Swen once said that we shouldn't save scum if we fail a skill check, we should live with the consequences. This notion comes from a TTRPG where you never "FAIL" a skill check, you just get a different outcome. That's completely not the case in BG3! Rolling not high enough is perceived as a fail for several reasons(i list them below), and who wants to lose, right?

Why BG3 actually encourages you to save scum and re-roll:

1. You see the diificulty class of a check. So if you roll lower, it automatically makes you think that it is a fail and you need to fix that. It can be easily changed, just make an option to hide the difficulty classes of skill checks
2. Reason that will probably stay - every check in the game has only two clearly perceivable outcomes - success or fail. For example, remember the dialogue where you can talk to the bandit who is behind a closed door and you persuade him to open it? Let's assume you pick the [performance] check so you try to impersonate his chief(or a friend of his, i don't really remember). So you roll and there are two possible variants - you fool the bandit, he believes you and opens the door(success) and you fail your performance, he understands that you try to fool him(fail). And of course you want to re-roll because failing a skill check leaves you with nothing, you didn't achieve what you initially wanted and that's all

How TTRPG(with a good DM) handles low rolls:

1. You can get completely unexpected outcome which can be silly/funny or can lead to a plot twist even
2. Low roll doesn't make you feel that you failed, it rather adds new circumstances to deal with
3. The result is not boolean(fail/success) - if you roll much higher than DC, you get this, if you roll much lower, you get this, if you rolled nat 20 you get something else and etc.

I understand that they won't rework skill checks, the 1.0 is near, so please at least add an option to hide DCs of skill checks

I mean, getting into a combat encounter, instead of resolving the situation peacefully is a different outcome, and not necessarily a bad one from gameplay perspective.

Come recent RPG tried to make failing "fun", and while I mostly didn't feel a need to save-scum in BG3 or Disco Elysium, yeah, failing still feels like failing.

I do think BG3 does a decent job with failing skillchecks - generally quests can be progressed in multiple ways, so failing something doesn't create a blockade (cough Disco Shiver check cough). You definitely don't get outcome you want if you fail a check, but that's good, no? What you suggest feels like it would make checks irrelevant - player decides what their character will do, rather than their build. There also could be something like what Witcher's did with choices - that consequences of our failed checks might not be immediately apparent. So using your example, you fail to impersonate a chief, and bandit isn't fooled but instead he let's you through and sets up trap at you later down the story line - you don't really change the system that way, but "encourage" players to live with their choices through sheer time necessary to pick a choice and see it through. With that design it also could be beneficial not to make it clear if you did or didn't fail the check so the player is left guessing at all times. I would play that game.

I am also not sure if rolling flat d20 is a good system for a computer game but it is another subject and another discussion - I personally prefer Obsidian's flat skill requirements that eliminate RNG entirely, and Josh Sawyer criticism of d20 roll make a lot sense to me. Personally, I found Disco Elysium's bell curve RNG much less frustrating.

Sounds like a perfect feature to have for the Core difficulty and/or above. As well as hide approve, with approve displayed, I just automatically turn into everyone's simp

I actually think tying it to difficulty is the exact wrong approach if Larian's goal is to get people to embrace failing as a viable, fun option. Making it depend on difficulty send the wrong message.

This sounds to me like yet another problem that is just in our heads ...

- There have to be risk of failure ... otherwise there is no reason to roll ...
- Every time you will roll, you will know if you suceeded, or failed ... no matter if you will see the number you need to overthrow or not ...

The only way this could work would be if you would hide litteraly everything ...
If you would just pick your dialogue (or action) choice ... and the game would roll everything in the background hidden from you ... and continue acordingly straight forward.
Except nope. :-/
Besides other (quite big) problems i realized as i wrote this ... even if you would hide everything ... you dont know your rolls, you dont know your difficiulty, you dont know if you suceeded or failed ... you figure that out litteraly second after that bloodthirsty Ogre will try to bite your head out, instead of accept your peace offering.

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If you cant handle that ...
I sugest you to set autosaving on longest possible period, set it to minimum possible number of autosaves, and dont use quick save ever ... that should give you some motivation to not reload.

