How does this interact with empowered spell, which does the same thing, would it roll3 dice and choose the highest/ reroll twice. Or would it not stack at all
If you could have it include cantrips that would be amazing. I've started a frost sorcerer run and my main nuke is Ray of Frost but sadly the mod doesnt reroll the die like it does for normal spells. I love your mod otherwise and recommend it to everyone I chat with. It's definitely a bump that casters need in early game to compete with martials!
Does this change the thing where Larian makes you roll ones 70% of the time, and sets a ceiling of 4-5 damage to any roll, no matter what die it is, or how many? I've never seen more than 50-60% of the total possible damage of a spell unless its a rare critical, so I'm seriously considering this mod as a possible fix for this bug. I'm still using patch 5, so I don't know if this (issue?) was addressed, but its made the game extremely unpleasant.
The reason the damage is always rather close to the 50% point is how the probabilities work if you roll multiple dice. Let's say you roll one d10, each number has a 10% chance to come up. Now you roll 2 d10, the range would be 2-20, but the actual distribution of the results is not uniform anymore like before.
You have 10*10=100 possible results, but just a single one of them is the full damage (rolling 2 10s). Same goes for the lowest possible result of 2. That's 1% each. Now what about rolling a combined value of 3? You can roll 1-2 or 2-1, so two results -> 2%. The closer you get to the middle value, the more likely it gets. So the majority of results are going to be tracking the average pretty closely. With each dice you add the effect grows more and more pronounced. So if you have your Fireball and roll 8 dice you are basically never going to be seeing outliers. Neither to the low nor to the high end of damage.
So in that regard this mod will not do anything noticeable in terms of the distribution of the results. But the feat will raise the average by about 0.6 to 2 per dice rolled, depending on the dice used (d4 to d12).
Getting ones 70% of the time is obviously hyperbole, but feeling like the negative result of rolling a 1 is coming up more often compared to the comparable positive result of rolling a 20 is a more or less ubiquitous cognitive bias. Bad outcomes just stick in your mind more then good ones. Every time the bad outcome happens this gets reinforced even further.
Also, coming at it from a different angle: Why would Larian skew the rolls toward the lower end? Historically, if a game fudges the numbers it's always either in the players favour (XCOM on lower difficulties for example) or trying to reduce extreme results, like Baldur's Gate karmic dice preventing long streaks of failures of successes. Compared to that I don't see incentives for developers to make failure more likely
That is actually a little more complicated than making the calculation like that btw. 1st of all its exactly as advertised so does in the vanilla melee version of the feat you roll damage dice twice and pick the higher result.
When it comes how much the feat gonna increase the average damage goes beyond usual calculation since I assume it brings same stuff into the calculation as the melee counterpart. So any + damages that you might have from damage riders and other buffs (phallar aluve shriek etc.) that procs through this spell's damage, will also get rerolled. So effect will be higher than estimated.
An other thing to be aware of is make sure u set the karmic dice "off" in your options, so it will be really random. Hope u guys enjoy.
Its neither hyperbole nor cognitive bias, I've been gaming probably longer than many players of BG3 have been alive, and I assure you, I have seen enough die rolls to know exactly what the bell curve looks like. A spell that does 4-24 damage should roll averages of about 10-14, but in BG3 I am seeing them average 5-9 instead. There have been endless discussions about this, I'm not the only person to have noticed, and karmic dice on or off doesn't affect the issue.
From a dev perspective, they would certainly do this to account for expected power builds and layered buffs, as test data could have shown them there was a need to create an artificial difficulty to balance that out. What it does then, is make optimized builds and layered buffing the new normal (requirement). To make levels 1-4 have a preponderance of 1s also sets the perception that your characters are inexperienced. When this happens less often, starting around levels 5-8, you are meant to perceive that they are getting more capable (items, stats and buffs notwithstanding, I'm only talking about bare rolls).
You could just read earlier posts if you were curious. To summarize: I was asking if this mod causes any change to underlying RNG data, as the coding of this game's die rolls does not match what is observed in physical reality when rolling the same dice (data over time, bell curve, etc). The inconsistency has been experienced by many others. One small example of these discussions.
yeah I feel the same, I just found this crit counter mod and I'm going to try to get some data, it's unfortunate that this mod only counts crits instead of all roll values
Well I would love to look at those numbers if u manage to gather them, but anything less than 1000 rolls isnt data at all in that manner. Tbh I got no idea or a sight, like made me question if the game's dices are loaded. But if theres such an error, it could be anything like karmic dice doesnt turn off, even if u turn it off in the options kind of thing. We had seen armor calculations going wrong on a reload if u dont use armor fixer etc. So would need actual data before anything else.
That's not Larian's fault, that is just a skill issue. In all seriousness, RNG is RNG and it is absolutely possible to have s#*! luck all the time. Probable? not very likely, but certainly possible. There also was a bug regarding dice rolls like in Patch 1 or 2, but it was solved by a hotfix.
That's not Larian's fault, that is just a skill issue.
There is no actual skill required in BG3, its a turn-based game that allows people to save-scum, so your dismissal is not only wrong, but also out of place. Nobody has any problem getting through the game, skill has nothing to do with it. This is simply a design flaw that results in a less enjoyable experience, because we are not seeing actual RNG.
