I’m curious as to how quickly BG3 rule changes will start making their way into tabletop house rules and 3rd party supplements.
My guess is pretty quickly, if my own group is any worthwhile measurement.
Yeah. Larian made some really good changes to D&D, then they added crit fails to skill checks
then they added crit fails to skill checks
Do you know how many times that has pissed me off? Especially on my rogue where even a 1 would have opened the damn lock.
Yeah, as DM I’ve always house ruled that it didn’t make sense for a character to fail at the thing they’re the best at.
Though I have been known to interpret a natural 1 as a crazy external force - like an earthquake - and have them reroll at -10.
Makes it even more fun when they succeed anyway.
[nervous sweating] I’ve always run my game with crit fail skill checks. That’s normal.
Isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
It’s the second shittiest common house rule, assuming you mean that if someone with a +15 bonus rolls a nat 1 on a DC 5 check, they automatically fail (possibly with a worse effect than if someone with a -1 rolled a 2).
On the other hand, there are other ways to have crit fails on skill checks that are much more palatable, like:
- having a slightly worse effect when someone rolls a nat 1 and would have failed anyway
- having a worse effect when someone’s total is 1 or lower
- having a worse effect when rolls are failed by certain thresholds, like by 10 or more (potentially, but not necessarily, only when the roll was a nat 1)
(The worst common house rule, btw, is crit miss tables for additional effects beyond an automatic miss when you roll a 1 on an attack roll.)
If a 1 is not a fail, why do you roll at all ? I mean if the DC is 5 and you have +15, your DM should just not make you roll (* you pass automatically). So a 1 should always be a fail.
The DM doesn’t necessarily have your modifiers memorized and asking what they are every time slows down play. The DM also likely doesn’t want to share the DC. The easiest fair solution is to always ask for a roll (assuming it’s possible, generically, to succeed or fail) and to then consider passes to be passes. If you only avoid asking for a roll when you know the player will make it, then you’re likely to be biased toward the players whose characters you’re more familiar with.
So a 1 should always be a fail.
RAW this is not the case. From the DMG:
Rolling a 20 or a 1 on an ability check or a saving throw doesn’t normally have any special effect. However, you can choose to take such an exceptional roll into account when adjudicating the outcome. It’s up to you to determine how this manifests in the game.
My experience with having nat 1s being auto fails and is that this results in characters who are “erratically … tragically incompetent” as well as taking away player agency (Nick Brown on rpg.stackechange explained this well). Maybe you and your players like a game like that, but I certainly don’t.
If the DM doesn’t know the stat your character has the highest in and uses all the time, they have an awful memory and shouldn’t really DM.
Not going to lie, I’m already taking notes. I like that in general, if you make the right choices, it’s easy to make even wizards feel a lot less squishy, which would make me feel a lot more comfortable not pulling punches in my game. One of my favorite changes so far is the wild shape recharge on short rest for druids.
It’s gotten me thinking about how to fix some other broken classes again, like making Ranger not fucking suck, and fixing the MADness of Barbarian. Fight me IRL, having the Barb’s unarmored defense dependent on dex instead of strength is dumb as hell when the barbarian is clearly a STR/CON class, that would be like having the Monk’s unarmored defense being dependent on Constitution. “So, what, Barbarians should just deflect attacks by flexing extra hard?” Yes.
Ummm… Barbarian Unarmored Defense is based off Con, not Dex. They just didn’t take away the default Dex bonus to AC that every class in the game gets. They shrug off damage by having a high Con. Barbarians are pretty good as it is, if you let them completely dump Dex and give AC from Str, they would be broken AF… 18 AC at level 1 with a shield under point buy system, and immediate jump to 20 AC at level 4, with no reduction in damage output at all. Possible to be 20 AC at level 1 literally completely naked (no shield) with rolled stats, and 18 isn’t even entirely unlikely…
The reason that it’s broken (in a bad way) as Dex+Con compared to the Monk’s Dex+Wis unarmored defense is that monks absolutely CAN get broken as fuck AC from Dex + Wis, especially as the game goes on. Kinda on a related note, in BG3 I re-specified Astarion as a thief/monk, gave him a few mid-tier magic items, and now he’s my front-line tank with an AC of 21 at level 7. No sane Barbarian PC is going dex barb, so realistically the barbarian’s unarmored defense is going to cap out at AC 15-16 minus shield (which, come on, what barbarian won’t be rocking two handed weapons?). So, while the Monk gets unarmored defense based on both of its chief stats, Barbarian gets unarmored defense based on just one of its chief stats.
Having a barbarian with a broken AC to start with doesn’t bother me too much, but then I also tend to not run gritty/from dark style games, and that’s also bearing in mind that the martial classes don’t really scale as well as the casters do after level five. Giving the barbarian a ludicrous AC to aspire to at high levels might help balance that out.
You are talking about removing Dex bonus to AC, which every class gets, to make Barbarian able to completely dump 4 ability scores and not even need items (at least a fighter needs nearly 1k gold to get into heavy armor that will compete with this barbarian completely naked). Barbarian is not broken in a bad way currently compared to any other martial. A monk might keep up with AC, and maybe even damage output (but I’d argue being locked into monk weapons means they won’t) but they’ll have at best 60% of the HP a barbarian has (who is also taking half damage from non-magical sources a majority of the time) and still have to put points into 3 stats to stay relevant.
Also, BG3 is not a great source for comparison… I have a bard at level 5 with a 21 AC. The more “tanky” classes I have played were all around 23 AC at level 7. There are a lot of magic items in the game that stack AC and you are absolutely swimming in them by level 8. Every party I’ve played through by the end game it was 4 characters with 23-26 AC across the board. My wizard was 24 AC (25 if standing in low light) by level 10…
You’re aware that barbs get resistance to bludgeoning, slashing and piercing irregardless of whether it’s magical, right? And that extends further with the bear totem
Yea, I meant to refer specifically to spell damage but wasn’t very clear. But that furthers my original point anyway.