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Also ...
Even tho argument about reloading and bad feeling when loosing seems false to me ... i think this idea have some potential!

Therefore i would suggest adding option to "hide difficiulty class" into game-difficiulty settings!

Bcs, feel free to disagree with me, but knowing whenever you should spend your resources, or save them for combat that can come right after ... or not knowing this and have to guess if that spellslot for advantage would be necessary or basicaly wasted ...
Well, that would certainly affect difficiulty, especialy at lower levels!

Rag.

It is a game. It is just pixels on the screens - all of the game is in our heads. It is all about psychology. All a game design can do, is make players think and interact with a game in a certan way. If a design leads to undesired player behaviour, than that design is faulty, not the player. It will likely be impossible to get desired behaviour out of every player, but randomised skill checks leading to savescumming has been a common problem in cRPG, to the point that some studios prefer to avoid RNG all together.

A suggestion to hide game feedback is interesting, but I question if it would actually solve anything - so far success.failure states in BG3 have been very binary and would be obvious even without additional feedback. On a dowside I think it would reduce the excitment of rolling the dice, making the whole process rather tedius. What's the point of spinning the dice, if there isn't a number in your mind that you are hoping to roll?

The idea of hiding DCs for skill checks did get me thinking, but on reflection I’m not sure it would stop me reloading if I were tempted to, just make it more frustrating as I wouldn’t know how close I was getting. But clearly mileage on this will vary and I can see it might feel less like failure if you just roll and something happens without it being clear whether your roll beat the DC. If DCs were hidden I wouldn’t object, and if it were an option toggle then I do think I’d give it a try.

I will say that I think BG3 has mainly cured me of save scumming on failed dice throws and I’m less tempted to reload if things don’t go my way than I’ve been with any game previously. And I do think part of it is that such a production is made of the dice roll so somehow if feels more like cheating to reload if I fail. Admittedly a fair amount is also that I already know what happens if I pass the roll, given I’ve played EA through a number of times. But I don’t believe I’ll lapse once the full release comes out as I find accepting the dice results so much more fulfilling and engaging. Yes, sometimes a series of poor rolls can leave few options to progress and none of them are what my character would have wanted, but that now actually feels to me like an interesting story for my character as opposed to a failure. And I’ve never had to actually reload due to bad rolls given Larian seem to have done a good job of making sure there are such a variety of ways to accomplish most tasks.

I certainly wouldn’t object to additional interesting options being implemented for failed rolls, or indeed critical successes (or critical failures, though I know that’s a controversial one). That would be great. But actually I’m no longer finding the urge to reload a problem with my own game and have learned to embrace the drama and unexpected challenge that the D20 introduces.

I don't think it would be a good idea for a default.

Reasoning: newbies. They'll have no idea they failed throws and will be unable to tell how hard checks generally are. This flows into follow up issues, such as lack of familiarity with tools to improve outcome (buffs), which attributes help with which checks, etc.

However, I'm not the first person to find the unskipable dice animation annoying. A lot of people would surely like this feature just to skip it!

If the goal is to avoid save-scumming and reloading to get only successful rolls, then it is not sufficient to only hide the DC. You need to hide the DC, and ALSO make it so that succeeding the roll can be the "bad" option, while failing the roll can be the "good" option, say, 15-25% of the time. Then you are motivated to accept whatever result you get if playing blind, as you do not know when rolling if winning or losing is what you want. Real-life DMs take this into account.

That is smart

I have had to save scum some situations to be able to roleplay a character correctly. For example, I wanted the Tiefling kid to die by Kagha’s snake for role playing reasons to steal the idol and give it to Mol without the “evil” intentions for my rogue. You know how hard it is to fail in that situation now WITHOUT looking like an evil bastard? 😂. Or have I just been “lucky”? With a DM my intentions could have been evoked with a NAT 20 or a Nat 1. It’s just the understandable limitations of crpgs. Other than that, I will generally keep my wins and losses.

Huh? What's a difference if the success and failure will be switched around? You rolled, you get bad outcome you try again. I don't think it is relevant if you got bad result because you succeeded, or you got bad result because you failed.

