Baldur's Gate 3 is a Sweaty Dungeon Master

hello hello trying something new this time i worry a lot about making mega projects with elaborate editing and animation so this time i thought i'd just try writing a script and just showing some not so edited footage alongside us i also just woke up literally like a minute ago so you're going to get the joyful experience of hearing my voice change over time nice huh so let me know if this sucks or if it rules so i've been playing baldur's gate 3 early access i'm going to eventually use it as a talking point for something else first off the game is in early access it'll supposedly really come out in year point being it's rife with bugs and weird design issues and i fully expect to change a lot in the future this video isn't really a criticism of the quality of the game considering that it's technically not even a game yet oh i'm feeling it now it is 4am what i actually wanted to write the script about is a stupidly specific topic dialog roles and dialogue in general i guess this is going to be rambly so that topic will shift around a bit very exciting this is why my channel grew so quickly all right so in a video game whenever you're talking to some guy or a girl or squid man or whatever you'll be chatting them up and then you'll get a decision in some games notably older rpgs you might get a long list of options it was longer because it was text only you could include a mountain of options when all the dialogue was in your head and the characters all use basic animations if any at all in other games especially a bevy of ones from the alts and tens there was a lot of binary good evil options people would play through the game twice to see all the scenes for being good and then all the scenes for being bad if you're playing a bad man you choose bad man option like kicking a puppy or stealing from a grandma you know because that's just what evil is if you're like three years old if you're a good man if you good man a good man do good for big blue points but bad man red wow sorry if you can tell i don't have a high opinion of those so also london with those are games like mass effect that tried to do the same thing but they re-label good and bad as something else to make the decision seem less stupid than it actually was by calling good paragon and evil renegade there's just enough wiggle room for the player to not choose team red or team blue the whole game in theory you could choose blue and then a few minutes later choose red whether the writing actually reflected what you perceive the decision to be is another matter i'm really glad that we seem to be mostly be past that era of choose your alignment design and gaming it was it was the difference between knights of the old republic one and knights of the el republic two and one being a sith is tantamount to being an insipid street thug that shakes down old ladies for quarters and eats babies because you think it makes you cool and two you're actually just trying to accrue power and manipulate the world around you for your benefit but even then in a game that's supposedly about greys there wasn't that much in between being one stereotype or another stereotype but that's more of a star wars problem with its narratives anyway wow is that a rabbit over there let's chase that for a second okay so uh part of why video games are called role-playing games it's because they stem from tabletop games and those games there's no reward to speak of and there's no video it's just you and your imagination there are pre-made rule sets to try to cover as many scenarios as possible and to create a pre-made world for characters to inhabit warhammer is one of them dungeons and dragons is one of them uh shadowrun butthole adventures not really also uh a sort of gurps i just like saying gurps gerps it's very fun and these players are playing a role they are acting in a similar way a movie or a theater actor might act they're playing the part of the character they created so now if they make a big dumb ogre when put in a situation where they have to solve some basic math the human playing the game would be able to solve the math problem the character would not and so uh rule sets like dungeons and dragons consider this and give your character an intelligent stat your dm your dungeon master considers the difficulty of the math problem for your ogre and tells you to roll a die to determine if your ogre is smart enough to figure out the problem your intelligence is factored in and you get a result the randomness of rolling a die assists with the ambiguous nature of translating abstract notions into a game the human player then continues playing their role as the ogre either succeeding or failing the die decisions aren't there to make you succeed or fail so much as to create the conditions for the player to adapt the story as they role play it role-playing that's where the term comes from not because master chief or cloud strife are roles that's [ __ ] stupid this idea of taking concepts like intelligence wisdom strength and dexterity and so on and giving them obvious numerical factors in an effort to help you translate imagination into a discernible quantifiable game is why when video games started doing it they were also referred to as role playing games that's why they're called role-playing games even though you aren't playing a role you're just watching a pre-written character that's also why insufferable [ __ ] just jam numbers on the guns and then say their game has rpg elements it's a term that's lost all meaning in tabletop the randomness of the result is essential this is because the situations are all imaginary more importantly they are dynamic and specific to the people playing the game you can imagine yourself in a situation where your character wants to german suplex a dragon out of midair because your character is thematically imagined to be similar to luchador and he's a badass and a video game you can't do that unless it's a very specific animated scripted and voice situation the designers intended for you to be in and tabletop you can in tabletop you can do anything as long as you can roll a natural 20 any craziest thing you can imagine that the dm agrees is technically possible is something you can do imagination requires randomization otherwise every situation would be solved you can never suplex that dragon because the numbers would say you can't but if you roll a die that allows you to both critically succeed and