Is "Karmic Dice" necessarily in the player's favour?

[SotiCoto]

Or can it start spontaneously generating failures if the player succeeds too much?

[Ellie]

Originally posted by Tenor Sounds:

Originally posted by Seraphiel:

Honestly, it doesn't balance out.

Enemies miss way more than you will (unless you've built your party really badly) and giving them a guaranteed 33%+ hit rate when they might have a 10% rate in reality will only hurt you. I'm not exactly an expert player but turning karmic dice off has really improved my experience a huge amount.

Fair, but are we 100% sure on the "they can only miss twice" thing? Is that just from your observations, or did someone on reddit do a bunch of tests? That seems a bit much, even for karmic dice.

It may also be that I'm still in Act I and not really worrying about maximizing AC so something like an enemy having a 10% chance to hit seems like a pipe dream atm. Like I said in an earlier comment, I feel like the more you specialize/min-max your character the more it makes sense to turn karmic dice off. But for a rando playing on balanced difficulty with a messy build it's likely more of a benefit than a hinderance.

If you're using Karmic dice to cheese the mechanics you may as well drop the difficulty to easy and call it a day.

[One Man Army]

Karmic Dice balances rolls both for you and your enemies.
This may work for you or against you.
For instance, If you have high armor AC and enemies miss in a row then the system may force a hit/critical on you.

I think it's best to turn Karmic Dice off, for a more natural experience.

[Tenor Sounds]

Originally posted by Lizzy:

If you're using Karmic dice to cheese the mechanics you may as well drop the difficulty to easy and call it a day.

Eh, I like kind of the difficulty between Easy and Balanced that the Karmic dice sort of represent, at least for my current first-time-through splitscreen co-op save. It keeps things moving so we can keep the momentum of the story going, has rolls mostly in our favor but still allows for tension during fights and reasons to use our cool abilities in smart ways.

[=DeadShot=]

I play on tactitian and only boss fights are realy hard and only 1 (Gortash) in the throne room is impossible for me to win. So the fights are not that bad.

[D YellowMadness]

Originally posted by Lizzy:

Originally posted by Tenor Sounds:

Fair, but are we 100% sure on the "they can only miss twice" thing? Is that just from your observations, or did someone on reddit do a bunch of tests? That seems a bit much, even for karmic dice.

It may also be that I'm still in Act I and not really worrying about maximizing AC so something like an enemy having a 10% chance to hit seems like a pipe dream atm. Like I said in an earlier comment, I feel like the more you specialize/min-max your character the more it makes sense to turn karmic dice off. But for a rando playing on balanced difficulty with a messy build it's likely more of a benefit than a hinderance.

If you're using Karmic dice to cheese the mechanics you may as well drop the difficulty to easy and call it a day.

I don't consider that cheesing. You can argue that it's not pure RNG if getting multiple 3's in a row isn't allowed but I'd argue that if pure RNG means multiple 3's in a row & "failing" through no fault of your own when no non-RNG options were offered doesn't make for a compelling or fair experience.

I only like RNG when it forces me to strategies my way out of a tough situation. Not when it completely negates strategy & guarantees a fail scenario. Especially when the consequences are that a character dies & the entire story is far less interesting without them.

I know that's subjective but that's kind of my point. People don't deserve a penalty for expecting a setting to do what the description intentionally implied it would do & trying to use it to make the game more fun.

Especially if the penalty is that it actually ends up doing the exact opposite of what it implied most of the time because better management of the odds on the player's part means higher odds of the game lowering their dice rolls on purpose, which isn't RNG.

[Ellie]

Originally posted by D YellowMadness:

Originally posted by Lizzy:

If you're using Karmic dice to cheese the mechanics you may as well drop the difficulty to easy and call it a day.

I don't consider that cheesing. You can argue that it's not pure RNG if getting multiple 3's in a row isn't allowed but I'd argue that if pure RNG means multiple 3's in a row & "failing" through no fault of your own when no non-RNG options were offered doesn't make for a compelling or fair experience.

I only like RNG when it forces me to strategies my way out of a tough situation. Not when it completely negates strategy & guarantees a fail scenario. Especially when the consequences are that a character dies & the entire story is far less interesting without them.

I know that's subjective but that's kind of my point. People don't deserve a penalty for expecting a setting to do what the description intentionally implied it would do & trying to use it to make the game more fun.

Especially if the penalty is that it actually ends up doing the exact opposite of what it implied most of the time because better management of the odds on the player's part means higher odds of the game lowering their dice rolls on purpose, which isn't RNG.

What you did here was to construct this argument:

(Position) "Karmic dice isn't cheesing"
(Argument) "Here are four paragraphs for why RNG is a bad system, which is why cheesing it is ok"

If you're playing a game that has a large RNG component and activate a setting that's specifically there to increase your rate of good rolls, that's cheesing. You might as well reload after a failed roll, or get a mod that just auto-wins all rolls.

You're free to do whatever you think enhances the experience for you. I'm not making a moral condemnation when I say that karmic dice are cheesing the mechanics. Maybe you really don't enjoy the mechanics, so they ought to be cheesed. But it is cheesing.

[BigJ]

Karmic dice are a cope mechanic.

Equivalent of asking the dm to fumble rolls.