The problem at the heart is very simple - player's get one chance to attempt to succeed at something, and if they don't they have easy (but unenjoyable) way to remedy it. Player's in majority of cases are invested in succeeding as otherwise they would be unlikely to pick that option to begin with. Even if there is an elaborate (and enjoyable) option B for when a player fails, player is still unlikely to be satisfying because that's not what they opted to do.

Set back or failure can lead in a long run to a more enjoyable experience, but initial feedback will always be one of disappointment as simply the player didn't get what they wanted to get when they pressed the button. I don't think they are many options, beyond:
1) devs trusting players to choose the experience that will be most fun for the players (reload or stick to the choices)
2) devs deciding that sticking with choices is a superior experience and enforce the choice - either by making it a flat, unmovable check or saving RNG seed like in FiraxCOM1 and I think Solasta - where after reload the roll is still the same.

I'm not making a qualitative suggestion here. I'm trying to trick the player into thinking that failure isn't always "failure" and success isn't always "success," so reloading the save is pointless because the quality of the end result is not guaranteed by the quality of the roll.

They'd know based on the outcome, unless you hid the fact that a roll was taking place at all. I'm all for hiding rolls from the player as much as possible, especially when you're able to in a computer game, but the build up to and release of a skill check is part of the fun for a lot of people.

Are you trying to tell me that none of it is real?
The world isnt under brain invading alien invasion?

Yeah right, as if i would fall to such fallacy...
Next time you will telling me that im not actually a Gnome throwing fireballs. xD

Seriously tho ...
Maybe this *shocking reveal* should be told to OP aswell?

I believe we both know by now, that i will never agree with this ...

Maybe if a design leads to undesired player behaviour for vast majority of players ... for wich we dont have data to know, luckily Larian do ...
But as long as you use singular, it IS players fault.

My point exactly ...

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As far as i know, you can skip it ... by clicking your mouse.
If you were not able to, it sounds like a bug to me.

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No, you are not ...
Savescummers gonna savescuming, it really is that easy.

Doesnt really matter what are you calling good, or bad, or sucess, or failure ... those numbers we see only help people call it proper name, but they are not the vilains in this story, they are victims.

The "problem", for lack of better therm, is that person who dislike whatever (and it doesnt really matter what, as avahZ Darkwood showed us) is happening in his game, have option to re-load and get different outcome.

And if you allready feel this urge ... you will feel it no matter if you fail with 1, or fail with 13 on difficiulty 14, or fail without knowing what number you throwed or/and what number you needed, or actually suceed but still didnt like the outcome ... you dont like what *IS* happening > you reload.

There is no way to stop this behaviour, except:
- Removing option to reload entirely. (as it was done in Vampyr ... personaly, i hated it)
- Or encouraging players with interesting situations in both cases, wich is exactly what Larian do. But that will never work on everyone.
- Or make saves so far from each other, so replaying it all would be too anoying for those players, so they rather accept the outome they dont like. (as it was done in early versions of BG-3 EA ... there certainly was lot of hate for that)
- OR ... and that is the worse possible way ... make all outcomes effectively the same (differs with just a little flavor), so it dont really matter in the end what choice you pick, or what do you roll. (as it was done in Dragon Age ... personaly, i hated it)
I really doubt there is any other way.

I say, embrace free will, let anyone to ruin their game just the way they want to ...
Its just like with cheats, no point in trying to develop some supereffective way for players to completely avoid them in single player game ... distribue them freely to players, dont hide them ... people will get their fun and quite soon find out that the game is a lot better without them. And thats when they grow.

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Im sory, what? O_o

It seems you and i have different deffinition of "Roleplaying" pal, but still ... can you elaborate a little futher?
How exactly can "wanting girl to die, so i can steal idol and give it to Mol" have roleplaying reasons? O_o

I think no measure whatever would hinder people from savescumming. So I would say, leave it as it is, to spare ressources. But make the dice animation skippable, it's annoyingly slow. If there is a way to skip, I just did not discover it yet.