critically fail you create a game that is also fair for the role you are playing in a video game randomizing roles is almost meaningless no i said almost in a video game the content is limited it isn't your imagination it's assets that have to be created in tabletop your options are limitless in programming you may only have one option or a blue and red option or even 10 options but they are still defined since all values and programming are known there's no reason to worry about randomizing for a result there's no imagination to factor in you can't suplex the dragon even if you can there's a defined parameter that requires very specific values to activate here's where the almost comes into play there is a slight value in randomizing results that value comes from forcing the player out of their comfort zone similar to creating the conditions for adaptive storytelling and tabletop in a video game you use randomness to create the conditions for adaptive gameplay many players if you give an option between 20 guns throughout the game they'll just use the first one they picked up and nothing else people are stupid and lazy like that that's why birth of the wild has insufferable durability system that definitely sucked ass a lot of people defend it because they think the idea is okay so they end up unwittingly endorsing a clearly broken system because they can't mentally divide concept from design but you know it was intended to force you into trying a wide variety of options which it sort of does and apparently also to make you use the master sword exclusively for cutting down trees and use bombs to kill most enemies because you don't want to have to worry about accessing the [ __ ] menus constantly to exchange out weapons anyways in gameplay things like randomizing bullet spread or randomizing chances to succeed a shot are there to force you to be adaptive to dynamically change your approach in some way in dialogue players typically will choose the best option even in baldur's gate 3 the developers have looked at their data and said that this is exactly what players are doing because there's usually an obviously best option if given a list of one incredibly hostile option one stupid option one neutral option and one option that gets on the npc's good side players will probably choose the quote-unquote good one randomizing results ensures that even if the player chooses this good option it may still piss off the npc or not convince them or make your dick fall out of your pants or something if you're a designer that made five scenes for one encounter you don't want 90 of all players seeing the exact same sequence i'll come back to that notion but just remember this type of approach hinges on all of the outcomes being desirable in some way baldur's gate 3 has a lot of roles balder's gate 3 does for dice rolls what e 621 does for animal crossing it does a great deal and most of it's bad you see baldur's gate 3 uses dungeons and dragons 5th edition as its entire base so if dnd handles a situation with a d20 or d6 you better believe baldur's gate is going to slavishly do the exact same thing when you walk past a trap you roll to see whether your character can see it or not when you try to shoot a guy with a bow which you'll be doing a lot of you roll to see whether it hit or not when you see a magic chest you roll to see whether you know it's magic you roll to disarm the trap on the chest you roll to lockpick the chest when you talk to someone you roll to see whether your character remembers the historical fact you roll to see whether your character can convince an npc of something and so on so many of them there is a [ __ ] ton of rolling dice in this video game with completely solved parameters this is not tabletop this is not imagination such excessive rolling is not needed in a video game with so few choices and such a small amount of wiggle room for interpretation in a video game a check on historical knowledge is solved on tabletop perhaps the knowledge being discussed isn't even in the setting it could be homebrewed you don't know as such there's a small amount of randomness required to solve any situation in the video game the knowledge is defined it's solved and immutable as such you can freely define what the requirement to know the information happens to be perhaps knowing santa claus isn't real requires a wisdom of five perhaps knowing santa claus is actually real and is a weave-borne demon that haunts the concept of the holidays or something requires a wisdom of 15. if you meet these requirements as long as the programmer placed them into the game these are things you should know if you meet the requirement it isn't random yet in boulder's gate you can actually reload the same sequence over and over again and get a different result on whether your catcher knows something or not having randomization in something like a visual check makes a little more sense if there's a secret button on the wall the player might know about it from another playthrough having this be controlled by character limits is a good thing roundedness in this situation is also a little more warranted even in real life let's say you can't find your phone as is often the case you are disheveled sweating fat and lumbering to and fro from the dark corners of your room probing the perimeter of your nesting ground like a mole rat looking for tube roots as you frantically claw apart your furniture and stuff dusty cheeto fragments into your drooling mall you're not guaranteed to find that phone your intelligence didn't get any higher it certainly can't go any lower your eyes just didn't glance the right spot at the right time there's a certain amount of what we perceive as randomness in a visual check capability aside so point being randomness in a video game is okay so long as you design for it some situations may call for it some may not you cannot and should not blanket apply an entire rule set to every single situation in a video game this is the issue with baldur's gate there is too much goddamn rolling remember the thing that i told you to remember from earlier how i said that designers can utilize randomness to ensure that players can't stay in their comfort zone and have to try new situations also recall before that i said that rolling a die and randomizing the result in tabletop is less about succeeding in failing and more about generating a scenario for the player to role play their character through it in other words randomizing