[D YellowMadness]

Originally posted by Lizzy:

Originally posted by D YellowMadness:

I don't consider that cheesing. You can argue that it's not pure RNG if getting multiple 3's in a row isn't allowed but I'd argue that if pure RNG means multiple 3's in a row & "failing" through no fault of your own when no non-RNG options were offered doesn't make for a compelling or fair experience.

I only like RNG when it forces me to strategies my way out of a tough situation. Not when it completely negates strategy & guarantees a fail scenario. Especially when the consequences are that a character dies & the entire story is far less interesting without them.

I know that's subjective but that's kind of my point. People don't deserve a penalty for expecting a setting to do what the description intentionally implied it would do & trying to use it to make the game more fun.

Especially if the penalty is that it actually ends up doing the exact opposite of what it implied most of the time because better management of the odds on the player's part means higher odds of the game lowering their dice rolls on purpose, which isn't RNG.

What you did here was to construct this argument:

(Position) "Karmic dice isn't cheesing"
(Argument) "Here are four paragraphs for why RNG is a bad system, which is why cheesing it is ok"

If you're playing a game that has a large RNG component and activate a setting that's specifically there to increase your rate of good rolls, that's cheesing. You might as well reload after a failed roll, or get a mod that just auto-wins all rolls.

You're free to do whatever you think enhances the experience for you. I'm not making a moral condemnation when I say that karmic dice are cheesing the mechanics. Maybe you really don't enjoy the mechanics, so they ought to be cheesed. But it is cheesing.

I'd agree that it's at least technically cheesing if you used an exploit or turned on a setting that's off by default to do it but I don't consider this cheesing because it's on by default & it only prevents streaks that more often than not just lead to an automatic fail of a whole scenario.

I think that's more like just not turning on Hardcore Mode in Fallout New Vegas or choosing not to use the intentionally bad joke character in a fighting game. I guess it's kinda moot in this case though since karmic dice actually causes the problem more often than it solves it.

No idea what they were thinking designing it that way. Making a setting that 100% guarantees frequent catastrophic failure chains, labeling it like it does the opposite, & turning it on by default so it seems like it's the intended way to play.

My general experience when I had it on was 1-3 mild/good successes, 1-3 massive failures, repeat. Still, I'm enjoying the game so far now that I've turned that off.

Well, aside from making the mistake of going to the refectory with barely any combat experience at level 2 with 2 new/mostly new characters on my team & basic gear & then getting my ♥♥♥♥ kicked in repeatedly as a result while trying to learn basic mechanics but that's probably largely my fault for getting lost & missing 2 or 3 chances to explore other areas first when they were clearly presented to me.

I shouldn't have forgotten my usual open world rule (enter every place I find immediately) & fallen into my linear game rule: Avoid every place that's obviously presented to me so I don't miss optional stuff.

Regardless, I felt really smart when I finally won so big props to the gameplay for rewarding strategy & learning instead of just boiling down to headbutting a brick wall until you nail the cheese strat like most games do when you hit a difficulty spike.

Originally posted by BigJ:

Karmic dice are a cope mechanic.

Equivalent of asking the dm to fumble rolls.

A more understandable version of it though since most games have taught people that RNG numbers are always lies in the A.I.'s favor. Examples: 95 accuracy in Pokemon, Head 95% in Fallout New Vegas, everything about the Mario Kart games. I looked at that setting, saw that it was on by default, & thought it was just a make-the-game-cheat-less button.

[Callirgos]

Karmic dice only stops losing streaks. It's what you're DM has been doing for you all this time, and why most of his dice rolls are behind a screen.

IF you turn it off you should play Iron Man mode - otherwise it's just not hardcore legit.

[Tenor Sounds]

Originally posted by D YellowMadness:

No idea what they were thinking designing it that way. Making a setting that 100% guarantees frequent catastrophic failure chains, labeling it like it does the opposite, & turning it on by default so it seems like it's the intended way to play.

Again, just to be 100% clear, Karmic dice are not supposed to be making you fail if you succeed too much, only vise-versa; there's a specific update post by the devs I linked to in an earlier comment that spells that out very clearly. And in my experience playing, that's how they currently work.

It's possible there is a bug that is reverting it to an old / incorrect functionality, but I personally haven't experienced that behavior and doubt that's the case.

[D YellowMadness]

Originally posted by Tenor Sounds:

Originally posted by D YellowMadness:

No idea what they were thinking designing it that way. Making a setting that 100% guarantees frequent catastrophic failure chains, labeling it like it does the opposite, & turning it on by default so it seems like it's the intended way to play.

Again, just to be 100% clear, Karmic dice are not supposed to be making you fail if you succeed too much, only vise-versa; there's a specific update post by the devs I linked to in an earlier comment that spells that out very clearly. And in my experience playing, that's how they currently work.

It's possible there is a bug that is reverting it to an old / incorrect functionality, but I personally haven't experienced that behavior and doubt that's the case.

Oh right. I don't know why I forgot that so quickly. Doesn't line up with my experience at all though but I haven't had it off long so maybe I'll soon find that the game's RNG is just horrible regardless.

There was still this one enemy who dodged like 12 attacks & got hit like 3 times even though most of the attacks were stealth moves coming from behind at long range & he was threatened but I think that might've been a quirk of that specific enemy since his allies weren't doing that.