Otherwise it is a training effect. The game should tell you that also with a "fail" you get an interesting and successful story. Of course most of the players would not read/listen. In my case, I cannot remember that I reloaded even once when I did not "succeed" in dialogs. I reloaded on several occasions when I "succeeded", because I wanted to fail (to get a fight). There are only very very few checks in the EA in which I wanted to succeed 100% of time. I cannot remember a dialog, just checks for chests or "doors". And usually the reroll possibility from Inspiration is enough. The only situation where I would reload till success is the lever which allows you to skip the tedious moon puzzle (I don't like puzzles).

To the example in the OP's post, it's not a big problem if you fail the check at the door of the ruins. You get trapped but the following fight against the alerted bandits is not more difficult than if you succeeded in the dialog, I find it even easier to a certain extent. The more the player has such experiences, the more he/she may be inclined to accept dice rolls.

You are not disagreeing with me, you are disagreeing with pretty much every GDC talk I have ever watched. I only repeat what I have heard.

And I should know better that you will take one sentence out of context to make an empty straw-man argument. Of course, the problem arises only if it is detrimental to large enough amount of players. That is what I have written.

Neither of us have data about how many players use quick load so that’s not data we can discuss. Hopefully Larian is getting this stuff through telemetry. OP gave a specific feedback about a mechanic, and your response is being condescending because it doesn’t affect you. Fine, it also doesn’t affect me, but it also won’t affect either of us if one would find a way to improve the system.

At the very least it is interesting to discuss potential solutions.

And whatever you believe personally, it is not a non issue as otherwise cRPG wouldn’t look so fervently to find the solution to this problem. Creating success/failure scenarios and rewards for specific builds is meaningless if your playerbase will just brute force the system. And they might have more unified and uninteresting experience as the result.

I think it's a really interesting idea to hide the DC, but show the roll. On almost any encounter you can almost guarantee that if you roll a natural 1 you failed and a natural 20 you succeeded.
I do think though that there would by many times you would be left wondering. I'm thinking of an encounter where you can help some travelers avoid certain death, and afterwards speak with them. There would be a persuasion or deception check about helping them deliver their goods. The possible results could be:

Success = They accept your help, load you up with a locked chest full of their valuable goods, and offer a reward when the goods are delivered intact.
OR They politely deny your help saying they have help on the way already.

Failure = They politely deny your help saying they have help on the way already
OR They accept your help, load you up with a locked chest full of junk, an offer a reward when the goods are delivered intact. However, on the way to deliver the goods, you get ambushed by a group of bandits that steal all of your gear and leave you on the side of the road unconscious if they win combat. (rather than just outright killing you)

There would be almost no way of knowing if you failed or succeeded if any of those 3 were the outcome. I mean if you rolled LOW you could assume failure and HIGH could assume success, but if failure or success might mean them politely denying your offer, how could you know what that means?


So I'm genuinely curious, why would you attempt something that you wanted to fail? I can't remember every encounter, but it seems like at least almost all of the give you the option to "Leave" or if you wanted to fight, there's an option to give a rude response at least. Even if there isn't that type of option to get out of dialog, if you want to fail a check so you can fight someone, why not just attack them afterward?

I think this is where I get annoyed/confused at the way the RP is being taken out of RPGs, and instead turning them into a game where there is a specific narrative you want to follow to get to a specific ending.
I personally feel like having outcome control taken away is one of the best things art like RPGs can do for us. Can you imagine what it would be like if we had no great novels but only "choose your own adventure" books where you could cheat to get the ending you think you wanted? Yuck!

I think this is interesting and is what took me some time to come around to as a non-TT player, despite having played a number of cRPGs in the past. For example, I’m one of those people who has a canon Shepard and replays her story every year or so (in the way I also reread favourite books), and I’d have found it really frustrating in Mass Effect not to be able re-experience her story because the game kept chucking random checks in. I guess I did see it as a bit of a choose your own adventure, in which I felt I’d created a story I really liked and wanted to be able to reliably recreate it.

