Perpetually low Dice rolls, is there a problem with the dice roller?

[AzureTheGamerKobold]

I am noticing an odd trend when it comes to the dice roller in this game. Like is it me or is this thing prone to the low end of the spectrum? doing this dice roll series in chapter 4 and i have a HUGE bonus to the skill but i'm failing 90% of the time because the rolls seem to always be a 1-3 and nothing higher. Looking at my7 combat rolls i'm also noticing how low these tend to be as well... now i've played D&D alot of years and rolling below a 10 is fairly rare, rolling a 1 is about as common as rolling a 20... it just doesn't happen to often.

So i'm sitting here wondering--- is the problem the dice roller? is it weighted toward the low spectrum? what the heck is going on here... is no way it should consistently be rolling these low rolls.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[GreyFox]

Yea it's dumb and the fact that you can't take 10 in a lot of these situations is just piling on top of the crap cake.

[Veganleader1]

I've seen countless times rolling like 1-4 about 5 times in a row then getting a 17 or so. Definately seems like it happens a lot. When this is happening it doesnt go anywhere near the middle of the scale sometimes. Does not seem random.

[JonWoo]

I usually don't pay any mind to "random" chance in games but I'm getting the same feeling with this game. I seem to roll both extremes more than middling rolls.

[Fendelphi]

At other times, you make several crits right after each other(not always confirmed). Such is the nature of rolls.


Due to the difficulty of the game and the amount of situations where you need to roll a dice, it is probably confirmation bias. You rarely notice all the times where your rolled 15+ while fighting, picking locks, disarming traps or detecting stuff, but you start taking notice when you roll less than 5 several times in a row.


Unless someone runs some empirical tests with several thousands(10.000-100.000) rolls that show otherwise(or the devs saying "yes, we altered the dice"), I would say that it is the fickle nature of the D20.

[itwillbefuntheysaid]

I just rolled 15 times between 1 and 3 with d20 in a row

[Reaver79]

Originally posted by itwillbefuntheysaid:

I just rolled 15 times between 1 and 3 with d20 in a row

Yea thats my fault, i tried rolling under 8 10 times in a row and i seems to be rolling 20's every 3'd roll aprox. So im draining your avarage.. ;)
Skill tests does often seem to fail alot more often than they should, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥ luck streaks can and should happen when your playing with chance.
I notice that Jaethal seems to score 1 or more crits every battle, leading to me to take her toy away as the damned scythe procced aoe negative energy dmg. That talks in favoure of the other end of the scale she only has a chance to crit on a 20 (possibly 19 if the weapon is keen), yet it happens every fight sometimes more than once, since im not scrolling back through the log i cant say she aint just the lucky one and the rest are missing out tho.

Originally posted by Fendelphi:

Unless someone runs some empirical tests with several thousands(10.000-100.000) rolls that show otherwise(or the devs saying "yes, we altered the dice"), I would say that it is the fickle nature of the D20.

Excatly, do keep in mind its kinda common that you get caught up in only noticing the bad rolls..

[khinra]

Dice roller is fine, yes it is annoying when failing a 3+ roll to open a locked chest (especially since that means you have to come back when you level up) but as far as Im concerned it covers randomness very well.

[SlyDevil]

It only seems like a problem because you are noticing the low results. For example if i'm trying to disarm a trap and i need to roll a 5 or more and i fail 5 times. But i could have rolled 20's - 10 times before and i wouldn't notice because i usually don't check when i win the roll by how much.

[Darth Sanguine]

Yeah, the damn dice are weighted. I keep rolling minimum damage on every attack - even when I reload and try again.

[Super Shotty Bros. Mario]

I've had this problem and always will. I chock it up to perpetual bad luck. Its not just for me here but everywhere. To be fair though, my dice rolls here seem even more crap than usual.

[Morgian]

It isn't so much the dice rolls which are fishy. It is reloading and getting the same result 10 times in a row (tried it with the finger-of-death trapped boy near the old Sycamore). Makes me wonder about the programming...in Civilization you have to enable new random results when you re-roll, otherwise it is always the same. Do they have a similar mechanic in place?

[El Diablo Blanco]

Originally posted by Fendelphi:

At other times, you make several crits right after each other(not always confirmed). Such is the nature of rolls.


Due to the difficulty of the game and the amount of situations where you need to roll a dice, it is probably confirmation bias. You rarely notice all the times where your rolled 15+ while fighting, picking locks, disarming traps or detecting stuff, but you start taking notice when you roll less than 5 several times in a row.


Unless someone runs some empirical tests with several thousands(10.000-100.000) rolls that show otherwise(or the devs saying "yes, we altered the dice"), I would say that it is the fickle nature of the D20.

