While I appreciate that Larian are trying to emulate the feeling of real dice rolls here, the animations for rolls, adding modifiers and showing the continue button are a masterclass in poor UI design. It somehow manages to be god awfully slow AND inconsistent in how I can skip it.
Currently this is how it works:
- I select my option in dialogue, without any idea of the DC of the check or how having multiple modifiers effects the DC
- I get booted to a whole new full screen view, with it’s own unskippable entrance animation.
- I select my modifiers, which are hidden behind a button click for no discernible reason, then roll by clicking another tiny button.
- I need to wait for a lengthy roll animation, UNLESS I get lucky by clicking at the right time to skip. Performing this skip seems neither consistent nor clear: I just need to hammer my mouse in the general vicinity of the rolling area and hope.
- If I am UNLUCKY I’m forced to sit through an incredible floaty dice roll animation that apparently takes place in Mars gravity. I have played TTRPGs, I know how long it takes to roll and read dice: half a second, unless you fling your dice across the table like a barbarian.
- I then have to sit through MORE animations as bonuses are applied, penalizing me for being good at the game and stacking them. I groan as they float towards the dice like they are taking a Sunday stroll through a park.
- Then I sit through MORE animations as the final tally clobbers the DC dice at the pace of a large glacier, before the continue button finally fades in at what seems to be a totally random time frame.
- And we get MORE animations as the full screen fades away
The result is a tedious process that takes me out of the game totally: we have these beautifully rendered characters, with emotion and voice acted dialogue, and stunning backgrounds: and Larian choose to hide all that with a full screen animation for dice rolling.
All this in contrast to how classic CRPGs used to do things: you click the dialogue button and instantly get a success or failure. You can barrel through heaps of them, limited only by your reading speed. AND they don’t take up the whole screen while doing so.
Instead with BG3 I have to sit through a minimum five second animation that’s the same every damn time. It could end up ten or fifteen seconds if you fail to skip animations. You might perform four or five of these within a single conversation: at the end you could have spent more time waiting for UI animations than reading and thinking about dialogue choices.
Larian, please please reconsider the dice rolling experience, it’s one of the only blemishes on an otherwise perfect game.
Insight, investigation and perception should generally be treated as thresholds of information to disclose rather than fixed DCs, with shades of failure and success.
Having been save scumming quite hard, the Critical Failure and Critical Success means fuck all. It changes nothing so I’m not sure why they included them outside of combat. Unless it changes in the harder difficulty. I’m on the medium, default one.
Wait. I thought the Crit Fail and Crit Success were automatic, even when you otherwise would have passed or failed?
Like for example, if I have a +5 total modifier and it’s a DC 3 check, I shouldn’t be able to fail it (my smallest modded roll is a 6). But I can still fail… with a Crit Fail by rolling a one. Same the other way around, where my largest possible modded roll can’t beat the DC… I can still roll a 20 to pass it.
Or did I misunderstand this mechanic?
Critical Failure is when you roll a 1. 1 always fails, even if your modifiers would be higher than the DC.
Critical success is just a natural 20, or a 20 with just the die alone and no modifiers and is always a success.
However generally in the PnP game or other CRPGs that use it, critical fail and critical success not only just fail or succeed the thing, they fail it worse or succeed it better. It might come with extra rewards or just more flavor text to make it different than a regular success or failure.
Critically failing at picking a lock, for example, might break the lock preventing another attempt at picking or even using a key.
Critically succeeding an intimidation check to extort money from an NPC might get you a little more gold or items.
BG3 doesn’t do this. Critical fail is a regular fail, but it’s telling you that you rolled a 1 on the die. Critical success is just success but you rolled a nat 20. They don’t make the rarity of the die roll special in any way other than telling you it was critically good or bad during the roll.
While you’re right about the fail and in PnP, this isn’t how it works in BG3. If your modifiers aren’t high enough to succeed, it doesn’t even let you make the attempt. It straight up says “impossible.”
You understood it right.