That’s the mindset I came into BG3 with, so it was a bit of a culture shock to feel that all I could really control was my character and that same character could end up having very different stories depending on the luck of the dice. But then I decided to just roll with it (groan!) and now I’m a convert, in a way that no other cRPG has made me even those that do use RNGs. To the extent that I now actually would love the opportunity to replay the Mass Effect trilogy with my canon Shepard and have things go randomly wrong and have to somehow deal with it!

The problem I see here is that a player wouldn't know that the polite decline could be an option in either case. They'd see that they rolled low and got turned down, then reload until they got a high roll where their offer was accepted. That approach only works with meta knowledge. Also, just in general I feel like it's kind of cheating for succeeding a check to lead to a bad outcome. As least for a check to lead to a bad immediate outcome. I feel like



I think you have the wrong idea about what Gaela is doing here. I see what he's doing as another extension of role-playing. At this point he's very likely done EA content to death story wise. So now he's using the capacity to choose in the game to make HIS OWN personal story that he can see play out uniquely, based on what he what he wants to see. If he's already at a point where he knows the possible outcomes, then the natural next step is leveraging that knowledge to make unique stories. I know that for games like Pillars of Eternity or Pathfinder, after my first or second time through, I start planning out my characters and their arcs so I can see them run through and experience all the little variations and such. That's usually when I get my favorite playthroughs. And where most games only give you one story, RPGs give you room to create a whole bunch of stories.

Is there any reason to mention this that im missing? :-/
Bcs im sory, i dont see any. It dont afect my point at all.

Yeah you should know better ... concidering how long we are talking to each other around here, how often, and how many times i repeated it ... i would hope you could at least by now remembered that when i quote single sentence its not to fabricate arguments, but to present what i react to as close as possible ...
Sigh ... well, maybe in another two years.

And ... is there any sign that it would be this case?
Like ... i dunno, at least, for example, majority of responces in this topic having same problem?

Since i didnt get that inpression. :-/

Well even if we would, those data wouldnt be sufficient.

You also have to take under concideration why they use quick load!
There is many people who are loading just to observe all options, we are testing after all ... many people are reloading just to get desired outcome for their youtube videos ... some people reload just so they can fail really supereasy check, just to find out what would happen ... and as we were told abowe, there are even people who are trying to fail on purpose for some weird reasons.

And even more importantly, we would need to know how many of those players is even bothered by the fact they are reloading.
I mean ... i freely admit that i savescum in Skyrim as madman, when im skilling pickpocketing ... and when i say madman, imagince kadency of reloading sometimes even every 5-7 seconds.
But i dont give a shit. > Therefore my savescuming in such measuring wouldnt be relevant.

Indeed ... and hopefully Larian also conciders context of those numbers.

I beg your pardon?!
First of all, i just need to say this ... again, you should know better, than asuming other people motivations, clearly this isnt your strong side. -_-

I have read OP suggestion, took it under concideration, draw conclusions from what would happen ...
And come to decision that even if his suggestion would be implemented as he asked, it wouldnt change the situation he described at all.

I even took another step after and suggested other use of his request so he CAN actually have what he want, but i can serve actual purpose ... wich as it seems, was completely ignored by everyone else.

What is so "condescending" about that?
If anything, its you who are acting acording to its definition (at least when translated) towards me ... but i gues i should thank you for that, sometimes i forget that there still are people unable to see beyond some stupid sticker they put on my name. -_-
So thank you for reminding ...

So how about ... do?


Just an idea ...
Maybe not as apealing as dissecting what I did again ... but at least in accordance with the forum rules. -_-

They did it to themselves, they have only themselves to blame ...
Anyone who is blaming the system is just unable to admit he screwed up.

I dont care what you say, i dont care what your GDC say, nor about how many of them there is or what that shortcut even mean ...
This is my opinion and i stand by that.

Question:
Where did those bandits came from? Is their existence conditioned by failing dialogue roll in completely different situation?
So ... it means Larian would need to prepare and script combat scenario that nobody who dont fail there will never see? O_o

Another question:
How exactly should game decide wich of those two outcomes for each scenario (fail/succes) should be used?

Another one:
Im sory but i have to ask ... what would be the point of rolling anyway?

