Summary
ABaldur’s Gate 3player curious about the game’s Karmic Dice functionality performed an analysis that resulted in some shocking conclusions. Dice rolls are at the heart ofDungeons and DragonsandBaldur’s Gate 3remained true to that. The randomness of a dice roll can be too harsh for some people, however. Larian Studios' solution was an optional feature forBaldur’s Gate 3named Karmic Dice. Karmic Dice is said to reduce streaks of both awful and exceptional luck, butBaldur’s Gate 3players don’t necessarily agree that’s what’s happening.
A typical dice roll inBaldur’s Gate 3is believed to be purely random. There’s just as much chance of a dice roll of 1 as there is a dice roll of 20. Sometimes that means getting streaks of very low dice rolls, which in a game likeBaldur’s Gate 3can mean very bad things in combat.Karmic Dice is an optional choice inBaldur’s Gate 3described as changing dice rolls to, “avoid failure or success streaks, while keeping the results mostly random.”
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Reddit user Bearfoxman’s experience with Karmic Dice didn’t fit the description, however. In a post to theBaldur’s Gate 3subreddit, Bearfoxman explains that Karmic Dice was consistently “fudging” the dice rolls of enemy attacks. To test his hypothesis, they tested six runs of 500 attacks with both Karmic Dice on for half of them and off for the rest. All attacks would be performed by the same enemy found early inBaldur’s Gate 3Act One. They’d track whether the dice roll’s result was either ten and below or eleven and above, with no bonuses included. The results are shocking, to say the least.
According to the analysis of Karmic Dice, enemy attack roles dramatically increase in success rates – but only inBaldur’s Gate 3’s higher difficulties. On the game’s easiest difficulty, Explorer, both standard dice and Karmic Dice resulted in around 53% of attack rolls being between 11 and 20. When the difficulty is increased to Balanced difficulty, the standard difficulty forBaldur’s Gate 3, standard dice rolls stayed the same while Karmic Dice landed between 11 and 20 nearly 61% of the time. On Tactician difficulty, Karmic Dice’s odds of an 11-20 roll increased all the way up to 80%.
While the most surprising result is that Karmic Dice appears to dramatically increase the success rates of enemy attacks asBaldur’s Gate 3’s difficulty is increased, that’s not the only shocking conclusion. Not a single one of the tests' 500-attack runs aligned with what Bearfoxman called the “statistical probability of a ‘fair’ dice roll.” All three of the runs without Karmic Dice turned on saw dice roll results that were higher than expected.
Karmic Dice appears to dramatically increase the success rate of enemy attack rolls inBaldur’s Gate 3on both Balanced andTactician difficulties. That doesn’t necessarily mean the game is unfair, however. The analysis at hand didn’t test for the player’s success rates. That’s something Bearfoxman plans to test in the future, though. For now,Baldur’s Gate 3players may want to keep Karmic Dice turned off, unless they’re looking for a unique challenge.
Baldur’s Gate 3is available now on PC and PS5. An Xbox Series X/S version is in development.
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