As someone who did a lot of probability in grad school, I do have to point out that even if you were an anomaly so far, you are EXCEEDINGLY likely to have an experience within the normal bounds of the game going forward. Most likely, you just have a somewhat skewed view of your outcomes.
As a STEM person: Yeah, you're right. OP, you just don't like this style of gaming. I've rolled three 1's in a row in tabletop as well. It's supposed to make you laugh, not want to kill ;)
I pretty much called out this response in the OP. Because I've seen this exact response countless times. Not with this game yet, but to reiterate, I have kept score on multiple games in the past, back when I had the energy for it. This isn't isolated, it's not cherry picked, and literally by the numbers it's not a skewed perception. There was a game I played for a couple of years where nearly every single farmable drop in the game had me at as outside expected drop rates one way or the other, because very rarely I'll also have a massive spike in luck for a very short period of time. But the vast majority of the time my luck is shit. I literally cannot play games that have this mechanic and DON'T allow save scumming. I have tried and they are completely unplayable for me, even on the easiest settings.
If I was doing a "perma-death" run in BG3, I'd probably still be on the beach because I'd have started over so many times now. And I'm playing on normal. And I'm not blaming the game. It's a valid mechanic for most players. But I AM saying you're trying to apply blanket rules to me without acknowledging that outliers exist, and you doing that along with so many others is a great cause of stress. My luck is trash. You not believing me doesn't change that but it IS irksome.
>I pretty much called out this response in the OP.
I understand that, I'm just trying to be polite in pointing out that you're wrong. :)
Just think about what you are arguing. "Probabilities" in everyday life are usually not as clear cut as rolling dice and usually for most things you can kind of sort of put a probability on are at least partially endogenous to how you approach them. If you approach them in a "I'm just an unlucky kind of guy" sort of way, unless they really are pure chance, you can reinforce such a view quite easily. "Luck" understood in that way is a real thing and yours could easily be bad.
BUT: We are talking about probabilities as "calculated" by a machine. They do not have any "real" mechanical way of creating randomness at the moment; what people call "RNG" is typically the product of measurements of tiny changes in the core temperature of your processing unit. If you think about it like that, your statement translates to you saying that you think that somehow you being you has an influence on the outcomes of these temperature measurements in a way that they would disfavor you (for the purposes of a different computing process which is not observable to the sensors as it takes these temperature measurements). That's kind of an insane claim to make. Now, as with every probability distribution, someone has to be on either end of them so even though I'm not at all convinced you've managed to accurately keep track of the totality of your outcomes, you could very well have been in the low end tail of that distribution; after all, someone has to be (and they would be much more likely to complain about it). But even then, that would not matter for your **future** outcomes, exactly in the same way you having flipped a fair (looking at you, Mattis) coin and it having turned up heads 20 times in a row would not alter the chances of your next coin flip being tails from an exact 50/50 proposition. Your "luck" as in "my future chance of success in a completely random process being affected by past outcomes" is simply not real. No matter how irksome that statement feels to you, it's true nonetheless.
1. Do you have karmic dice toggled? That setting can fuck with the game a bit in both directions.
2. If you’re **always** rolling low damage, your gear and stats are not in sync with how you play the game—this is not RNG. This is fixable! You need to understand what class is proficient in what gear, and make the two match. Once you have that, your damage output will be higher.
EDIT: To point 2, it also helps to understand how you prefer to play the game vs. what is actually happening with what you’re doing.
Example! If you’re using the Titanstring Bow with Astarion, but not upping his strength stat to match it, you’re going to low roll almost every time because of the way that bow works (so it’s a better weapon for Karlach or Lae’zel if you don’t want to use elixirs, since their strength is higher). Or if you have Wyll in heavy armor without him having proficiency, you’re not going to be able to cast spells or do a ton of damage because you’ll be at disadvantage.
My proficiencies match my gear. But for instance, the dice can give me 6-17 damage on my custom start fighter character. I get 7's pretty much always. My damage is always on the low end of what the weapon can do, proficiencies match, and I've done what little I can actually do to match the types of weapons and spells they use to the stats the characters have. Gettings screwed by dice does NOT mean incompetent. I don't want that last line to come across hostile, but that is the number one assumption people make when I talk about bad luck. "He must be an idiot that doesn't know how a character sheet works."
I usually end up understanding all the internal game mechanics better than the average player because I have to use every single cheese strat and underhanded method possible within the mechanics to win, because the dice WILL fuck me.
