Baldur's Gate 3 Karma Dice Study Unveils Astounding Revelations

Highlights

Baldur's Gate 3 introduced an optional feature called Karmic Dice to reduce extreme luck streaks in dice rolls, but players have mixed opinions on its effectiveness.

Karmic Dice appeared to have a preference for enemy attack rolls, demonstrating higher success rates on more challenging difficulty levels, according to an analysis conducted by a Reddit user.

However, the analysis did not assess the impact of Karmic Dice on the player's success rates, leaving it uncertain whether it also influences the player's rolls.

A Baldur's Gate 3 player who was curious about the game's Karmic Dice functionality conducted an analysis and made some surprising discoveries. Dice rolls are a crucial aspect of Dungeons and Dragons, and Baldur's Gate 3 stays true to that tradition. Nevertheless, the inherent randomness of dice rolls can be too harsh for certain individuals. In order to address this issue, Larian Studios introduced an optional feature called Karmic Dice in Baldur's Gate 3. It is claimed that Karmic Dice reduces both extremely unlucky and exceptionally lucky streaks, but some players of Baldur's Gate 3 do not necessarily agree with this observation.

In Baldur's Gate 3, a typical dice roll is believed to be completely random. The chances of rolling a 1 are just as likely as rolling a 20. Occasionally, this can result in a series of very low dice rolls, which can have negative consequences in combat situations within the game. Karmic Dice, as an optional feature in Baldur's Gate 3, alters dice rolls in order to "minimize consecutive failures or successes, while still maintaining predominantly random outcomes."

Reddit user Bearfoxman's experience with Karmic Dice did not align with the expectation. In a post on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit, Bearfoxman detailed how Karmic Dice consistently manipulated enemy attack rolls. To verify this claim, they conducted six sets of 500 attacks, with Karmic Dice active for half of them and inactive for the other half. All attacks were executed by the same enemy encountered early in Baldur's Gate 3 Act One. The focus was on tracking the results of the dice rolls, specifically whether they were ten or below or eleven and above, without any additional bonuses. The findings were nothing short of astounding.

The analysis of Karmic Dice revealed that enemy attack rolls saw a significant increase in success rates, albeit exclusive to Baldur's Gate 3's higher difficulties. In the game's easiest mode, Explorer, both standard dice and Karmic Dice yielded approximately 53% of attack rolls between 11 and 20. However, when the difficulty was raised to the Balanced level, which is the standard difficulty for Baldur's Gate 3, the standard dice rolls remained consistent, while Karmic Dice resulted in a staggering 61% of rolls between 11 and 20. On the most challenging difficulty, Tactician, Karmic Dice's chances of an 11-20 roll escalated even further to a striking 80%.

Not only does Karmic Dice significantly enhance the success rates of enemy attacks in Baldur's Gate 3 when the difficulty is raised, but there are also other surprising findings. None of the 500-attack runs in the tests matched the expected results of a "fair" dice roll, indicating that the runs without Karmic Dice yielded higher than anticipated results.

Karmic Dice greatly boosts the success rate of enemy attack rolls in Baldur's Gate 3 on both Balanced and Tactician difficulties. However, this does not necessarily mean the game is unfair. The analysis conducted did not examine the player's success rates, which is something Bearfoxman intends to investigate in the future. For now, players may choose to deactivate Karmic Dice unless they seek a unique challenge.

Baldur's Gate 3 is available now on PC and PS5. An Xbox Series X/S version is in development.