It’s not super obvious, but in BG3 there is a red sword icon between you and your opponent if your move is going to allow an AoO.
I think my favorite part about this game so far is that your companions are not forcibly shoehorned into their classes and you can make them whatever you like. In WOTR I always ended up with the same companions because they all came with set levels in particular classes, here next playthrough i can take a completely different crew without missing a beat.
All the way back in 3E was when they changed it, I remember playing a “brigand” (a fighter/thief hybrid class from the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign) who could do a “feint” in combat then follow up with a sneak attack. Face-to-face and in open combat. Basically any time you can strike someone in a vulnerable spot while their guard was down, you could get extra damage.
I remember once being disarmed and being able to do sneak attack damage with my fists. Touch of death, baby!
But yeah, it was a great change to make roguish characters more relevant in combat after the initial strike.
To be fair, humans and half-elves also get some of the best racials in the game for classes that don’t normally get shield proficiency. In regular 5e there’s a bunch of rules that make it difficult for wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, rogues, bards and monks to be using shields together with ranged weapons, spell-casting or unarmed combat. In BG3 you get the shield AC bonus just for having it in your melee set even while using ranged weapons, so having the proficiency is just a permanent +2 AC or higher bonus with no real downsides on top of any magical bonuses from the shield.
Human and half-elf racials kind of suck for the other classes, though. It’s a bit odd thematically, since they are usually more generalist races, and here they are either useless or amazing depending on your class.
Unspoiled bit of very minor dialogue: I spoke with someone who wanted to impress me with how old they are, and they said:
I can only think that this snippet of dialogue was written by a very tired writer not thinking about how generations work, and that the voice actor wasn’t really paying attention to the lines. It made me giggle.
I don’t know who you spoke to, but I did hear someone else bring up that line, and the response I saw was that the character could be saying it lived a longer life than any of its ancestors. IE the parents and grandparents died at 50 but the person you talked to lived to 80.
Apparently there is a setting called “karmic die” that is on by default that weights dice rolls because people tend to not like true randomness. I turned it off.
I turned it off as well just for that “more realistic” table vibe. I’ve seen people say it can hurt you later in game by forcing hits on you or skill loses by you.
As the thinking goes: Imagine you got your AC up to 25 (+2 Splint, +1 Shield, Cloak of Protection, one of the +1 AC feats, etc) . A number of things would need a Nat 20 to hit you so they should only hit you 5% of the time. But if the Karmic Dice decide there shouldn’t be 10 misses in a row, you’re getting hit twice as often. Conversely, once you get a ton of stacked bonuses and your skill rolls are at +15, you could still be missing more often than you statistically should due to forced Nat 1s to “level out” all your successes.
From what I understand, people have been talking about this since EA and Larian is aware but I don’t know if they’ve directly addressed this. I haven’t done any numbers myself and am just repeating the theorycrafting on how/when Karmic Dice can work against you. Myself, I just wanted the dice to roll true.
I’m probably halfway down into the Hag’s lair. Boy, are they setting up the Hag as an enormously tough and dangerous baddie. Part of me really appreciates the storytelling, and part of me wonders if Karlach will just kill her in one round by throwing things at her.
I would bet a dollar that’s not how it works. The possibilities you describe go against the statistical probability, which is the opposite of what I imagine the karmic dice feature is intended to do.
The problem with true dice is you could roll ten 1s in a row, while somebody else on the server is rolling ten 20s in a row, and then both of you end up proceeding with a normal distribution after your streaks. Meaning it will be a while before either of you start to approach what would be statistically “due.”
I bet the karmic dice work similar to Subnautica’s “bucket” approach. Take all the numbers that can appear and toss them in a bucket. In this case, 1 through 20. Shuffle the numbers in the bucket, pull them out until the bucket is empty. Start again. This approach enforces a strictly statistical distribution, and would prevent the scenario where you get ten 1s in a row but never end up doing extra well at any point to “make up” for that streak of bad rolls.
If I were designing it, I would probably put five rotations in the bucket at once: five 1s, five 2s, all the way to five 20s. Shuffle that, and then pull out numbers until the bucket is empty. This would let you get streaks of five 1s in a row, but then your remaining rolls from that bucket would be exactly good enough to even out that bad luck. (Or you had been on a really hot streak, but then the bucket hits you with five 1s in a row.)