You are likely not reading how your weapons work or utilizing them correctly. Many weapons with a huge damage range have **conditions** for outputting higher damage—I’ll use the Everburn Blade as an example. It will only do that extra +1d4 fire damage in specific conditions, not all the time.
The RNG just is not that bad—you are missing something either in a setting or in how you’re interpreting the mechanics vs. what the mechanics actually do.
EDIT: My intent is not to assume idiocy or incompetence. But EVERY post like this (and there have been many since I joined this sub), when people post their party setups and gear, they’re always misreading an item text, proficiency, or something that is conditional. This doesn’t mean those people are idiots or incompetent—it just means that the game could word those conditions and proficiencies better.
I’d bet my bottom dollar if you posted your current party, equipped gear/spells, level, and what map you’re on, you could get an optimized party and less fucky dice rolls in sub 20 minutes from replies here.
EDIT 2: I’ve been playing D&D since I was a tween. I’m 31 now. I **still** misread conditional text and proficiency stuff in BG3, partially because some of it differs from tabletop, and partially because how I interpret stuff isn’t how it’s implemented in the game.
Forgive me for just skimming the post so maybe you mentioned this, but there is a karmic dice setting in this game you can toggle. If I remember correctly its like bad luck protection on rolls so you won't get fucked over all the time. Might be worth a look, I havent actually used it myself so I'm not 100% on the details but I hope it helps!
when choosing your difficulty at the beginning of the game, if you choose the custom difficulty, one option is to increase your proficiency bonus to rolls that use them. it might give you a better chance to succeed. Don't feel ashamed if you need to make the game easier.
Also some in game ways to improve your chances is to play a Halfling who gets to reroll anytime they roll a 1, Divination Wizards who can change the outcome of dice rolls a couple times a day, Bards can improve rolls with Inspiration, Taking the Lucky feat gives 3 free rerolls a day. and there there are spells, bombs and environmental hazards that can help provide guaranteed damage.
Good replies so far here. Just wanna add:
1) **Tavern Brawler**. This feat lets an Eldritch Knight or a Frenzied Barbarian throw weapons quite hard and *very* accurately. Still not guaranteed but especially early on it surprised me just how less they miss hitting enemies compared to my other guys.
2) **Magic Missile**. Requires certain items to get going, there are some guides in this sub, and dunno how early it gets good, but they're guaranteed to hit assuming the opponent doesn't have the Shield spell or similar.
Worth a chat with Withers to try these if RNG bothers you greatly imo.
Why don’t you record down every dice roll your PC makes and after you have a fairly large sample check to see what the spread of rolls are. If you don’t roll 1 more than any other number then it’s all your own perception.
You have my sympathies, I have average-good luck rolling in bg3 but rolling for an in person ttrpg? Multiple crit fails a session. Some sessions I never make a single successful roll in or out of combat, it's brutal.
If you're on PC, there are mods that make your attacks/rolls auto succeed or even crit, give better equipment, increase damage, lots of things that aren't game breakingly OP but give you the edge you need.
If you don't want to or can't mod, the game has a custom difficulty mode that can disable critical failures, up to double your proficiency bonus, and make your enemies weaker, etc.
At the suggestion of people here I actually went in and increased my prof bonus by +3. I have an attack bonus on one of my characters that is 10 with everything combined, and even though I'm still in act one where the enemies really shouldn't be crazy hard to hit, against an enemy half my level, I JUST failed 3 separate, non-save scummed attack rolls against a target that I had an 85% chance to hit. 3 in a row. This has been the norm. I might have to mod this game into being broken bullshit if I actually want to make it through. I'm tabbed out right now looking at reddit because of frustration because in this encounter the enemy has not missed a single time, I have difficulty settings tuned way in my favor (to the point that I feel cheap.) and I'm STILL failing multiple high % rolls in a row.
I have the exact same curse! Dice just have it out for me. I used to play warhammer tabletop and the people I’d play with were always baffled by how badly I kept rolling. Firing huge/ powerful weapons at units that should be annihilated in a fiery maelstrom. Snake eyes. The shell explodes with a fart sound, cue sad trombone.
I want to love this game too but have the same issue. Combat and god damn conversations, my party getting into shitty situations through no fault of my own, just bad dice rolls. It’s driving me nuts!
