I’m new to both DnD and cRPGs, I’ve read about what the karmic dice does but I wanted to know your opinions as well.
Does it really make it for a “better” experience? Can fights go seriously wrong or extend for a longer time when not using it? What do you all think about it?
EDIT: please read this comment by @[email protected], it explains how the dice really works, something I didn’t get at first, thank you burgundymyr!
What does karmic dice do?
It’s a sort of bad luck protection to avoid making you roll low for too many times in a row, it’s an on/off toggle in game settings. The downside is it also works for enemies.
The actual math behind it is not know however (unfortunately).
This is not accurate. It makes you (and enemies) succeed and fail more often if you/ they have had a streak of the other. It has been tested extensively.
As a result it punishes a high armor class/stats builds and rewards more actions (summons, extra attack, etc).
I highly recommend turning it off if you understand the mechanics of 5e. It’s fine if you don’t understand how things work and just want to play.
Oh, it works against too much “good luck” as well then? Like it normalizes your streaks to avoid too many of either good or bad rolls? I definitely didn’t understand that.
I don’t, I knew nothing about DnD when I started but I’m trying my best to learn. Thank you for the clarification!
Yes and no. It doesn’t care about what number you roll, just the result of the roll (success or failure). It will help you if you roll a 5 ten times in a row and you fail all those checks, but if you pass all those checks because of bonuses or because the target number was low, then it will make you more likely to fail. Although, in not actually sure you can get ten successes or failures in a row with karmic dice on.
In DnD your skill checks (except for opposed rolls c which we’ll ignore for now) have a DC which is the number you have to roll to pass, that target number is shown on the screen in bg3. You also get bonuses to the roll (also shown on screen under the die). Attacks and spells with saving throws work the same way. Roll a d20, add bonuses, and see if your number was high enough to pass. Saving throws are slightly different because the defender is rolling, but it’s the same idea, they want to roll higher than the DC of the spell.
So all that to say, karmic dice does NOT smooth the rolls and make it likely to get an even distribution of high and low rolls, it smooths successes and failures so that regardless of how hard a skill check was or how easy it was to hit an enemy, you will be more/less likely to succeed or fail m multiple times in a row.