Beginner's Guide Baldur's Gate 3 | Dice Mechanics & Abilities

I can't get this damn door open I don't know why man I put a couple points in the strength I really don't know what the hell's going on with this game Open Sesame welcome back guys I'm so excited for this game thank you guys so much to those who have watched my other videos my classes and races video or my combat systems explain video and many more I appreciate all the feedback I've gotten up to this point if you guys do end up enjoying this video please subscribe for I want to be your number one source for baldur's gate 3 information so this video is going to be very very important mainly for those of you who do not play or have not played the tabletop Dungeons and Dragons so baldur's gate 3 is going to be heavily based on the 5th addition rule set from the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons so maybe you have never played the tabletop game maybe you don't like it maybe you've never heard of it or maybe your experience of the D&D world comes from various book series that have been written or maybe you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about you just want to play a new exciting upcoming RPG game regardless if you don't understand the basics of how the dice rolls work in the tabletop game then you are not setting yourself up for success in the video game so when playing baldur's gate 3 you're going to come across many situations where the game is going to roll dice for you and the outcome of these dice rolls is going to determine whether or not you fail or succeed at certain actions now of course guys the dice rolls in Baldur's Gate 3 are being done via computational calculations sometimes you actually get to see the electronic dice roll in front of you on the screen but many times you just have to look in the bottom right of the screen at the numbers now one thing that Larian did do to make it much much easier on us is when you are in combat if you take your cursor and aim it over your opponent's head and you've chosen the attack that you want to do is they give you a percentage chance of that attack actually hitting and what essentially is happening here is the game is doing all the mathematical equations and potential dice rolls for you to let you know your chance of actually landing your shot it's actually really important to have a basic understanding of how the computer came up with that percentage chance so you can prepare yourself for fights in the future because you want to keep that percentage chance as high as possible if you go into every battle and you only have a 25% chance of landing your shots it's gonna be a miserable game experience for you so technically you don't have to know the mechanics behind how it works you can still do things the computer system behind the game is going to roll the dice for you regardless where you're going to fail a hell of a lot more in the game if you don't understand it not to mention when creating your character it is important to understand why you should level up certain stats over other ones and not just for the sake of getting more damage like you do in other games so yeah guys if this is new to you you're definitely going to want to stick around for the entire video for all of the information is equally as important to understanding and it all weaves in together so what is the dice roll exactly used for it's used for many things in the game such as ability chucks which are tests of the character's innate talent and training to overcome a challenge challenges that are not attack based that is such as moving a boulder or picking a lock etc a dice roll is used for attack rolls which are used to determine if your attack on an enemy strikes them or if it misses the attack roll has nothing to do with the actual damage that you inflict that is a separate roll and also the dice roll is used for saving throws which are when your character attempts to resist a spell trap or poison etc so for these situations the game will have you roll a 20-sided dice and require you to get a certain number depending on what you are doing or who you are fighting and after the modifiers have been added or subtracted if you don't reach that number you will fail at your attempt but there is more to it than that and we will get to some of that shortly in this video we're just going to talk about the ability checks in the attack rolls but wait what is the number we are trying to beat with our electronic dice rolls this will vary with each situation when having to do in an ability check such as moving a boulder the game will assign the boulder ADC number which is a difficulty class number meaning you have to tie or get higher than that DC number to succeed in your action now in combat when doing an attack roll to see if you will land your strike on your opponent instead of a DC your opponent will have an AC which is an armor class this is also the number you have to tie or beat to land your strike before we talk specifically about the dice roll computer calculations we have to go over some of the main stats that will have a great effect on how your dice roll turns out these stats are called abilities if that confuses you just think attributes there's going to be six main abilities dexterity strength intelligence wisdom Constitution and charisma I know I didn't go in the order of the picture here I probably should have depending on which class and race you play and how you go about love clean up your character will determine which abilities you are strongest at and which ones you are basically useless and so the level that you have certain abilities at will help determine if you are successful at certain things by determining what modifiers you will have when rolling the dice we'll talk about that right after this quick overview of what these abilities are typically associated with so first up is dexterity dexterity deals with acrobatic situations like balancing and dodging sleight of hand situations stealth situations like sneaking some melee weapons typically favored by classes such as the rogue with daggers and ranged weapons like the bow and arrow strength deals with athletic skill situations like climbing jumping and swimming it deals with brute force situations like breaking through a door are moving a boulder as well as various other melee weapons typically favored by classes such as the fighter and barbarian intelligence deals with Arcana history investigation and nature and religion and of course spell casting for some classes like the wizard wisdom deals with animal handling situations insight medicine perceptions such as may be spotting hidden things and survival spell casting uses wisdom when playing classes like the claret and the druid I assume the druid will be in the game at launch Constitution deals with your health and stamina situations such as holding your breath surviving extreme weather conditions or resisting things such as poisons and nasty spells what exact situations they will put in Baldur's Gate 3 we do not know yet but it will be similar situations like that where your constitution comes into play and the last ability charisma deals with charming skills commanding and confidence basically this ability offers you the best chance of doing well in social encounters probably good to have at least one person who has invested into this ability in your party so how do the numbers of your abilities what you've invested into your abilities affect the dice roll when playing this game well there is a lot to talk about but we're gonna keep it at the basics and we're gonna start off with modifiers so modifiers in Baldur's Gate 3 will be a number that will be added to the behind the scenes computational dice roll let's want to get out there guys I did look up dice and it can be used in a plural or singular form in modern-day English so say you're trying to move a boulder in the game which deals with the strength ability this particular