Until Larian reveals how they are using rand(), then its absolutely their fault. This function in C does not generate actual random numbers, it produces a seemingly erratic but perfectly deterministic sequence of integers, which begins at some initial number and always follows the same path according to its seed. This is why the karmic dice 'solution' was offered. A better solution would be to generate a new seed every time a new number is produced, but they would have to enter a public discussion for us to know how they are handling this.
14 is the mathematical average of 4d6 so i'm not sure how you decided 10-14 was what average should look like when you have been "gaming probably longer than many players of BG3 have been alive," and "have seen enough die rolls to know exactly what the bell curve looks like." It makes it hard to take you seriously.
Anyway, without data, all you're doing is yelling into the void that you're experiencing what feels like a statistical anomaly. But statistical anomalies happen. For all you know, your streak of low rolls is being offset by someone else's streak of high rolls. Clustering doesn't mean non-random, especially if your sample size is small.
Would it be possible to add a version that gives a half feat ASI bump? Totally okay if not. Thanks a lot for the mod! Didn't realize how useful a mod like this would be until I saw it.
Tbh I would suggest this one to be able to add ASIS and all, its a way of customizing feats as well, as long as u only drink it when u get a feat. https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/206
About brokenness; actually I did this for smth totally else. Seeing nexus doesn't have that kind of feat, I thought why shouldn't I make this available as a feat also.
22 comments
Let's say you roll one d10, each number has a 10% chance to come up. Now you roll 2 d10, the range would be 2-20, but the actual distribution of the results is not uniform anymore like before.
You have 10*10=100 possible results, but just a single one of them is the full damage (rolling 2 10s). Same goes for the lowest possible result of 2. That's 1% each.
Now what about rolling a combined value of 3? You can roll 1-2 or 2-1, so two results -> 2%.
The closer you get to the middle value, the more likely it gets. So the majority of results are going to be tracking the average pretty closely. With each dice you add the effect grows more and more pronounced.
So if you have your Fireball and roll 8 dice you are basically never going to be seeing outliers. Neither to the low nor to the high end of damage.
So in that regard this mod will not do anything noticeable in terms of the distribution of the results. But the feat will raise the average by about 0.6 to 2 per dice rolled, depending on the dice used (d4 to d12).
Getting ones 70% of the time is obviously hyperbole, but feeling like the negative result of rolling a 1 is coming up more often compared to the comparable positive result of rolling a 20 is a more or less ubiquitous cognitive bias. Bad outcomes just stick in your mind more then good ones. Every time the bad outcome happens this gets reinforced even further.
Also, coming at it from a different angle: Why would Larian skew the rolls toward the lower end?
Historically, if a game fudges the numbers it's always either in the players favour (XCOM on lower difficulties for example) or trying to reduce extreme results, like Baldur's Gate karmic dice preventing long streaks of failures of successes.
Compared to that I don't see incentives for developers to make failure more likely
1st of all its exactly as advertised so does in the vanilla melee version of the feat you roll damage dice twice and pick the higher result.
When it comes how much the feat gonna increase the average damage goes beyond usual calculation since I assume it brings same stuff into the calculation as the melee counterpart. So any + damages that you might have from damage riders and other buffs (phallar aluve shriek etc.) that procs through this spell's damage, will also get rerolled. So effect will be higher than estimated.
An other thing to be aware of is make sure u set the karmic dice "off" in your options, so it will be really random.
Hope u guys enjoy.
From a dev perspective, they would certainly do this to account for expected power builds and layered buffs, as test data could have shown them there was a need to create an artificial difficulty to balance that out. What it does then, is make optimized builds and layered buffing the new normal (requirement). To make levels 1-4 have a preponderance of 1s also sets the perception that your characters are inexperienced. When this happens less often, starting around levels 5-8, you are meant to perceive that they are getting more capable (items, stats and buffs notwithstanding, I'm only talking about bare rolls).
The inconsistency has been experienced by many others. One small example of these discussions.
Tbh I got no idea or a sight, like made me question if the game's dices are loaded. But if theres such an error, it could be anything like karmic dice doesnt turn off, even if u turn it off in the options kind of thing. We had seen armor calculations going wrong on a reload if u dont use armor fixer etc. So would need actual data before anything else.
Until Larian reveals how they are using rand(), then its absolutely their fault. This function in C does not generate actual random numbers, it produces a seemingly erratic but perfectly deterministic sequence of integers, which begins at some initial number and always follows the same path according to its seed. This is why the karmic dice 'solution' was offered. A better solution would be to generate a new seed every time a new number is produced, but they would have to enter a public discussion for us to know how they are handling this.
curve looks like." It makes it hard to take you seriously.
Anyway, without data, all you're doing is yelling into the void that you're experiencing what feels like a statistical anomaly. But statistical anomalies happen. For all you know, your streak of low rolls is being offset by someone else's streak of high rolls. Clustering doesn't mean non-random, especially if your sample size is small.
https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/206
About brokenness; actually I did this for smth totally else. Seeing nexus doesn't have that kind of feat, I thought why shouldn't I make this available as a feat also.