Why not shared skill checks?

[shadowclasper]

Look, I'm loving the game, but for real, why are all checks only handled by the character initiating things?

It's not like I can back out and come back in on every check, sometimes I can and that's fine, but it'd just be flat out better if the game, when for example, it asked me for a knowledge check, used the knowledge of a party member participating in the conversation (not hidden and grouped up with me).

[Sima Marlin]

Originally posted by Djayc85:

How does skill check work in a real life DnD campaign

Party can help, but usually the person asking does the rolls.

For fifth edition particularly, you can give an advantage to a person making the roll should you assist them in meaningful way.

Example : you roll if you know what a monster you are tracking at Underdark, you have a Drow in party who's from underdark, they can give the roller advantage as they can verify/ help to narrow down what creature they are looking at based on their experiences.

Advantage means you roll the dice twice and take higher roll.

Alternatively, DM occasionally allows all people who want to or who are proficient with certain skills to make a check.

Example : You find an ancient ruin with a statue of a woman. Everyone with proficiency in History would be allowed to make a check to see if they know who the woman is or what the ruins are. In this case everyone that fits the bill would make the skill check, even entire party, at some cases. Should someone succeed in a way that makes them sure they are right, they could explain the situation to party in a correct way.


For Baldurs Gate 3 I wished they'd go mix approach : Discussions are discusser only, but skill / perception / investigation / history checks, outside discussions would be "all people who qualify" type of thing.

That way your over talkative smelly Dwarf can make their horrible discussion checks, but if they go and claim that an ancient Temple is a toilet for giants, that more lore sawwy wizard could right them up on that.

Of course, this is already done for traps and hidden objects as people will just use that char for those tasks naturally.

[Blackdragon]

Originally posted by HozzMidnight:

It's worrying. They are far more focused on stupid cosmetic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ than improving the gameplay. No rolling stats either, despite being promised for years. Instead you can cut your ♥♥♥♥ off and get a vitiligo slider. People are really giving Larian a pass on basic ♥♥♥♥ they have chose to leave out of the game despite having 6 years and an open ended budget.

Yeah, once you put this stuff into perspective, these are the real questions. Larian said they didn't have time/resources to implement something as simple as stat rolling... something that dirt-cheap games like Solasta have, and perhaps more importantly - something that has been iconic for Baldur's Gate character creation since forever!

The FIRST thing you did when creating a new BG character was roll for stats (and roll... and roll :D). Rolling is also the default way of getting stats in tabletop D&D. Literally how could not have been implemented from the very beginning? That's ridiculous, really.

And it actually IS important for gameplay, since only with rolling you can get a 16+ stat to increase to 18 by race bonus, or even an 18 to increase to 20. Why does it matter so much? Because in D&D 5e you get either ability score increases, or feats. Having to take an ASI or two in order to pump your main stat to 20 robs you of 1 or 2 feats. And since BG3 only goes to level 12, you ONLY GET THREE FEATS. TWO OF WHICH YOU WILL HAVE TO SPEND ON ASI.

Oh and Larian also didn't include the variant human with its bonus feat... despite robbing the default human of its six +1 ability score bonuses.

As a result, due to lack of rolling for stats (and also no variant human), and thus the need to take ASI's instead of feats, rather than having 3-4 feats to play with, we will only get ONE feat. ONE FEAT PER LEVEL 12 CHARACTER. This is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ridiculous.

What did we get instead? Yep. Penis sizes and vitiligo. WHO in their right mind cares about this in a D&D game? Vitiligo LOL... Didn't Larian make fun of people who chose to play white males when they could play tieflings and drow? Now suddenly they sacrifice actual important mechanics to implement a skin disorder that an extremely tiny minority of people suffer from? Their priorities are well and truly backward.