Should You Play With Karmic DICE? | Baldur's Gate 3

hey it's dry bear and today I'd like to ask and answer what in the heck are karmic dice in Baldur's Gate 3. you'll find this setting in your gameplay options menu in bg3 and it's a bit mysterious as to what this option actually does it's on by default but should you be playing with karmic dice or not so that's what we'll get into today but first if you have any questions or comments for me you'll find me live every single day on twitch.tv forward slash dry bear if you do come hang out with me in the community on Twitch then the next time you roll a dice in bg3 without any bonuses and no inspiration where everything's on the line You're Gonna Roll a Nat 20 and get a critical success now if you're wondering where to find this it is in your gameplay options so you open settings the first tab it defaults to is gameplay and if you scroll down a little bit you will find the karmic dice option here and again it is on by default now this is something that larion had in previous games and in Early Access for this game but they actually renamed it from a different name to Connor mcdice because I think there was a lot of confusion around should it be in the game is it important to have in the game and what does it actually do I think they actually like it being a bit mysterious because ultimately to me having experience with as a game developer it seems like they want this on because it makes the game play overall better for your average player but what does this setting actually do what does it actually have the impact on for the game so here is the explanation of karmic dice in general humans tend to have a pretty negative reaction to True Randomness this is something that surprises a lot of people especially if they don't work in programming or mathematics or anything involving numbers where RNG is a big part of their daily experience it's actually my the best example I give and I used to give a lot as a game designer to help explain the negative reaction to True Randomness is when we first got uh music players like iTunes there was a random feature that was introduced in the first version of of iTunes that was widely used by everyone for playing digital music and what it did is it would just randomly shuffle through the songs you had on iTunes and randomly pick a song to play for you however there was a big backlash on this feature because it felt like it was always playing the same songs over and over and you might actually experience this when you play a playlist on YouTube or you're listening to something on shuffle that doesn't have any additive functions that go on top of that Randomness it starts to feel like sometimes it's not random quote because it feels that it's picking the same things over and over or that sort of thing and so that's kind of one of the problems with true random especially when it comes to the experience of someone using a dice often is that random can yes be very varied it can be all over the place but random can also be very consistent in One Direction or the other you can random the same number or the same or close to the same number many many times in a row and so what larian has decided to do with Baldur's Gate 3 by default is introduce a system called karmic Dice and all this does is essentially what I imagine is very similar to what Apple did in the early days of iTunes is they would add in a smarter pseudo random system into the shuffling so that if you had heard the song before it makes a slight leaning towards not hearing that song again and so it kind of helps Shuffle it to keep it a little bit more varied and a little bit more intriguing and in this game that's exactly what karmic dice does karmic dice tries to avoid streaks of luck and this works for good luck and it works for bad luck so it feels like it's more of a like subjective Randomness that people would expect from Randomness without actually you know experiencing true random which can be very very consistent in some cases and so they make it so that if you go on a lost streak every time you go on a lost streak there's systems in there that prevent you from staying on that lost streak and the same thing goes for uh win streaks as well getting 20s and 19s and 18s over and over it starts to make sure that there's a little bit less consistency in the dice to make it pseudo random however the big thing about karmic dice in Baldur's Gate 3 is that when you have this feature on it is game wide which means it's affecting your or dice rolls as well as the enemies dice rolls so yes while you will be less likely to go onto a lost streak where you get one and then two and then four and then two and then three that's less likely but it's also the same case for the enemies that you're facing in general it Smooths out the experience and makes it so you get a more varied uh response or results in the dice itself and in general towards the middle to last last half of the game it tends to favor the player in most cases especially when it comes to dialogue and things like that because by the time you reach middle to late game you will have a lot more proficiencies and bonuses and advantages and things that you can cheat the dice with and when karmic dice is on and it's preventing you from getting crazy lost streaks adding all those bonuses on top means that in general it tends to favor the player what they don't mention on the system on the setting itself is that it will also benefit the enemies as well so back to the original question should you be running with karmic dice on or off and I think if you're not a die-hard DND fan you're probably better off just playing with karmic dice on it just means that you're going to have a bit of a smoother rolling overall uh larian claims that over a large sample size it ends up being quite similar so at least from what they've said publicly that the system isn't so drastic that it will greatly reduce or change the outcome over a large sample size so it's not like completely Shifting the luck it just kind of steps in when uh you know bad streaks are happening too much and it starts to shift it back to make sure that it is varied so in that in that case I would say that if you want to have a smoother experience you're not someone who plays tabletop games like this much and you want to have that true Randomness experience then you can keep it on and in general if you have it on or off and you're not someone who is a Die Hard fan you may not even notice the difference as much but if you're someone who is a tabletop fan and you want the cleanest truest experience that you can get that is closer to tabletop and that every time you pick up a physical die and you roll it you don't know what's going to happen and it's very possible for you to have some horrible horrible luck I'm sure anyone that's played tabletop of any kind knows that if you roll a physical die it's very possible for you to get five six turns in a row a very terrible luck and things go very poorly or you're doing dialogue options or you're interacting in some way and everything just goes completely horribly and in those games you know if you're playing true tabletop there's no quick save or quick load option so you would have to kind of live with the result and that's part of the fun so I would say that if you are someone that wants uh you know if you're a casual player and you're playing at Baldur's Gate 3 for the first time I would say keep karmic dice on let it do its work let it do what it's good at and helping smooth out that experience and give you variety over time but also if you want to go into your second or third playthrough try playing with it off especially since you know the encounters that are coming up for the most part you know some some of the dialogue options that are coming up and when you play with karmic Dice off it feels like a little bit more edge of your seat because it's very possible you're going to roll a whole bunch of nat ones or you could roll a whole bunch of nat 20s the system is not going to get in the way of that it is going to be a true RNG random number generator reaction and that's all I've got for you today I just want to answer that question people in my chat have been asking I actually didn't fully understand what the system was without more research so there is the karmic dice system in Baldur's K3 if you found value in the video leave a like down below leave a comment for the algorithm to help this video get seen by more people and I'll see you on my live stream if you enjoyed yourself today leave a like down below you can support me and my work on patreon and view patreon exclusive content Link in the description thank you so much for tuning in and I'll see you in the next one [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: DrybearGamers

Views: 184,894

Keywords: drybear, rory newbrough, baldurs gate 3 drybear, baldurs gate 3, baldurs gate, baldurs gate 3 guide, baldurs gate 3 gameplay, karmic dice, karmic dice bg3, karmic dice baldurs gate 3, karmic dice baldurs gate, karmic dice on or off, baldurs gate 3 karmic dice, baldurs gate 3 karmic dice setting, baldurs gate 3 karmic dice on or off, baldurs gate 3 karmic dice reddit, karmic dic, carmic dice, bg3 karmic dice

Id: wiQZuhgtBPA

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023