I mean, i see that there is difference in your example ... but when its not clear if i even suceeded or failed, there is no way to find out, and all outcomes seems to be same at first sight ...
Why should i even care about what, why, or how i roll? :-/

And finaly most important question:
Since the argument was savescuming ... does it somehow prevent it?
(Just for the record i still think it cant and shouldnt be prevented, but i try to stick to the topic.)

I mean what is holding me back to open that chest, find out its full of junk and reload anyway?

Another question:
Wouldnt that also remove good feeling of succes?

I mean ... if i see that i will need to roll 18+ ... and i do ... there is kinda "yes!" feeling ...
Is it here aswell? Since i dont really i know if i suceeded? O_o
I cant help bug feel like it wouldnt be.

I dont really want to repond for geala here ...

But something simmilar happened to me aswell ... in my case it was player vs. character conflict of interest.
As i played my Githyanki, i wanted their armor ... so i had to kill them ... but my Gith would never, so i decided to be completely honest with them, just as naive Lae'zel ...
But if my Gith wouldnt be as naive as Lae'zel ... i would probably aswell pick persuation and pray to fail.

Try Vampyr ...
Either you get exactly what you wanted, or you find out you were wrong.

I belong to that second group.

I totally get this, I just like to see what story my character creates if things are handled a bit differently on a subsequent playthrough.


I've never played ME, but I've always thought I might like it. Only so much time!

I shall continue trying to ignore thee, though after two years I don't have much hope either.

You are just a very curious being. I mean why are you on the forum opposing suggested changes and yet fundamentaly believe that game design doesn't matter. If a change is made, like skill checks get modified or push get nerfed why do you care? If you don't enjoy the new system, it is just in your head afterall, and it is your fault for not enjoying the game. Afterall to quote you:

I was worried I maybe didn't explain my thoughts the best. I didn't mean that actually in the game the polite decline could be either a success or failure, I meant that when you got a polite decline, since it's pretty neutral, you wouldn't actually know. From MY perspective, the party can accept that response, or decide to attack, kill and loot the polite deniers. But I don't personally see reloading a save as an option.

I think if the game had many different dialogs like this, save scumming would be a less attractive option for the exact reason you mentioned. If the result of a dialog with skill check isn't definitively good or bad, then hopefully the player(s) will choose to continue on with the results as-is, rather than reloading and rerolling until they get a different result, which just might not be a better one!




That does make more sense now. I suppose I was thinking more so for first time play throughs. Like, "I guess I'll go ahead and look like the good guy by and try to persuade her not to do the thing, and hope that I fail persuasion, so she does the thing and attacks me, then I can kill her like I really wanted to" as opposed to just doing the thing you actually wanted to do, which was kill her, even though there might not be a way to do that and still look like the "good guy".

A reminder to anyone who needs it that negative comments about people’s attitudes or behaviour are not okay.

And if anyone has any problems with anything posted, they can PM me or report a post, which is to be preferred to getting into a row here.

Hell yes! I think the beauty of RPGs is that different things can happen and you just might not get to experience the whole thing, at least not in one play through.

This is where I didn't put my thoughts into text very well. It's not that the game is deciding, there might still only be 2 outcomes, but if many times during the game the outcomes seem like in a gray area, YOU don't know if it was a success or failure. But you're apt to find out later ;-)

The easiest answer for this is because it's D&D, the game we came here to play.
Would you ask your DM "what's the point of rolling if I don't know if I passed or failed?" But, maybe you would ask that. I wouldn't because the DM is weaving the story for us and I'm trusting them to give me an entertaining experience.



Nope, it wouldn't prevent it, but I feel like it might discourage it if the result of the effort of savescumming might not become apparent until hours later, and it might turn out you would have preferred the original option!
Imagine you decided to reload and reroll until you finally convinced them to give you the locked chest to deliver rather than politely denying your request. Then you found out that the lock can't be picked and maybe hours later in the game you get ambushed and it's a bad experience all around. Then you find out you denying your offer was them deciding they liked you and didn't want you to get ambushed because their cronies were waiting to ambush anyone coming along the road with the "chest of goodies"


Maybe yes, maybe no, different strokes, different folks...

