Baldur's Gate 3 Karmic Dice Analysis Delivers Shocking…

Summary

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.
A Reddit user's analysis found that Karmic Dice seemed to favor enemy attack rolls, with higher success rates on higher difficulty levels.
The analysis did not test the player's success rates, so it's unclear if Karmic Dice also affects the player's rolls.

A Baldur's Gate 3 player curious about the game's Karmic Dice functionality performed an analysis that resulted in some shocking conclusions. Dice rolls are at the heart of Dungeons and Dragons and Baldur's Gate 3 remained true to that. The randomness of a dice roll can be too harsh for some people, however. Larian Studios' solution was an optional feature for Baldur's Gate 3 named Karmic Dice. Karmic Dice is said to reduce streaks of both awful and exceptional luck, but Baldur's Gate 3 players don't necessarily agree that's what's happening.

A typical dice roll in Baldur's Gate 3 is 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 like Baldur's Gate 3 can mean very bad things in combat. Karmic Dice is an optional choice in Baldur's Gate 3 described as changing dice rolls to, "avoid failure or success streaks, while keeping the results mostly random."

Reddit user Bearfoxman's experience with Karmic Dice didn't fit the description, however. In a post to the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit, 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 in Baldur's Gate 3 Act 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 in Baldur'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 for Baldur'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 as Baldur'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 in Baldur's Gate 3 on both Balanced and Tactician 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 3 players may want to keep Karmic Dice turned off, unless they're looking for a unique challenge.