I’m new to both DnD and cRPGs, I’ve read about what the karmic dice does but I wanted to know your opinions as well.
Does it really make it for a “better” experience? Can fights go seriously wrong or extend for a longer time when not using it? What do you all think about it?
EDIT: please read this comment by @burgundymyr@sh.itjust.works, it explains how the dice really works, something I didn’t get at first, thank you burgundymyr!
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TL;DR It does NOT stabilize your rolls. It DOES Stabilize your number of successes/failures (which I think is bad for the system).
There is a lot of confusion in this thread about how this works.
If you understand the mechanics of bg3 and are try to optimize your build you should definitely turn it off. If you don’t care about that and just want to play without understanding all the mechanics I would still turn it off, but it’s fine to leave on probably.
What it does is make rolling a success more likely the more you fail and vice versa. It also applies to enemies. So if you have put all your resources into Armor Class so that enemies miss you more often… well you might be marginally less, but the whole point is that enemies will hit you at a fairly regular frequency and you will hit them back at a similar rate. It means you won’t keep failing and that you won’t succeed at everything.
It punishes you for being really good at something and rewards you for taking more actions rather than being good at the ones you take. It is kind of good for new players that used a scuffed build because it means they won’t fail all their checks even if they made terrible choices, but if you make some basic common sense choices like getting a high armor class or pairing expertise in stealth (Rogue 1 ability) with a high DEX then it can be very frustrating.
Thank you! That explains a lot.
I’m a new player, didn’t know anything about DnD nor cRPGs when I started, but I like to understand what I’m doing when I play a game so I’m doing my best to learn.
I started on the easiest difficulty with the dice on, by the end of act 2 I think I got a hang of how the rules work (still far from fully understand them but I’ll get there eventually), I noticed that no matter what I did in combat to get advantage or trying to avoid damage, my party ended the fight badly wounded, I never died but still.
I started a new playthrough on normal difficulty with the dice off, it’s been a few fights already that I can finish with most of my party unscathed, something that never happened before even if I was on easier difficulty.
This is just anecdotal experience and I’m most probably getting better as a player, but now that you explained it, I can’t stop thinking it’s also the dice normalizing (or not) things for me.
I don’t regret using it because if you start from nothing like me, there’s a hell lot of stuff you have to “digest” to be able to play, it’s pretty overwhelming so the game sort of helping you in avoiding too many failures is a good thing IMO. But now that I’m starting to get a better understanding of how things work, I’ll definitely keep it off.
So it makes things less swingy
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Exactly. It seems like it mostly benefits checks that are closer to 50%, artificially giving more variance to prevent streaks. But if you have Astarion picking a DC 10 lock with +19 modifiers, I really don’t want the game to muck with my 95% chance to succeed. I mean, I do have 55 picks but that’s not the point.
On lower difficulties karmic dice can even out your streaks, which feels good but ultimately isn’t game-breaking.
On higher difficulties they can get you killed because they also work for the enemy, meaning you’ll get hit a lot more, which is a real problem.
Nay, although there have been a couple times losing a stack of lockpicks consecutive lost coin flips where I almost regretted it. :P
Nah, I don’t want anything fucking with my dice rolls, especially in combat. If I stack AC, I should be an unhittable tank. If they only worked for skill checks, I would probably leave them on to help with unlucky streaks but even those I can just save scum.
I left it on. I haven’t seen any datamined information on the system so it’s all just placebo as far as I’m concerned. Like a fake thermometer that people can adjust all they want to make themselves feel better. Maybe it does something, maybe it doesn’t (though it probably does).
But I put 0 stock in how people “feel” about the randomness since they’re not doing real testing and it’s all likely confirmation bias.
As a programmer, the idea of replicating the randomness of dice in a game is… tricky. Simply: computers don’t do random, so we must do our best to imitate randomness. So then attempting to ‘curve’ that artificial randomness also makes me feel weird.
I turned it off myself, though, now I can tell myself that my improbable high rolls are ‘earned’… and using 3 inspiration points to only keep rolling 2s and 3s are also ‘earned.’