I see ...
Well, i cant really say i agree ... but i get what you mean.

So ...
Either box of Junk, or box of Treasures ...
Or box of Junk, or denial ...
Or denial, or box of Treasures ...
Yes?
No denial, or denial situation.

That confused me a little.

I mean, yeah ... pushing consequences futher could work.
Not really sure if its possible any time tho, actually i am quite sure it isnt.
When you are freeing Lae'zel, persuating Gibblebog, or Nettie, or trying to save Arabella ... you allways have to get results imediately.

Still interesting idea!
The more content player stuck in between save and consequence, the less they will be motivated to reload.

*> Now when i think about this, maybe adding autosave after finishing roll would help aswell ... make reloading a bit more tedious.

Well, first of all, you have no choice than go on (or finish entirely) in DnD with DM ...
So that is entirely different situation that can hardly be compared.

But yeah, i gues i would question my DM if there would be no way for me to say if i pased or failed.
If i may use your example ... if i would try to [PERSUATE] those people to accept my help, and lets say i would roll 20 (or in general big, lets say 15+, number) and they would tell me "no thank you help is on their way, we are good" ... i would question what was the point of that roll, since im quite sure i passed and yet they dont really seem persuated to let me help them.

Thats what i thought.
+1

Wich i presume i would find out in either different playtrough, or after reloading ... by them just telling me?
(I mean, if they really like me, it wouldnt make sense to keep that information secret, right?)

If so ... then i would love it.

I see ...

No, still not getting my point across.
There's still only two possible outcomes, success or failure. You just might not be able to tell for sure if you succeeded or not because the results were ambiguous.



Because that polite denial could have been the success when the failure was them being a lot tougher than you and kicking your ass just for asking.


It would make sense if they were, for instance, organized thieves and happened to like you but weren't about to tell you their ambush secrets...

Just my thoughts and ideas in any case.

Not saying this is right or wrong, and as I’ve said here I’m not a TT player so am in no position to judge, but after Matt Mercer was announced as Minsc in BG3 I watched some of the Critical Role vids and was interested that he rarely tells his table whether they’ve succeeded or failed, just tells them what happens after they give him their rolls. Sometimes it’s obvious, but plenty of other times it wasn’t clear whether a better (or worse) outcome might have been available and I’ll admit I did like his approach. I’m sure others who are far more familiar with other DMs or are DMs themselves will have their own, better-informed, views on what works best though.

Wow i didn't think my topic would blow up like this, but i'm glad it did, discussion is a great thing. However, my general message wasn't entirely about savescumming, rather that BG3 has very binary approach to skill checks with only two states - success|failure. In TTRPG you never know for sure what the DC was, and DM(good DM) can generate dozens of outcomes based on your roll. And failure or low roll should never frustrate a player in TTRPG, it should provide fun expirience too because we basically play it to have fun. That's why i posted this topic, as i don't feel that in BG3. And as i understand, that they won't rework the system entirely i suggested to at least try to hide it

It is actually rare for a DM to say out loud whether you "failed" or "succeded" going through a skill check

Oh yes, this time i expressed myself poorly ...
I mean it as three separate situations, not three possible outcomes in same.

That would be perfectly valid answer.

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In mo tabletop veteran either, i get to one group and played cca 1,5y long campaign by now. And luckily for me, i really resonate well with our DM. ^_^

Still ... it would depend a lot on context ...
When i roll with clean intention, and tht intention isnt reflected in the outcome ... i ask.

I just asked him on Discord, and he confirmed the same ... he tryes to describe situations as clear as possible, but if someone have doubts, there is nothing easier than ask.

I have been a DM for a long time and my principle is to never reveal the difficulty coefficients, whether they are low or high.

In some campaigns, I received complaints from players and adapted to tell them what the difficulty of the test was after it was completed.

In TTRPG, we have the opportunity to always be adapting rules for better game flow and for the enjoyment of players.

Within a video game, I believe we need closed rules and binary systems for most tests, and BG3 has been doing this very well!