(Wait, does BG3 require being online to play? I think I’m mixing it up with Diablo 4.)
No. You don’t even need the Steam/GOG launcher and can run it directly from the .exe file. Whatever anyone else is rolling across the country has no impact on your game.
Larian describes Karmic Dice as a “friendly DM” who nudges the dice to prevent win/loss streaks though it does so for both you and the enemies. The thing is, arguably, in some circumstances you should have winning streaks because you have very high AC or high skill modifiers, etc. But we don’t know much more about it than that since they haven’t revealed the actual weighting mechanics.
There’s a potential encounter in Act II where you need six pretty high DC successes to complete it to a specific outcome. Hopefully the “Make them lose” streak counter isn’t set lower than that 
It does not.
From what understand it deals with the die rolls, not the results. So it should be helpful more often than not at higher levels when you get higher bonuses. Either way, I prefer true random rolls.
At higher levels, with higher bonuses, you should be LESS dependent on higher rolls as your mods are doing more lifting. Unless the game is throwing DC 40 checks at you but I haven’t gotten there yet. I have seen one or two DC 30 checks which I think is the usual cap in tabletop (the rules call DC 30 “Nearly Impossible”).
That said, I assume the actual impact overall is fairly minimal in either direction. Like you, I mainly turned it off just because I’d rather let the dice do what the dice do just like if I’m playing tabletop or on Roll20, etc.
I killed the hag, and ended up using the wand to try and raise the lady’s husband. I happened to have Gale selected when that cutscene started (I think because I had opened his inventory to give him the Staff of Chrones and forgot to change back), I figured it would make sense for him to try in character, and I wanted to see what would happen. Of course, the hag was lying; we gave the lady the wand and her zombified husband and sent her on her way.
I think I am all done with the surface in Act 1. Going to head into the Underdark, until I hit the point of no return. Then it’s back to the surface to do the mountain path. I think that’s the order I need to go in if I want to do both? I’d actually rather do the gith creche before the Underdark, but my understanding is that some quests will fail as soon as I step into the mountain pass, even though I can go back.
You forgot the / before your first closed spoiler tag.
Thank you! Edited
That’s my assumption as well. Separate ‘buckets’ for PC and environment would keep things balanced.
The board game Catan has a variant that uses cards instead of die rolls. One modification is after shuffling the cards representing the die rolls, you discard the last 4 or 5. It eliminates the predictability while keeping a somewhat even distribution.
Another option BG3 could do is pre-generate N die rolls, scan the list while keeping track of how ‘sweet’ or ‘sour’ the distribution is, and discard (or reorder) if the distribution is too far one way or another. This is more effort, but allows better variety in rolls.
Order of Operations style spoiler for Act II
Moonrise Related Spoiler
Given that Jaihera was all “OMG we need to find out Thormes secret before we can attack Moonrise Tower!”, I naturally assumed that this is what I had to do and rescuing the prisoners was part of that assault. So I ran the Shar temple and got a warning that finishing it would potentially cancel quests but since Shadowheart was being tested to become a Dark Judiciar I figured that it was going an evil route would lead to abandoning quests. Nope, doing that part of the plot at all ends the rescue quest lines for Moonrise. You need to enter Moonrise, rescue the prisoners and THEN do the Thorme secret stuff then go back to Moonrise.
Fortunately I had a Save from that far back and just had to re-do about two hours of game play. If it was a more informed choice I would have shrugged it off but the set-up sort of deceives you, in my opinion (I doubt intentionally but still). Thought I’d mention it in case anyone else gets tripped up by it.
I just took the L on the prisoners (though I didn’t trigger the assault on the village and so none of the harpers were ever captured)because I’d rolled an unbelievably clutch critical success on the DC 30 persuasion check to get Shadowheart to chuck the spear away and abandon Shar.
I wish Act 2 hadn’t been fully gothic horror.
I did not see the big reveal at the end of Act 2 coming. What’s interesting is that (big Act 2 spoilers ahead)
I was feeling kind of grumbly because I’d made the “guardian” parallel the main character’s aesthetic in certain ways, thinking they’d both be playable and it would look neat. After that reveal, my choices suddenly make sense. Of course The Emperor would choose a form pleasing and familiar.