Baldur's Gate 3 by Larian Games

j00t · Oct 17, 2023

Seananigans said:
It's definitely some tricky bullshit. Basically turning it off makes it normal DnD. Keeping it on neuters the effects of high/low AC, as it won't allow "streaks" of miss or hit. So with it on, someone with 8 AC will NOT get hit every single time, the game will force misses occasionally. Similarly, someone with 23 AC will get hit much more often, as some hits that would have been misses will be fudged into hits.

My guess is under the hood, they have hidden bonuses and penalties assigned to each char based on how many times they've been attacked, with the intention of "smoothing" out streaks. Juice tricks.

Personally I keep it off, it's a load of horseshit. I want to be able to raise AC and have it matter, and I don't mind when mobs have high AC and I miss a lot, or if I just roll poorly 5x in a row and miss. That's DnD.

i hadn't really thought about it much in terms of armor, though that makes sense. i've only looked at it from the perspective of sometimes in a real game, you just roll crappy all night. in fact our last game, throughout the entire night of active skill checks and 2 hours of combat, i had 1 roll that was above a 10. sometimes that's just how the dice fall. so i get wanting to turn it off to combat that, but i've been playing dnd every week for near on 7 years now and you get used to crappy dice rolls. but thing is, after 3 weeks of dice working against you, you start rolling nat 20's left and right. i've had a few games where the party rolled nat 20's with disadvantage several times. personally i'm very happy with the dice being an active part of the storytelling, so using karmic dice is anathema to that.

but again, i play every week and this is a video game. i understand people not playing tabletop, and just looking at bg3 for what it is, a video game. rolling a bunch of misses in a row sucks and if you don't have much time to play, video games are meant to be enjoyed. you don't want to feel worse than when you started.

Burns · Oct 17, 2023

Julian The Apostate said:
Is there a consensus on the board about karmic dice? I'm about 20 hrs in and just realized this was on by default and I'm leaning towards turning it off. Reminds me of juice tricks.

The hardest difficulty isn't really that hard, and I turned them off immediately, since it seemed like having them on would make the game easier.

With them on, I could see it punishing the meta of everyone gets medium or heavy armor though. Even wizards and sorcs seem to dip 1 into cleric for various bonuses. Other than that, playing normally with casters in robes, would be easier as they would be getting crushed less.

Seananigans · Oct 17, 2023

j00t said:
i hadn't really thought about it much in terms of armor, though that makes sense. i've only looked at it from the perspective of sometimes in a real game, you just roll crappy all night. in fact our last game, throughout the entire night of active skill checks and 2 hours of combat, i had 1 roll that was above a 10. sometimes that's just how the dice fall. so i get wanting to turn it off to combat that, but i've been playing dnd every week for near on 7 years now and you get used to crappy dice rolls. but thing is, after 3 weeks of dice working against you, you start rolling nat 20's left and right. i've had a few games where the party rolled nat 20's with disadvantage several times. personally i'm very happy with the dice being an active part of the storytelling, so using karmic dice is anathema to that.

but again, i play every week and this is a video game. i understand people not playing tabletop, and just looking at bg3 for what it is, a video game. rolling a bunch of misses in a row sucks and if you don't have much time to play, video games are meant to be enjoyed. you don't want to feel worse than when you started.

Yeah, Karmic won't allow you to "roll nat 20's left and right." You'll miss that kobold with 12 AC two times out of five, because reasons.

It's not RNG, it's just "here's what happens."

j00t · Oct 17, 2023

Seananigans said:
Yeah, Karmic won't allow you to "roll nat 20's left and right." You'll miss that kobold with 12 AC two times out of five, because reasons.

It's not RNG, it's just "here's what happens."

i haven't ever played with karmic dice, but i'd be somewhat interested in seeing what's going on under the hood. in it's simplest form, it's not going to allow for a string of bad rolls, same as it's not going to allow for a string of good rolls. the question is, what does it consider a string? can you get 2 nat 20's in a row? 3? what about a natural 17, 20, 14, and a 9 in a row? at what point does the karmic dice step in and say "no, this is too much"

k^M · Oct 17, 2023

j00t said:
i haven't ever played with karmic dice, but i'd be somewhat interested in seeing what's going on under the hood. in it's simplest form, it's not going to allow for a string of bad rolls, same as it's not going to allow for a string of good rolls. the question is, what does it consider a string? can you get 2 nat 20's in a row? 3? what about a natural 17, 20, 14, and a 9 in a row? at what point does the karmic dice step in and say "no, this is too much"

I had it on and wound up rolling 3 or 4 nat 1's on dialogue checks in the span of 5 min. Worse still was it was on a lock with 19 charisma, rng gonna rng.