results in real d d is about improvisation and in video game d d it's about showcasing content so then for both tabletop and video games there's commonly known ways for the player involved to ruin the game in tabletop you can get that guy that guy is a player that is quite frankly a stupid little [ __ ] it can be the girlfriend that doesn't want to be there or the sweaty dorito junkie that tries to metagame every decision or even the player that doesn't show up for sessions for two months and then demands that you reinsert them into the narrative it could even be the dm dms can be stupid little dick nuggets too maybe the dm doesn't like one of the players and has rocks fall on his head maybe he tosses him down a pit because he couldn't roll on 19. whatever or maybe the dm has a very specific story he wants to tell and when the players start accidentally crafting their own experience he sends a divine being to come down from heaven to reset the situation and force everyone back into the acting positions that the dm actually wants you know undermining the whole point of playing a tabletop game that guy for tabletop dice rolls which are about generating improvisation no matter who that guy is you can ruin the improvisation by just refusing to cooperate if you're an actor who's intent on ruining the scene it's going to be ruined because you have a tiny penis and the world simply must know for video game dice rolls which are about showcasing that guy can only be one person the writer or the director you know whoever the [ __ ] is who's actually in control of the scene effectively the video game dm this is because like i said randomizing results in video games has almost no value it only has one value showcasing content if your game has no content or showcasing whether for narrative or gameplay it doesn't need randomization for this shitty early morning topic of dice rolls and video game dialogue which now feels as robust and complete as a christmas sweater i will not iterate on baldur's gate too much of this [ __ ] game is about failing if there's an area with five land mines in it in between your character pathfinding over them and just rolling to see the [ __ ] things it'll probably take 20 minutes of reloads to get all of them if you pass by a statue and you're just curious what it is it'll probably take about five minutes of reloads to get your character to stop being like free statue and to suddenly remember that he's a [ __ ] scholar that has seen one or two books in his life in combat you're going to be missing a lot especially if you're a wizard for some reason this is xcom without the lessons xcom learned by being xcom roles in xcom need to be over 90 or above or the game is basically unplayable if a role in xcom is not 100 you should expect it to miss half cover is no cover i have missed 100 success roles in xcom somehow i am an xcom veteran i hate xcom and that is why i love xcom point being a lesson learned very early in developing these games is that missing 20 of your shots are something similar to the player feels a lot like missing 80 percent of your shots it feels terrible even if you logically know it to not be the case baldur's gate has not learned this lesson baldur's gate combat is just as good as his dialogue rules and his dialogue roles wildly suck ass experiencing a good dialogue in a video game should feel like being a teenager and being allowed to grope a boob for the first time it's not really a big deal and you'll certainly be admonished for recounting it 10 years later but that moment of exploration served as a road bump that slowed your path however briefly in an instant to inexorably becoming a high school custodian keep out of it baldur's gate threes dialogue options have the breast feel of a ziploc bag filled with warm dog urine which is to say there's a lot of it a surprising amount in fact but it isn't a boob and why you see most of the time the dialogue doesn't matter the outcome will be more or less the same no matter what you do but there's usually one option with a roll ended that results in you getting a [ __ ] from a small dirty asian goblin and all your party members besides bat nose think you're cool because of it that's the good option the rest are bad or are simply a pathway to escaping the conversation without taking damage or more often being forced into a fight there's a minor variety in exploring these pathways to nowhere but they all lead to the same place two voice lines and a fat load of nothing the good option always has two or three roblox in the way fail any of them and you're treated like an idiot for trying to roll the die at all and are kicked out of the conversation encounters with these conversations also tend to happen with no warning you're heavily injured after a fight and walk onto the wrong patch of ground an npc appears out of nowhere you are given a role you cannot possibly succeed and you are punished for not succeeding it by being thrust into a fight against one billion lions all of which are perched upon machine gun emplacements while you try to pull up your beltless pantalones your pencil thin penis flapping in the autumn breeze conversations in this game have the same amount of depth as its character creator sure it looks like a lot but it's actually just a small collection of really bad character craters because too much focus is being placed on novelty instead of depth once you select the various races you'll find they have about half a dozen heads to choose from with no way to alter their features and that's about it just skin tones and eye color a lot of hair though unless you have horns for some reason also if you're balding you get like two options they didn't have my captain picardus care so i had to choose no hair the facial hair also sucks because so much emphasis is placed on either gigantic beards or fanciful beards but that's every game that bothers to have them when it asks me to create what i desire i discovered that i couldn't because i hated all the faces i didn't want any of them did like the idea of having a devil girl though the t flanks really like that was really in the line but they aren't allowed to have bangs for some reason i guess because of clipping because of the horns even though some of the hair on normal ones clips into the faces anyway not a fan of the character creator really not uh really rudimentary focuses way too much on novelty just like the rest of the game that's that's my point anyway back to