boulder has a ICI of eight which DC means difficulty class in the eight means that you have to roll an eight or higher to be successful and moving the boulder so say you roll the dice and you get a six but you have a strength modifier of plus two so now you actually have an eight it added to for you because you have invested enough into the strength ability which is a primary ability affected by the situation of moving a boulder you put enough points into the strength category to get the modifier of plus two it doesn't mean that you put two points in the strength I'll talk about the modifier in just a little bit but let me reiterate guys that this is the video game so when I say roll the dice for the most part you're not rolling the dice in this situation you're probably just walking up to the boulder right clicking on it and clicking move and then the game is going to instantly do the dice roll for you and you will fail or succeed now let's say that you used a different party member who didn't have as much invested into strength and they tried to move the boulder and maybe they got a luckier roll than the other guy enrolled at ten well unfortunately we have to add or subtract their modifier which in this case this particular character has not invested much into strength so they have a minus four modifier so the roll of ten now becomes a six and they fail to move the boulder even with a higher roll this character still failed while the first guy succeeded in moving the boulder even with a lower roll of the dice all because of the modifiers in this particular situation the computer is going to use a dice with twenty sides on it so when you roll you could roll anything from a 1 to 20 there are many different types of dice that the computer will use for different situations such as six-sided dice or 10-sided dice or it might even use multiple dice but that will be for a later video so the dice with 20 sides is used in ability check situations like this one with moving the boulder it's used with attack rolls which determine if your attack hits the target or not and also saving throws which are dice rolls used to calculate the defense of a character versus many spells and effects and many other things so how the hell do you know what your modifier number will be it's actually fairly simple in this case we're talking about the strength ability and we were given a modifier of plus 2 to our dice roll the way that plus 2 is calculated is by taking your total points into that specific ability so say we have 14 points invested into strength you then subtract 10 and divide by two so 14 points into strength minus 10 is 4 and divided by 2 is 2 so we get a plus 2 to our roles when dealing with the strength ability chucks this minus 10 n divided by 2 applies for any of the ability checks not just the strength now our other character that failed that moving the boulder had a strength modifier of minus 4 this means that they must have had only two points invested in the strength because 2 minus 10 equals negative 8 and divided by 2 equals negative 4 if you don't like doing the math you can use a chart that will tell you what each number is worth or think of it like this every even number above 10 you get a plus 1 to the modifier so 12 points into strength is a plus 1 modifier 14 points into strength is a plus 2 modifier 16 points is a plus 3 and so on every odd number under 10 receives a minus 1 to the modifier so a 9 is a minus 1 modifier a 7 is a minus 2 modifier etc now it can feel a little confusing at first when all this info is thrown at you but just think about it a little and make up a scenario like I did and you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly you don't have to be able to do the calculations the game is going to do them for you but now you at least understand why you might fail at certain things certain characters in your party are better off doing certain things than other characters now that was an ability check where we use the dice 20 in the modifier now let's quickly go over a combat situation before you can even do damage to someone there is an attack role which determines whether or not you will even hit your target relating back to the boulder the boulder had a DC of 8 which meant we had to get an 8 after we rolled and added or subtracted the modifiers in this particular case the enemy will have an armor class number that you have to roll equal or higher to to be able to have a successful hit so how many points we have invested in the dexterity will determine our modifier for the situation just like it did with the strength and the boulder now there are other things that come into play when doing your attack role such as your proficiency bonus but we're not gonna talk about that in this video we're just gonna talk about the ability modifier for combat in this situation so let's say we have invested 12 points into dexterity so far this means that our modifier will be +1 because remember 12 points 10 divided by 2 is 1 or like I said every even number above 10 is plus 1 so we have a plus 1 modifier we will get to add 1 to whatever dice roll we get with the 20-sided dice for this attack role so let's say the computer does the dice roll and we end up getting a roll of 8 we get to add our plus 1 modifier from our dexterity bonus so now we have rolled basically a 9 the enemy's armor class was a 10 so we sadly are still 1.2 short so our shot misses that's how it typically works in combat now if you did roll high enough in your shot hit the target the damage that you deal will be a whole nother roll of different dice depending on your weapon that will also be for a later video guys this is just the basics in part 1 now considering this is a video game all of these computations are basically being done almost instantly you're typically waiting for each dice roll when you're playing the tabletop I'm waiting for the math to be done but when we're in the video game say when you shoot your bow it either hits or misses right when you shoot it now if you missed and you want to see why you missed you can check in the bottom right box and look at the calculations in rolls and understand why sometimes you will just get really unlucky sometimes you're just not prepared enough to be consistently successful in said situation or sometimes the enemy is just a beast so you might have to look for outside factors to help you such as other party members or environmental opportunities so you'll be adding even more numbers to your dice rolls depending on other factors in the game such as proficiency bonuses we only talked about the basics of ability modifiers in this video and a little bit of the attack roles I hope this will help some of you guys don't get too worried about the game being a giant math equation because like I said all these computations are being done by the computer system you don't have to add or subtract or divide anything but it's good to be able to at least understand how these calculations are happening so you can make better decisions in the game thanks so much for watching guys if you guys enjoyed the video please like counter and subscribe I really appreciate it's a huge help to my videos I will continue to post Baldur's Gate 3 videos and I also will expand on these dice roll mechanics I do all sorts of videos on this channel guys ranging from gaming news to live streams to tutorials to product reviews etc I would love to see some of you guys on a future video until next time Wolfpack [Music]

Channel: WolfheartFPS

Views: 26,129

Keywords: Baldur's Gate 3, Baldur's Gate 3 dice mechanics, baldur's gate 3 abilities, dice, mechanics, abilities, ability score, baldur's gate 3 modifiers, modifiers, baldur's gate 3 beginner's guide, beginner, guide, tips, baldurs, gate, things to know baldurs gate, combat system, baldus gate tips, rules edition 5e, dungeons & dragons, wolfheartfps, rpg

Id: Md6WmRj1fvY

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020