For some reason, it required a dice roll to determine if I...successfully said these words out loud?

There are plenty of options for weighting the dice in your favor. Send someone who has the right skill to deal with the situation instead of just using your main character for everything. Use Inspiration, which is pretty common to get. Use Guidance or Bardic Inspiration or any number of other spells and abilities…

I like the “1 is a critical fail” rule and do use it. However, I never enforce it rigidly and it almost never creates an inescapable state of failure. Also, because I use rolls sparingly (unless my players are trying insane things), ones come up very rarely - and make for fun situations. I never. Ever. Use the stupid…

Oof. This is a weapons-grade bad take from my perspective, which is surprising because I’m usually right with you, but I just can’t get behind this opinion. Knowing that my future playthroughs have these other options “if I build X character next time, I bet I get a better shot at it” is part of the appeal to me.

The point is an action can fail even if it seems mundane. In the case of “reading a dog’s tags” the failure could be “you startle the dog and it bites you.”

Now, as I play BG3 I’m being pretty strict with myself about allowing things to play out as the dice fall

Makes sense that this would be pretty divisive, but I’m loving how weirdly capricious the game is sometimes. I wouldn’t want every game to handle skills the way BG3 does, sure, but I don’t know as I’ve had a RPG that lets me fail like this one does.

I might not be so anti-dice if I had encountered more honest players. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to lose multiple characters over the course of a single campaign due to an unlucky string of bad rolls, but everyone else’s characters always seem to escape relatively unharmed. Start of the fight with a BBEG :…

I’m a long time player of the table top, and very rarely have I encountered a flat pass/fail situation. Outside of combat, even if you fail you still have other options to explore. There’s plenty of wiggle room of passing and failing. Sure you successfully picked the lock, but since you nailed the exact number you…

Worse, there’s a way around it, a way to “correct” this for yourself, but it’s save-scumming, and you just feel dirty and rubbish.

AcTuAlLy, it’s usually in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. At least in 3.5, it was a variant rule found in the DMG.

What absolute nonsense. Failing is fun in BG3, they clearly learned a lot from Disco Elysium. Chaotic RNG is the basis of TTRPG fun and both games absolutely nail. Shame on Walker for his tired contrarianism. Must be fucking exhausting!

Sounds like you have already built up in your naming of quick save, a disdain for using that mechanism.  In the name of usability and accessibility, I'm glad that they allow the use of "quick save" to let players enjoy the game the way they want to.  If you want to pray to rngesus and never use quick save, go for it!…

“It could be that just missing that all-important 15 sees a player character die, absolutely devastating your story, changing everything, and in turn introducing a whole new character to the story.”

I know this is a bit off-topic, but if a GM is allowing a single roll to determine whether a character lives or dies,…

Congrats on never tripping over your own feet while walking.

Article fails to mention how some genuinely AMAZING scenes unfold on failed dice rolls. I have intentionally failed rolls by save scumming to see alternate outcomes vs successful rolls and sometimes those failed rolls lead to really great moments / scenes or very dramatic events. For example, very early in the game on…

Right? Prefacing a rant about how you hate dice with “I’m not anti-dice” feels a lot like when your uncle says “I’m not racist, but” and then goes off on some crazy racist bullshit for 20 minutes.

“Oh, and at the other extreme, imagine if they could just let you turn off the animation altogether and just immediately get a result, rather than sit there hammering at mouse buttons, waiting for it to bloody let you click on the “Continue” button. Nope.”

Disclaimer: In a former life, I was BG3 lead writer Adam Smith’s boss. But he abandoned me to go work for Larian so I hate him.

I dunno, this is kind of a trash take imo. I found the game to be very good about playing with failed rolls in a way a live DM might.