conversations let's say let's say that you have an intelligent set of 16. pretty good pretty good you know the latin family name for penguins or something sometimes you know depending on roles it's vanessa die by the way the smartest someone can be without magic is a twenty so the game has you roll a d20 the game also tells you that you get a plus three bonus from your intelligence stat of sixteen somehow without knowing anything about d and d you might think then that you'd need a role of two or above if your stat was a 15. this is not how d and d works of course but if you don't know you don't know that's true but no your target role is a 10. factoring in your knowledge of penguins your target role is now a seven that's right your eclectic knowledge of land birds has improved your odds by 15 if you were the smartest person in the world your odds of succeeding the role may have improved by twenty percent who can say exactly you failed the role of course because this is baldur's gate three baldur's gate 3 is a [ __ ] hard ass that doesn't care if your role playing is jackie chan you will drop that baby and you will hit yourself in the face with the latter you will get trouble even if the odds to succeed are 50 you'll probably fail seventy percent of the time and it will feel like ninety percent of the time you reload your save and try again fifteen times somehow you always roll below a seven somehow your main state of intelligence does not [ __ ] matter even though the role is for the stat of intelligence defeated you choose to stop bothering with these reloads and choose the generic option oh the mp says as a result okay inseen that is the breastfeel of baldur's gate 3. randomization and dialogue is only as good as the paths it sets you on if there's only one path we're choosing then remove the dice roll and have it be a raw check if there are several outcomes for a sequence but 9 out of 10 result in your characters dying or being humiliated or shamed in some way there's really only one the worth of randomization and video game dialogue hinges completely on the quality of the writing i can think of very very few games in which this actually works it almost never works disco elysium is the only one that immediately comes to mind and discolusion works because its writing is superb even if your character fails and slips back into bad habits the character writing of those sequences is so powerful that it might be said that failing your checks is worth more than succeeding them again this hinges totally on the quality of your writing and the consequences of the roles baldur's gate threes this is a weird sequence balder's gates baldur's gate threes bothers gate threes dialogue is not disco elysium quality it never will be the differences between dialogue options are usually a single voice line more importantly the designers treat options as being inherently superior but more difficult consequences in baldur's gate are either beneficial to everyone or result in [ __ ] bloodbaths so either don't try and sort of succeed or try little and probably fail it feels just like a ziploc bag filled with dog urine warm dog urine with a 5 additional chance to stay closed because you're such a smart guy consider tabletop for a moment you know that little board that dungeon masters are sometimes shown to have in front of them that little thing it hides what they're up to those sneaky little freaks but the reason why they hide what they're doing is so that it can benefit the players at the table it keeps players from being spoiled on plot details mainly but it also allows the dm to lie about their own dice rolls if your dm is that guy then sure this is a bad thing but most of the time it's because of something almost all role-playing players know good dms don't always follow their rules if you're a good dm you don't want your players to die unless they really deserve it even if they die you'll work your ass off on a way to bring them back this is for their benefit is for the sake of the game when the players are telling their own stories you'll go out of your way to give them what they need to accomplish their goals you're not going to give them the game but you give them everything that they need to succeed and a good dm if a throw is off by one point from succeeding they'll lie and say that you beat the odds one of the ways that xcom fixed its [ __ ] was by introducing a secret mechanic the more you miss your shots the more the game will lie about the shot odds even if you have a listed 10 chance to hit it'll just give you a successful role it will give you 100 it also works in reverse if you learn too many bad shots randomly the game will make you miss once no matter your opinion on what a cheating little slot xcom can be and make no mistake xcom is a [ __ ] please appreciate what they are trying to do missing 20 of your shots by the rules still feels terrible and so a good dm a good video game designer leverages this by lying about the odds in your favor and placing the difficulty somewhere else other than the element the player will be most engaged with baldur's gate 3 in its current form is a dungeons and dragons campaign being run by a terrible dungeon master the dm responsible for baldur's gate 3 is a rule thumping [ __ ] with a single story to tell you cannot slavishly translate a tabletop's exact rule set into a video game especially not when even in the tabletop the people playing and running the game will totally ignore the rules to make them work because that's what table top games are d d as a system is famous for releasing edition after edition that have major glaring holes in its internal logic that require the players to either fix them themselves or ignore them even baldur's gate 3 had to fix rangers because they [ __ ] suck otherwise so pointmate video games don't put randomized stat driven roles into your dialogue systems or almost anything they don't belong in video games unless they're controlling something very dynamic very back end or unless you are an amazing writer or designer that knows exactly how to explore failure in the most fascinating way possible play disco elysium it has the breast feel of breasts again baldur's gate 3 just released in early access i can't possibly imagine after original sin that these kinds of problems will stick around for too long but it does make them an easy whipping boy to show off such a basic design flaw i didn't even mention how badly the game implements the concept