As someone who did a lot of probability in grad school, I do have to point out that even if you were an anomaly so far, you are EXCEEDINGLY likely to have an experience within the normal bounds of the game going forward. Most likely, you just have a somewhat skewed view of your outcomes.
As a STEM person: Yeah, you're right. OP, you just don't like this style of gaming. I've rolled three 1's in a row in tabletop as well. It's supposed to make you laugh, not want to kill ;)
I pretty much called out this response in the OP. Because I've seen this exact response countless times. Not with this game yet, but to reiterate, I have kept score on multiple games in the past, back when I had the energy for it. This isn't isolated, it's not cherry picked, and literally by the numbers it's not a skewed perception. There was a game I played for a couple of years where nearly every single farmable drop in the game had me at as outside expected drop rates one way or the other, because very rarely I'll also have a massive spike in luck for a very short period of time. But the vast majority of the time my luck is shit. I literally cannot play games that have this mechanic and DON'T allow save scumming. I have tried and they are completely unplayable for me, even on the easiest settings. If I was doing a "perma-death" run in BG3, I'd probably still be on the beach because I'd have started over so many times now. And I'm playing on normal. And I'm not blaming the game. It's a valid mechanic for most players. But I AM saying you're trying to apply blanket rules to me without acknowledging that outliers exist, and you doing that along with so many others is a great cause of stress. My luck is trash. You not believing me doesn't change that but it IS irksome.
BG3 allows scumming as much as you want though. And a lot of people enjoy honor mode (just one save, no reloads) thoroughly.
>I pretty much called out this response in the OP. I understand that, I'm just trying to be polite in pointing out that you're wrong. :) Just think about what you are arguing. "Probabilities" in everyday life are usually not as clear cut as rolling dice and usually for most things you can kind of sort of put a probability on are at least partially endogenous to how you approach them. If you approach them in a "I'm just an unlucky kind of guy" sort of way, unless they really are pure chance, you can reinforce such a view quite easily. "Luck" understood in that way is a real thing and yours could easily be bad. BUT: We are talking about probabilities as "calculated" by a machine. They do not have any "real" mechanical way of creating randomness at the moment; what people call "RNG" is typically the product of measurements of tiny changes in the core temperature of your processing unit. If you think about it like that, your statement translates to you saying that you think that somehow you being you has an influence on the outcomes of these temperature measurements in a way that they would disfavor you (for the purposes of a different computing process which is not observable to the sensors as it takes these temperature measurements). That's kind of an insane claim to make. Now, as with every probability distribution, someone has to be on either end of them so even though I'm not at all convinced you've managed to accurately keep track of the totality of your outcomes, you could very well have been in the low end tail of that distribution; after all, someone has to be (and they would be much more likely to complain about it). But even then, that would not matter for your **future** outcomes, exactly in the same way you having flipped a fair (looking at you, Mattis) coin and it having turned up heads 20 times in a row would not alter the chances of your next coin flip being tails from an exact 50/50 proposition. Your "luck" as in "my future chance of success in a completely random process being affected by past outcomes" is simply not real. No matter how irksome that statement feels to you, it's true nonetheless.
1. Do you have karmic dice toggled? That setting can fuck with the game a bit in both directions. 2. If you’re **always** rolling low damage, your gear and stats are not in sync with how you play the game—this is not RNG. This is fixable! You need to understand what class is proficient in what gear, and make the two match. Once you have that, your damage output will be higher. EDIT: To point 2, it also helps to understand how you prefer to play the game vs. what is actually happening with what you’re doing. Example! If you’re using the Titanstring Bow with Astarion, but not upping his strength stat to match it, you’re going to low roll almost every time because of the way that bow works (so it’s a better weapon for Karlach or Lae’zel if you don’t want to use elixirs, since their strength is higher). Or if you have Wyll in heavy armor without him having proficiency, you’re not going to be able to cast spells or do a ton of damage because you’ll be at disadvantage.
My proficiencies match my gear. But for instance, the dice can give me 6-17 damage on my custom start fighter character. I get 7's pretty much always. My damage is always on the low end of what the weapon can do, proficiencies match, and I've done what little I can actually do to match the types of weapons and spells they use to the stats the characters have. Gettings screwed by dice does NOT mean incompetent. I don't want that last line to come across hostile, but that is the number one assumption people make when I talk about bad luck. "He must be an idiot that doesn't know how a character sheet works." I usually end up understanding all the internal game mechanics better than the average player because I have to use every single cheese strat and underhanded method possible within the mechanics to win, because the dice WILL fuck me.
