respect. As an option is what it is , an option. I know my wife does not enjoy a game where three rolls in a row ends up unlucky and it ruins the game for her , loaded dice is therefore fine for this type of players . Sorry I know I sounds angry but this type of post that talks for "the community" just gets me on my nerve , talk about yourself but don't take everyone hostage , thanks !

The inclusion of loaded dice says "we have no idea how to balance our shoddy RNG system, but it's too ingrained into all of the work that we've already done, so we're going to give you a solution to correct our problem and we're going to market it with some subtext to imply that it's cheating or taking the easy way out to save face."

I can see that for the main game. But I'm really hoping for the same type of modding tools that were released for DoS2. That's where you'll see a difference. When people can use the modding tools to create their own adventures and campaigns. If those tools do get released I see this game having the same longevity that NWN and NWN 2 has had.

The challenge is here that their random number generator (RNG) seems to be off. I cannot confirm the validity of those claims since I have not made the effort to acutally track the rolled numbers. I also have not found an analysis (google) of BG3's RNG.
If you use real world dice you can check the normal distibution for a D6 (or D4 ord D20) yourself easily if you have the time and want to spent the effort. And rolling your own dice probably make you more accepant to the fact that you just had a string of badly rolled dice.

BG1/2 demonstrated that its certainly possible to make a compelling D&D computer game where every roll is basically hidden from view and the game just winks at you like "trust me."

As long as the gameplay shows the average player exploding enemies into puddles of goo often enough to be satisfying, I'm probably going to let it slide in that sort of game. I'm sure there were plenty of reloads to write scrolls or get max hp in BG before those were added as game settings options, were you could curse your luck. But otherwise, I wasn't counting for clustered 1s, because it just wasn't the defining feature of the gameplay. If a critical miss can be followed by a vorpal pwning with like a 2 second delay, you tend to just brush it off. Take that same thing, slow it down turn-by-turn and put big flashy dice rolling animations on the screen for every other thing, and it definitely then becomes a defining feature.

If they're going to lean into dice as the main thing, they should make it ironclad, so there's no question about running it under the "core rules" mode. They can do whatever in they want in "please make this less painful" game settings, but first do the rng due diligence so its air tight for people who don't want skynet pulling punches.

Ps. Incedental, but I think I might be kind of an oddball here for totally enjoying D&D on a computer, but also not really being the biggest fan of Role Play if its detached from gameplay. I like it to be a game, first and foremost, and so I appreciate play-acting elements and that kind of creativity more as a flourish. But I'm not a huge theater person, so that's kind of on the DM or the gaming group I guess, whether its fun times for me on a nuts a bolts level. I need consistent rules and systems I can parse and limits to what we can do on a gamey level in order to keep it engaging for me. The dice can serve that function for people like me on the table top, but there are other ways to approach it as well if the medium is a videogame. I was pretty satisfied with BG1/2 as a D&D story product and I can't recall ever once rolling dice in that game after character creation. They just didn't highlight it as the thing. But this game doesn't seem to be making fidelity to the earlier BG games a priority, instead 5e and the table top turn based experience is what they promoted, so pretty understandable that we see the dice all the time in that case, or gripes if it departs from the TT expectations overmuch. I just don't know that it makes for particularly great BG game, since its a very different sort of experience. For whatever that's worth

I may have just rambled around my main point without actually making it, so one more quick crack here lol.

I think when I am totally engrossed by the story or the performances its somewhat easier to set aside the mechanical considerations or eschew stuff like 'roll/check/roll again' in the service of a hightened entertainment factor, but its only when the story/performance aspect gets strained (as tends to happen when say replaying the same thing twice) that I cling even harder to the mechanical stuff and the systems in place. That's when you really need the dice/rng.

Since D&D is this weird marriage between playacting and wargaming, at least when the former starts to fall apart the latter can step in to keep it going at least on the level of tactics and crawling.

I can recall a few conversations with table top players who kind of derided Baldur's Gate or any crpg really as an inauthentic D&D experience. Especially when NWN came out and there was a serious attempt to find a bridge between the crpg and the table top. Like "Baldur's Gate, isn't that just a game about fireballs though?" with a snear. But it always struck me, because that game was fun enough that even after beating it and hearing the story 100 times, it still totally delivered on the mechanical side. Meaning it managed to be still be a fun game to actually play, even if the DM was passed out drunk or having an aneurysm tick/dimensia episode, endlessly repeating themselves on the story set up. It just worked on that level of 'ok if everyones checking out, I'm just going deep dive on stats and tactical builds or equipment minutia.' But I really can't remember ever saying to myself, 'these dice are totally trash! Why didn't that spell land? Is it the rng? Maybe it's the rng? It must be the dice.' Like that just never happened, cause it didn't have a chance to. They filled it out in other ways from the RTS type angle, which on the TT would come down to either imaginative story telling or just rolling dice. Emulating the table top or the cast die is an ideal to aspire to, but there are other ideals too, and if I'm being honest it was the art books and the miniatures and finally the computer games that brought me into D&D more than the actual TT and dice game materials. The original BG saga brought a lot of people on board that way too. I don't know that D&D is my really my favorite dice game hehe. I also struggle with how I feel about most my other favorite dice games when they are translated onto the computer. Like I think there must be an elegant way to do it, but I haven't really seen that done yet. At least in D&D the roll flow is better and we have the novelty of the many sided die. D6 dice games like Axis and Allies are hitting on whole'nother level of computer dice pain. At least the rng gripes couldn't get that bad here, even if that really was the whole game.

I feel like there's some sort of cautionary tale in there. But I'm probably rambling around it again. I'll plead insomnia every time