Also explains why sometimes your tankiest character gets absolutely destroyed, going to have to look at turning it off.

sleevedraw · Oct 17, 2023

Game is really growing off of me in Act 3. Feels like you should have gotten to Baldur's Gate sooner in the story. Also feels like combat is less tactical than in Act I/II and basically just devolves into whether you or the CPU is better at breaking the action economy by being a rules lawyer. Maybe that's how all DnD is; I usually don't do TTRPGs, but it's decidedly "meh" for me. Future playthroughs, I'm probably just going to drop to easy difficulty, because it seems like all combat for me in Act III can be reduced to "Haste Karlach and summon army of Air Myrmis to keep everything stunlocked before your enemy stunlocks you."

Originally agreed with Mist in that I didn't particularly like the party members (other than Karlach), but I feel like they slowly grow on you over time, so in that sense, the game is a success.

Tuco · Oct 17, 2023

Julian The Apostate said:
Is there a consensus on the board about karmic dice? I'm about 20 hrs in and just realized this was on by default and I'm leaning towards turning it off. Reminds me of juice tricks.

I left it on. I like it as a concept.

The issue of it making swarms of low level mobs more threatening was never a big deal because there just aren't a lot of those encounters.

j00t · Oct 17, 2023

sleevedraw said:
Game is really growing off of me in Act 3. Feels like you should have gotten to Baldur's Gate sooner in the story. Also feels like combat is less tactical than in Act I/II and basically just devolves into whether you or the CPU is better at breaking the action economy by being a rules lawyer. Maybe that's how all DnD is; I usually don't do TTRPGs, but it's decidedly "meh" for me. Future playthroughs, I'm probably just going to drop to easy difficulty, because it seems like all combat for me in Act III can be reduced to "Haste Karlach and summon army of Air Myrmis to keep everything stunlocked before your enemy stunlocks you."

Originally agreed with Mist in that I didn't particularly like the party members (other than Karlach), but I feel like they slowly grow on you over time, so in that sense, the game is a success.

5e combat is VERY much about action economy. i think 5e did a lot of things right in the grand scheme of things, but action economy being as important as it is is something i never really liked.

Tuco · Oct 17, 2023

j00t said:
5e combat is VERY much about action economy. i think 5e did a lot of things right in the grand scheme of things, but action economy being as important as it is is something i never really liked.

I saw and heard the phrase "action economy" a lot when I was playing and reading BG3 and I still don't understand what the phrase "action economy" means and how it differs from words like power or lethality.

ex:

Here we saw 3 strategies:

Increasing your action efficiency.

Reducing the number of actions by the party.

Reducing the action efficiency of enemies.

If you add the missing item of "reduce the number of actions of enemies" it just sounds like "git gud."

j00t · Oct 17, 2023

Tuco said:
I saw and heard the phrase "action economy" a lot when I was playing and reading BG3 and I still don't understand what the phrase "action economy" means and how it differs from words like power or lethality.

basically, action economy refers to how many things the players can do vs the dm. if the players have 3 characters under their control, but the dm has 10 creatures, the dm has the advantage due to action economy. BUT if, say, the players are 3 lvl 17 fighters with 4 attacks each, and the creatures are lvl 3 goblins with just 1 attack, then the players have the action economy advantage.

classes with multiple attacks or that can summon creatures of whatever, increase their ownaction economy. classes that can CC enemies with slow, banish, hold monster, etc reduce the enemies action economy. when you're in combat, the number 1 focus should be figuring out how to put the action economy advantage on your side. whether that means taking out large groups of low hp creatures through aoe spells, or by cc'ing casters that can sway the action economy in their favor, etc.

some of that is just general tactics for any kind of combat, but with 5e specifically the way the rules work (lvl 5 martial characters getting extra attack, druids summoning groups of creatures, etc) there is A LOT of focus on balance through action economy

Tuco · Oct 17, 2023

j00t said:
basically, action economy refers to how many things the players can do vs the dm

How many things, or how effective those things are?

Seananigans · Oct 17, 2023

k^M said:
I had it on and wound up rolling 3 or 4 nat 1's on dialogue checks in the span of 5 min. Worse still was it was on a lock with 19 charisma, rng gonna rng.

Also explains why sometimes your tankiest character gets absolutely destroyed, going to have to look at turning it off.

That's the point though, with Karmic on, those nat 1's aren't RNG being RNG. That's just "you fail because reasons." No dice rolls can be trusted when Karmic is on.

k^M · Oct 17, 2023

sleevedraw said:
Game is really growing off of me in Act 3. Feels like you should have gotten to Baldur's Gate sooner in the story. Also feels like combat is less tactical than in Act I/II and basically just devolves into whether you or the CPU is better at breaking the action economy by being a rules lawyer. Maybe that's how all DnD is; I usually don't do TTRPGs, but it's decidedly "meh" for me. Future playthroughs, I'm probably just going to drop to easy difficulty, because it seems like all combat for me in Act III can be reduced to "Haste Karlach and summon army of Air Myrmis to keep everything stunlocked before your enemy stunlocks you."

