Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Please consider toning down speech checks

There's several times in conversation where you have the option of a speech check, and if you succeed you'll be met with a second speech check. The most recent example for me was with the Kuo-Toa. I passed a DC 15 check during the conversation with their priest to figure out that their god is a conman. But rather than being able to tell them that I needed to pass a persuasion or performance check, the DC for which was 10. To avoid a fight in this situation is a .25*.5 = .125 chance. Seven times out of eight a fight happens.

A single hard check would be better than multiple moderate to hard checks. A player can feel a bit cheated when the succeed a check only to be hit by another role of the dice. Multiple checks should really only be needed if the player choses to abandon their current plan and swap to another, if you're heading towards the same goal then you shouldn't need to keep rolling for anything but really hard tasks.

Related to this I hope in future we'll get options to smoothly choose which member of our party attempts a check. The great thing about the tabletop is having different players contribute by jumping into situations with their own skills.

It's been mention several times that they've got it all turned upside down with regards to speech checks. We should be getting multiple chances at success, not failure. Also the DC's tend to be a bit too high in my estimation.

That's a great way of phrasing the issue

While it can be annoying to lose a roll I would like to stress that more often than not skill checks aren't exactly barring people out of vital stuff. Winning one frequently just means receiving a small hint about something.
In other cases (i.e. the scene with the viper druid and the thielf child) the consequences are a bit more dire but it's also clear that the "bad" outcome is supposed to be the default one and managing to save the situation is supposed to be a fringe scenario.

Yeah one of the best aspects of the game is that you will not loose out of content if you fail a speech check. If anything, you loose out of content by hitting the check. I have yet to find a situation that cannot be solved several other ways if I fail a check. That being said, I agree you should not have to roll several times to achieve one thing. It makes me think of a new DM who forces the rogue to roll a stealth check for every guard he sneaks past on his way to X location.

I think you also need to roll new stealth checks for every round in this game. And if combat is going on for some party members, but others are still sneaking, the sneaking ones still continuously roll stealth checks until they fail them, even if combat is paused.

I should test this out, though, that's a good idea.


EDIT: Indeed, when sneaking inside someone's cone of vision, you constantly, without pause, roll Stealth checks until you leave the cone, or you fail. Whether you are in combat or not.

It's not that the enemies each get to make a perception check once a round either. That's normal and expected.

I think I can agree here. Success should open up new paths, failure should close doors.
I personally like that there are multiple checks in a row, but they should feel more like a reward if I make them. A few times I felt that I could get a more mediocre but acceptable outcome, where as rolls tended to give me reward or punishment.

I do like the check system though, and I like that failure is an option, this makes the game feel more DnD than any other DnD game I have played.

Maybe either have high risk, high reward, or have the option to "stick with what I got" when presented with more rolls. At the same time, if I was a DM in scenarios where I wanted something to be possible, but very hard, I would do multiple checks too.

I've said it before that I think skill proficiencies need a buff, being proficient in a skill grating 10 to 20% chance to succeed in an average DC is to little.

I just save before speaking to any NPC and reload if I fail the dice roll. Would be nice if I was in control of some aspect of the conversation and not RNG.

The calculation seems to be the same as in 5e. If you're proficient in a skill you add your proficiency bonus which starts at +2 and goes up as you hit certain level milestones. You also add the relevant skill modifier. So a level 4 18 CHA character proficient in persuasion will get +6 to rolls (a 30% increase in success). At higher levels this will increase further.