Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks Gnome Cunning and Lucky - any good?

At first glance Gnome Cunning
You have advantage on Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma Saving Throws.
seems powerful.
Anybody play a Gnome and notice its impact?

The other runt race - Halflings - have Lucky:
When you roll a 1 for an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll.
At first glance much less nifty, yet No Critical Fails Evah! still seems a nice thing to have

Totally non-scientifically, I feel reroll on attack, ability checks, etc when you get a 1 would tend to be more useful than advantage on mental stat saving throws, just because you’re making the former rolls far more. But I guess the fact that advantage is a better benefit than reroll on 1 might balance out the fact that it’s useful in fewer circumstances. I genuinely don’t know! I did do a gnome run a while back, though can’t recall whether she seemed noticeably more resistant to, eg, charm spells which you’d expect with the saving throw advantage.

Gnome cunning will be more useful when we need to make more saves against powerful status effects . It is powerful. Mathematically if you have a -1 to the save for DC 20 save then advantage is useful but you will still likely fail. If you have proficiency and an ok stat then with advantage you will have a good chance to save

imo the Lucky feels better having played 9 full runs (5 gnome + 4 Halflings) but i agree things will change once you get to act 2... there are also 3 places [so far] where being a small gets you extra loot so Viba the difference

Quite honestly ...
I never noticed neiter outside of skillchecks ... bcs all combat log do, is telling you if you suceed, or failed, with word "advantage" or "disadvantage" or "reroll" next to it ... and while i want to believe that the game indeed do all rolls properly ... when i just dont see it, it simply dont feel right. :-/

We tested this extensively in EA and so - originally - lucky was broken in a bad way so that if you had advantage and rolled a 1 it would prioritize that 1 and you would miss. So you had to make sure you never had advantage until they fixed it.

Statistically, assuming you have Karmic dice turned OFF (this is very important) you have a 1in 400 chance of rolling a 1 with the Lucky trait and a 1 in 1400 chance of rolling a one with Lucky + Advantage.

Now having said that there are no critical fails in 5e (you are clearly old like the rest of us and used to the bad old days) and so with a 1 you just auto-miss/auto-fail a save or ability check. Taking that out of the equation VASTLY reduces your miss/fail chance across the board as there are attacks, saves and ability checks you would succeed if you just rolled a 2 or more. And keep in mind this applies to spell attacks as well.

There is a great build that Zee Bashew did with the Lucky trait and Wizard: Divination Subclass called The Build Murray (Bill Murray, haha) - see below for that.




As for the Gnome - the advantage on Wisdom saving throws so Hypnotic Pattern and Hold person can be greatly mitigated. For a Barbarian this is a huge advantage, although obviously Gnome Barbarian is not optimal in other ways.

Look, I think Gnome and Halfling are vastly underrated races and the racials don't get enough attention but they are both really very good.

Lucky is more fun in the tabletop game, when the physical D20 comes up "1" an the halfling player shouts out "LUCKY!"