Originally agreed with Mist in that I didn't particularly like the party members (other than Karlach), but I feel like they slowly grow on you over time, so in that sense, the game is a success.

This is how I felt at a3 quite a few times, finally just powered through to finish it on tactician leaving most of the quests unfinished. By the time I got to the "Coronation Summary" I was level 12 and fighting seemed pointless. Very few actual unique drops (compared to D:OS) and most just +1/+2 weaponry.

Getting back to A3 on a full on playthrough to finish it all, and I could have sworn they patched it recently to reduce the mobs in A3 (or at least improve performance by lowering the non important npc count). Did I dream that or is there a setting somewhere? About ready to just rain fire down so I can walk through the city in slightly better FPS

Seananigans · Oct 17, 2023

Tuco said:
How many things, or how effective those things are?

Yeah sure that's the 10,000 foot view.

Action economy is the entire reason "Legendary" things exist. Legendary actions, resists, etc. Lair actions. Because 4-6 players versus one single monster is wildly in favor of the players all things being equal. The legendary actions/resists/etc give the monster the needed power boost to maintain a challenge.

But yes, +gooder.

Phazael · Oct 17, 2023

How many. Action Economy is a specific game concept in turn based games about having more turns/actions relative to someone else. In BG3, its about finding methods to fully utilize all of the action resources and increase their availability. Monks, as one example, are very strong in action economy because you can generate useful utility and/or additional offense with their bonus actions (a major reason why the thief subclass that adds another bonus action is a popular choice for their builds). And tons of builds grab two levels of Fighter just to get the Action Surge option.

Tuco · Oct 17, 2023

Phazael said:
How many ... Monks, as one example, are very strong in action economy because you can generate useful utility and/or additional offense with their bonus actions.

Pick one, brother.

I don't think action economy being solely action count is consistent with the definitions I read. But if it is, in BG3, total action count is only one of several factors in party lethality. See: My two barbarians one-actioning mobs that do jack and shit for damage.

In BG3, an ideal party takes their turns early and does a maximum amount of damage to take out key enemies, while having enough survivability. This basically means, "A strong party is a strong party.".

The definitions of "action economy" read like, "Good action economy means you hit a lot. And hit hard. And make the mobs not hit a lot. And also not hit hard.". Meanwhile I'm waiting for some lessons on supply and demand or some lassez faire loot distribution to justify the word "economy" in action economy.

Seananigans · Oct 17, 2023

Tuco said:
Pick one, brother.

I don't think action economy being solely action count is consistent with the definitions I read. But if it is, in BG3, total action count is only one of several factors in party lethality. See: My two barbarians one-actioning mobs that do jack and shit for damage.

In BG3, an ideal party takes their turns early and does a maximum amount of damage to take out key enemies, while having enough survivability. This basically means, "A strong party is a strong party.".

The definitions of "action economy" read like, "Good action economy means you hit a lot. And hit hard. And make the mobs not hit a lot. And also not hit hard.". Meanwhile I'm waiting for some lessons on supply and demand or some lassez faire loot distribution to justify the word "economy" in action economy.

Action economy also deals with efficiency of action. If your party of 4 is facing 13 mobs, you're at an action disadvantage. Even small damage attacks add up when they're lobbing 13-26 of them at you every round.

If your choices for one character's round is 1) spend an action on two attacks, one-shotting two of the 13 monsters or 2) spend an action on a cc spell that neutralizes 6-10 of the monsters depending on saves, then option (2) is the better action economy. In one case you've removed 2-4 enemy actions/attacks, in another case you've removed 12-20 enemy actions/attacks.

Personally I prefer to spend my actions on equipping different gear.

Phazael · Oct 17, 2023

Lethality and Effectiveness of actions is a concern, but Action Economy is specifically about quantity. As I said, its a pretty major concept in gaming outside of video games (board games its huge, particularly in worker placement games). 5e is really tailor made to be a video game. I thought that from the first time I read the rules and BG3 more or less bears that out.

But hey, don't take my word on the subject. Look at all the power builds for characters out there and the all have one major thing in common. They are all maximizing their availability and use of their actions, both standard and bonus.

Tuco · Oct 17, 2023

Seananigans said:
Action economy also deals with efficiency of action.

Phazael said:
Action Economy is specifically about quantity.

Action Economy is a dumb phrase, so I don't blame the community for having homebrew definitions.

... · Oct 17, 2023

It just means being economical with all party actions. Always be using your action types. If the class doesn't have a bonus action, do a lot of shoves. Chug a potion. Leap over stairs to save movement range etc. Try to buff ans heal before combat

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