I searched for this topic because I wanted to see if anyone had done any actual testing on this rather than, like you said, just notice the hard times.

In my own experience, I seem to lean towards "predetermined suck" or at least "established suck" as my hypothesis. Whenever I seem to find an unnatural string of rolling 1's and 2's, I will reload and... get almost the exact same rolls.

During my most recent test, in the DLC dungeon, I have just finished fighting through the goblins and spiders and then stumbled upon a room with a trap on the floor. No biggie. My rogue rolls a Nat 1 and biffs the trap disarm, gets the whole party nuked with a chain lightning spell. I reload. The DC for the trap was not very high and I'm using Octavia as my rogue, who has a very respectable modifier to Trickery. She rolls a Natural 1 again. The party, holding up down the hall this time, still gets nuked with the Chain Lightning. I reload. She rolled a 2, failing the trap disarm. I try again, she rolls another Natural 1 and the party, standing at the second pair of double doors down the hall, gets nuked with Chain Lightning.

This goes on for seven reloads. She would miss the trap disarm roll and then biff with a natural 1 or would just flat out start the reload with a natural 1. I've played D20 tabletop for decades and it is truly a rare thing when two or three natural 1's or 20's come up in a row. On a perfectly balanced 20-sided die, any number has a 5% chance of being rolled. If you roll a natural 1, it happens. A second one is comical, because it's 5% of 5%, or 0.05% chance. A third one is worthy of taking a pic of and showing it to your nerdy friends who would understand the astronomical chance of rolling three in a row. 0.0005% chance, if you're wondering. It can happen, sure, and it does. But it's historic and not something that should be happening SEVERAL times in a single play session.

It's almost like we are playing under a DM who gets upset that the party is doing so well against his bad guys so he starts fudging a few dice rolls to make us hurt.

This is further believable because the VERY NEXT ROOM after the whole fiasco with the Trap Who Shall Not Be Disarmed, my party, who had been doing very well against the goblins and spiders met their doom as two 12HD Movanic Devas, two 15HD Satyr archers and the Wandering Traveler said hello. Half of my party had just hit level 6.

I can almost hear some nerdy, spiteful DM laughing as he squeaks out, "Make a reflex save vs my Flamestrike!!"

[Babbles]

Originally posted by SoundofSilence:

There have been lot's of discussions about this, but the conclusions have been that it's a fairly uniform distribution (based upon numerous tests with large sample sizes).

I've probably answered on every thread, heh, so why not continue :)

There are 2 problems with a pseudo-random number generator: long sequences of low roll followed by long sequences of high rolls 1,1,3,4,6,3,8,4, then 17,20,20,19,14,17 or every roll has a diametric follow up - 1,19, 3,16, 11, 5, 18. The trick is to balance these effects, hence 'pseudo random'.

I would like to say this game seems a bit biased towards the sequences, hence you thinking you are getting 'unlucky rolls' some of the time.

However I personally think it is just biased against the player, on purpose, as an aspect of the sadistic game balance theory some developers use (Owlcat have even left jokes around the internet about this).

After 800+ hours, several runs through Varnhold Vanishing, I simply see the enemies getting a lot more 19s than the player. VV is a good test for this as you generally fight the same or fewer enemies than the 6 in the players team (big slow hard hitting cyclopse). 6 PCs with 19, 17 or even (one one or two) 15 crit ranges get a similar number of crits as teams of 4 or 5 19 crit range cyclopse.

[Veganleader1]

Try quicksaving often and watch as your win rate on trap checks and combat rolls drops for the first 6-7 loads. I'm a quicksave junkie and so so often wil rolll 6 or more 1-3's when all i need is a 4 to open a chest or something similar. Why? Because I know that I want what's in that chest and that it will be an unlikely scenario that I will come back later as everything is time sensitive in the game. Nobody is going to convince me that the developers didn't put a penalty on rolls that happen right after a save load.

I kinda feel it necessary to abuse save/load to play this game. You lose trap rolls and miss exp and take damage, you lose a chest roll and don't get important loot, you don't succeed at a kingdom roll and your kingdom falls behind. Maybe I wouldn't so fanatically save-dance but you just get punished hard for fails. And this is after having specialized characters to deal with things like trickery. So I do it, and just deal with the minute or even several minutes or so of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ rolls and several reloads just to get a success to progress at my game.

[Pozhinateli]

RNG is never random. That is script that is supposed to make illusion of random, while results are calculated based on some value. In most cases that is time, sometimes CPU clock. I would not expect from this game any kind of advenced random generator script.