of short rest and long rests in the tabletop you can go a whole session without fighting a single single enemy one fight can sometimes take hours but once it's over it's a gigantic victory gaining a single level can turn you into a cataclysm made flesh and dm set the rules for why you can't rest depending on your circumstances and whether the dm thinks it should be discouraged in baldur's gate 3 it suggested you'll [ __ ] explode if you rest more than two or three days you know in the story i got to the end of early access having only rested three times ever in the entirety of the game up until the very end of that first act i rested only three times because i just didn't know how much they wanted me to rest it was hell i was level four because that's the highest level you can be in early access despite having probably been in a hundred fights against over five trillion goblins the four levels in boulder's gate 3 are almost meaningless i eventually learned that healing is pointless because you'll probably die in one hit no matter what because enemies are all on cocaine and always have the high ground of course and advantage attacking is also meaningless because you will miss and by you will miss i mean you will probably hit 70 percent of the time maybe probably not even that probably fifty percent of the time but it will feel like you always miss using can trips was king for a while until i realized that these also always miss but they are free attacking will always miss throwing items will always miss you know how you actually win encounters in baldur's gate three attack with bows which i'll also always miss and then immediately scurry like rats and crouch behind a wall the enemies are pretty stupid and will do one of two things they may shut off their ai entirely and just stand there as you pelt them with arrows and then crouch after every turn to keep their ai shut off or they will blatantly cheat just like xcom enemies and run right up to your character look them straight in the eye because they just so happen to be there and you will succeed a stealth check they won't actually see you even though they're looking directly then you will keep re-rolling the same stealth check repeatedly until the ai succeeds in making you come out of stealth so it can attack you as it looks directly at you again because it just so happened to be looking at that one patch of ground pretty lucky huh at that point because enemies love to attack downed enemies you can use your corpse as a tank and just keep picking it back up with a stealth buddy as your other two guys weed away the mountain of enemies with two damage attacks or zero damage attacks as the case may be the combat sucks right now and it's not fun is what i'm getting at if you create your character correctly then at least the first portion of the game will be alarmingly easy up until that [ __ ] windmill you know the one after the third time resting in front of the ending trigger for the first act a cut scene appeared and made it clear that the entire premise of not resting in unless you had to was you guessed it also meaningless and so afterwards i learned that i should camp and rest after every single encounter not to try my best to avoid doing it at all no no no you need to do it all the time for any reason at all even if you get a splinter in your wittle thumb you should camp and waste a day to heal that one health point because the wrestling system in dungeons and dragons is [ __ ] stupid and always has been it's never been done correctly and likely never will be because it hinges on a dungeon master telling you to stop [ __ ] using it in a video game there is no dungeon master you know beyond programming itself it's just a stupid system that has no brakes it relies totally on you not wanting to see a load screen and instead deciding to just tough it out so that you can get out of this damn temple already the two lessons i'd like to communicate in this rambling video are one characters should feel good about their choices and their choices should be equally valid if they aren't cut that [ __ ] out and two you can't just wheelbarrow in a system from another game especially not from another industry of games and then expect any of it to work because designing a [ __ ] game means you have to be a designer a dm and adjust the rules for the campaign you're trying to run design is dynamic so in other words larian studios please pull your dicks out of 5th edition's [ __ ] and do your jobs as video game designers and design a video game for video game players not for tabletop did you know magic missile in this video game can miss magic missile it collides with surfaces depending on the arc of the projectile magic missile the spell that can't miss like the infamous d d spell that cannot possibly miss because it's a magic missile that just finds its way to the target they somehow found a way to turn a distance based spell that always hits if you're in range into a spell that can actually miss what an [ __ ] but consider considering their background i kind of imagine that they'll sort this stuff out unless they can't change anything dramatically from dnd's rules because of the license or something in which case whoever is [ __ ] with her ability to actually design a working system uh please shut the [ __ ] up and let them do their jobs but again early access maybe then none of the supplies at all but it still feels good to complain about complaining is fun sorry for recording so early in the morning but i really wanted to get this done it's been lingering a little bit too much i had to re-record because all day yesterday i was actually recording this same thing and my voice kept going out and i realized it's just not the day i just can't do it now so i wanted to rush this out as fast as possible and for some reason recording in the morning means that my voice is a little bit more stable even though i make a lot more mouth noises i've noticed as i've gotten older my body just no matter what i do wants to make weird mouth noises like like i'm a [ __ ] old man with his adventures and i oh i [ __ ] hate it anyways let me know what your opinion is of these only slightly edited videos they're ugh they're hopefully i haven't edited anything yet hopefully they're a little bit easier to put together in editing which is my most hated part of this but they take just as much time to write apparently as i learned but it is a little bit faster so let me know have a good day