Although from a purely scientific stand point you are correct and there is no truly random number generator, I would argue that simulating a dice in a video game can be considered random for all intents and purposes.
Playing on easy for my first game. I have left it on and I still fail on some of my rolls. Over all I feel like it’s boosting my rolls to be better. Fights are easy unless a spell or mechanic I don’t know or understand goes off. The dialogue, if I select the option I have the best bonuses in I tend to get by all of them. Really stealth and traps have been my biggest hurdle. The AI keeps walking into them when I move.
I played on easy so far too, I left it on because it’s default and I was too new to even understand what it does. I didn’t find fights particularly difficult either, for stealth, traps and lockpicks I use Astarion, he’s exceptional at it.
Now I started a new playthrough even if I didn’t finish the first one yet, because I wanted to try normal difficulty, so I was wondering if karmic dice is really worth it.
I just leave it on and don’t think about it too much. If I saw some hard details on how exactly it works (not guesses) I might have a stronger opinion. I’ve never turned it off and never thought twice about it.
I turned it off because it’s not real dnd if there’s dice weight. Rolling a hot streak or cold streak is just part of the dice, the dice giveth and the dice taketh
What does karmic dice do?
It’s a sort of bad luck protection to avoid making you roll low for too many times in a row, it’s an on/off toggle in game settings. The downside is it also works for enemies.
The actual math behind it is not know however (unfortunately).
This is not accurate. It makes you (and enemies) succeed and fail more often if you/ they have had a streak of the other. It has been tested extensively.
As a result it punishes a high armor class/stats builds and rewards more actions (summons, extra attack, etc).
I highly recommend turning it off if you understand the mechanics of 5e. It’s fine if you don’t understand how things work and just want to play.
Oh, it works against too much “good luck” as well then? Like it normalizes your streaks to avoid too many of either good or bad rolls? I definitely didn’t understand that.
if you understand the mechanics of 5e
I don’t, I knew nothing about DnD when I started but I’m trying my best to learn. Thank you for the clarification!
Yes and no. It doesn’t care about what number you roll, just the result of the roll (success or failure). It will help you if you roll a 5 ten times in a row and you fail all those checks, but if you pass all those checks because of bonuses or because the target number was low, then it will make you more likely to fail. Although, in not actually sure you can get ten successes or failures in a row with karmic dice on.
In DnD your skill checks (except for opposed rolls c which we’ll ignore for now) have a DC which is the number you have to roll to pass, that target number is shown on the screen in bg3. You also get bonuses to the roll (also shown on screen under the die). Attacks and spells with saving throws work the same way. Roll a d20, add bonuses, and see if your number was high enough to pass. Saving throws are slightly different because the defender is rolling, but it’s the same idea, they want to roll higher than the DC of the spell.
So all that to say, karmic dice does NOT smooth the rolls and make it likely to get an even distribution of high and low rolls, it smooths successes and failures so that regardless of how hard a skill check was or how easy it was to hit an enemy, you will be more/less likely to succeed or fail m multiple times in a row.
I just left it on, I don’t really understand it though. I still fail even trivial skill checks repeatedly with anyone other than Astarion so I’m not actually convinced it does anything at all.
I know there is a kind of philosophy in random dice roll design for software where you slightly skew the distribution of subsequent rolls based on previous ones because it feels more random (rather than getting e.g. 1, 2, 1, 2, which could be ‘truly random’ but feels like ass), but I don’t think that’s what karmic dice is doing. I do play really high AC, with Laezel and Shadowheart in full endgame plate plus a buff here or there I think they run 24~27. It is very hard for enemies to hit us and it feels about right. I would be very surprised to learn that karmic dice is benefiting enemies too, because that seems unintended and not in the spirit of how the tooltip is written.
No for me. Let luck be free of influence.
Besides, I feel lucky.
It’s still shitty algorithmic pseudorandomness either way, and I can still have winning or losing streaks with karmic dice on, despite that being its advertised reason to exist.
No way. I want true dice rolls, good or bad.