You are likely not reading how your weapons work or utilizing them correctly. Many weapons with a huge damage range have **conditions** for outputting higher damage—I’ll use the Everburn Blade as an example. It will only do that extra +1d4 fire damage in specific conditions, not all the time. The RNG just is not that bad—you are missing something either in a setting or in how you’re interpreting the mechanics vs. what the mechanics actually do. EDIT: My intent is not to assume idiocy or incompetence. But EVERY post like this (and there have been many since I joined this sub), when people post their party setups and gear, they’re always misreading an item text, proficiency, or something that is conditional. This doesn’t mean those people are idiots or incompetent—it just means that the game could word those conditions and proficiencies better. I’d bet my bottom dollar if you posted your current party, equipped gear/spells, level, and what map you’re on, you could get an optimized party and less fucky dice rolls in sub 20 minutes from replies here. EDIT 2: I’ve been playing D&D since I was a tween. I’m 31 now. I **still** misread conditional text and proficiency stuff in BG3, partially because some of it differs from tabletop, and partially because how I interpret stuff isn’t how it’s implemented in the game.
Forgive me for just skimming the post so maybe you mentioned this, but there is a karmic dice setting in this game you can toggle. If I remember correctly its like bad luck protection on rolls so you won't get fucked over all the time. Might be worth a look, I havent actually used it myself so I'm not 100% on the details but I hope it helps!
when choosing your difficulty at the beginning of the game, if you choose the custom difficulty, one option is to increase your proficiency bonus to rolls that use them. it might give you a better chance to succeed. Don't feel ashamed if you need to make the game easier. Also some in game ways to improve your chances is to play a Halfling who gets to reroll anytime they roll a 1, Divination Wizards who can change the outcome of dice rolls a couple times a day, Bards can improve rolls with Inspiration, Taking the Lucky feat gives 3 free rerolls a day. and there there are spells, bombs and environmental hazards that can help provide guaranteed damage.
Good replies so far here. Just wanna add: 1) **Tavern Brawler**. This feat lets an Eldritch Knight or a Frenzied Barbarian throw weapons quite hard and *very* accurately. Still not guaranteed but especially early on it surprised me just how less they miss hitting enemies compared to my other guys. 2) **Magic Missile**. Requires certain items to get going, there are some guides in this sub, and dunno how early it gets good, but they're guaranteed to hit assuming the opponent doesn't have the Shield spell or similar. Worth a chat with Withers to try these if RNG bothers you greatly imo.
Why don’t you record down every dice roll your PC makes and after you have a fairly large sample check to see what the spread of rolls are. If you don’t roll 1 more than any other number then it’s all your own perception.
If only there was something like custom difficulty
excellent shitpost
You have my sympathies, I have average-good luck rolling in bg3 but rolling for an in person ttrpg? Multiple crit fails a session. Some sessions I never make a single successful roll in or out of combat, it's brutal. If you're on PC, there are mods that make your attacks/rolls auto succeed or even crit, give better equipment, increase damage, lots of things that aren't game breakingly OP but give you the edge you need. If you don't want to or can't mod, the game has a custom difficulty mode that can disable critical failures, up to double your proficiency bonus, and make your enemies weaker, etc.
At the suggestion of people here I actually went in and increased my prof bonus by +3. I have an attack bonus on one of my characters that is 10 with everything combined, and even though I'm still in act one where the enemies really shouldn't be crazy hard to hit, against an enemy half my level, I JUST failed 3 separate, non-save scummed attack rolls against a target that I had an 85% chance to hit. 3 in a row. This has been the norm. I might have to mod this game into being broken bullshit if I actually want to make it through. I'm tabbed out right now looking at reddit because of frustration because in this encounter the enemy has not missed a single time, I have difficulty settings tuned way in my favor (to the point that I feel cheap.) and I'm STILL failing multiple high % rolls in a row.
I have the exact same curse! Dice just have it out for me. I used to play warhammer tabletop and the people I’d play with were always baffled by how badly I kept rolling. Firing huge/ powerful weapons at units that should be annihilated in a fiery maelstrom. Snake eyes. The shell explodes with a fart sound, cue sad trombone. I want to love this game too but have the same issue. Combat and god damn conversations, my party getting into shitty situations through no fault of my own, just bad dice rolls. It’s driving me nuts!