Channel: PlagueOfGripes

Views: 84,798

Rating: 4.7530451 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: iJgQlScrdkA

Length: 39min 3sec (2343 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/allas04]

I know friends who would go nuts trying to reload and 100% all these random rolls including the random flavor text ones.

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I feel Plague makes a good point with XCOM too.

XCOM cheats the odd. It doesn't go with what the odds actually are, it goes with what the devs think the players will think or 'feel' is fair and satisfying.

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If an XCOM players misses an 80% shot, the next 80% shot has secretly like a 95% chance to hit. And a miss of that bumps it to nearly 100%.

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Because an actual RNG with separated rolls will make it so an 80% hit rate can actually fail dozens of times in a row and will happen sometimes.

But while that's how actual probability works, but that's not what most players would think feels good or fair.

[u/NewWillinium]

It is fascinating to see people experience Plague for the first time. This got crossposted over to the actual BG 3 subreddit and maaaaaaaaan

[u/LifeIsCrap101]

Hang on, I need to Roll to see if I like this video...

Rolls a 12

Eh, it was alright I guess.

[u/time_axis]

Sounds like something that will probably be one of the first things fixed by mods when this game actually comes out.

[u/CommanderClaw]

Really agree with just about every point Plague brought up here. A perfect replication of D&D 5e's rules into a video game does not an entertaining game make. There's good things in BG3, but they're hamstrung by the game's desire to perfectly replicate existing design decisions rather than attempt to adapt the intent behind those decisions.

[u/awhst]

Honestly, the only random skill check system I've liked was Disco Elysium, which makes failing checks interesting, but had to prime players to accept failures by making the first red check have better outcomes (both in writing and in rewards) on failure because failing checks is typically just a mechanically sub-optimal result. It's also so rare for the inverse (succeeding is bad) that people still remember the Fallout:NV Dean Domino barter check.

[u/Ace_Kuper]

Baldur's Gate 3 points aside.

I definitely disagree with Plague on the "Good DM cheats or adjusts the rolls, even if it's to avoid PC death" for a introduction to D&D or playing with kids maybe. But having DM adjust the rolls in anyone's favor is a pretty bad habit.

Also, as other people pointed out rolling a natural 20 doesn't mean you succeed at what you set out to do. In fact in a lot of cases if the specific skill\stat you rolling is super low rolling a natural 20 would not be enough ever. A Barbarin trying to pick a complicated lock and rolling a 20 could still result in just a 20, if he isn't proficient with thieves tools, so the lock difficulty being 30, it would still fail. In that case he is better off crowbarring or trying to break the door, but that's an entirely different check.

[u/Detective_Robot]

Alternate title: Plague rambles for forty minutes, as for the video itself I suggest not save scumming and accepting your bad rolls.

[u/ibblestbibblest]

Is it me or has Plague pitched his voice down in the audio mix? It sounds quite odd.