In my opinion, if the difficulty of the test were only shown after it was performed, it would be ideal, providing a variety of actions that could be used with or without bonuses even if it was not the right moment. After that, seeing that you used a charm for a difficulty 6 test brings the feeling that you should have paid more attention to that situation.

There is nothing you can do to stop people from save-scuming all you can do is remove save so stop trying...

This does absolutely nothing againts save scuming. And is funny as hell.

You can still save scum to get the wanted result doesn't matter how the game gets to it. So hiding everything or dc or whatevere giving random fails whatever wont changes nothing.

If poeple are not happy with the result they will save scum. Some save scum just to see all the options... The only way to remove that is to remove save. Make them lose hours of gameplay... and even then people save scum or will just make mods.


btw:
IF RL DM does this and fudge rolls in nagative way just to fuck with the players you should find a new DM... i'm againts fudging all together, but ok i get it when it helps the players i can at least justify it a bit.

Best thing devs can do to minimze save scuming is give mutiple great outcomes that people will like, simple as that... making great narrative. Most people wont save scum if the outcome it good, makes sanse and is not gimiicky and helps if it's funny - cute or whatever. Problem is that every outcome costs money and time so there is a limit of how much you can do.

Yeah I got caught, because I'm the same kind of guy. I can understand that this is probably fine for multiplayer, but I'm a perfectionist in single player for several reasons. I have to proofread all the outcomes (translations) and I hate TT based dice dialogues. I am really disappointed that there is no option to disable them completely. I'm oldschool and like to select only the answers. And for me that would be the only way to massively reduce save-scumming. It was hell when proofreading to cross check the translations. Also, rp-wise, I always want as much dialogue as possible. Quick example with the Book of Dead Gods. Here I want to fail with strength, but pass with arcana and then religion.

I don’t think that’s necessary. I think of skill checks in a similar way as building character for combat - it’s an RPG, you create a character and you can’t excel in everything. Being able to easily bypass restriction that come from character builds, does invalidate a lot of appeal of a cRPG. If character can pass every skill check, than skill checks are themselves pointless.

It is perfectly fine to with hold certain specific interactions from characters not specialising in certain fields. Of course, it would be an issue if some substantial content was held hostage behind very specific quests but I can’t think of any such situation in BG3.

And than there is an issue of RNG heavy roll like d20 being rather chaotic in characterisation of our PC. Sure, I might have +7 bonus, but I rolled 2 so my smart wizard fails arcana check. But at the same time he rolled 20 on bashing the door open in spite of having 8 strength. I do think those situations could be turned good by life DM, but in cRPG they will just feel wrong. The game likely will have only one resolution for each situation, and each of those examples would need to be handled differently for different characters.

I agree with Wormerine. I personally don't have much issue with the random D20 skill checks, and I wouldn't want BG3 to remove them since this is a D&D game, but I do think that they're best in a live table environment, with a DM that can justify a strange success or failure. In a less flexible video game format, I do think a straight pass/fail based on meeting the target or not is better.

I think most of the time when you attempt something, you have an idea how difficult it is. The visible DC reflects that.

What needs to be absolutely hidden however, are the Perception checks. Revealing secrets on a failed Perception check is an incomprehensible design choice.

In PNP games the DM tells you the DC of a roll 90% of the time it makes sense unless the roll is intended to be secret. hiding Dc target scores might be an option that you could toggle but having them invisible for every check would be infuriating for me.

On the subject of skill checks, I find not being able to abort a check is more frustrating than failing one. I ain't perfect and some times I click the wrong button and with out the option to abort the roll I wind up having to reload a save. Since the game doesn't make auto saves when you transition from one area to another I wind up losing a lot of time when I make a stupid mistake. I generally don't spam the auto save button when playing, its too much like cheating to me. I don't reload the game when I make a bad choice, I live with it, but sometimes I do make input mistakes that really mess up the flow of the game for me.

I would rather have a hardcore mode where the game disables manual saves and autosaves at every DC check and combat roll so you can never go back or undo your choices. This would make resurrection scrolls more useful too.