this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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The article doesn't get into the math of how much of an equivalent bonus/penalty that Advantage/Disadvantage gives, and that is the actual complicated part of the mechanic.
On average the bonus or penalty equates to about +/- 3 on a roll. However, it can swing higher or lower depending on the difficulty of the check compared to the character's inherent modifiers. If a character can only pass by rolling a 20 (or can only fail by rolling a 1) after their other modifiers are accounted for, then the effective bonus/penalty is only +/- 1. Conversely, if the necessary roll is 11 or above to pass (or 10 or below to fail) then it is +/- 5.
The reason Advantage/Disadvantage feels so powerful is because D&D is balanced around players needing to roll somewhere between 7 and 14 to be successful in most of their actions, and that is the range at which Advantage and Disadvantage are most impactful.
I thought Advantage/Disadvantage was so powerful/hurtful because you roll 2 dices and take the better or worse roll.
That is what is done, but they're attempting to explain how that actually effects the odds. If you only had a 5% chance to succeed to begin with, advantage only bumps that up to about 10%. On the other hand, if you were at about a 50% to succeed, you jump up to a 75% chance with advantage. Bounded accuracy means that most rolls are balanced to have somewhere between a 30-70% chance to succeed; right in the range where advantage is most impactful.
This is exactly right. I was trying to explain the mechanic in terms of effective bonuses/penalties to show its effect more concretely.
Advantage doesn't actually confer a +5 when the needed dice roll is 11, bur statistically that's what it feels like.