this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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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