BG3 is three 90% misses in a row with advantage -__-
this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
170 points (91.7% liked)
Showerthoughts
42186 readers
602 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Shadowheart is beyond useless lol.
Wait what?
Many misses in Balder's Gate, as well.
It's been proven that the hit rates shown in XCOM are basically bullshit. There's a bunch of hidden modifiers which determine the true hit probability.
And all of those favors the player
you get secret bonus to hit if you miss unless you are on the highest difficulty (and even then there's a bug that makes aliens cap out at 95% shot chance).
But you can still miss a 100% shot
I feel the pain you clearly just felt
3 times...... How.. Advent is standing right there, one tile away and you have a shotgun....
Bonus pain if the model was shoving the gun barel up its nose
Shotguns and swords missing is so painful. They're usually so reliable that it feels like a guarantee!
Morrowind and dying to mubcrabs right outside the starting town says hi.
Is it odd that I really like Morrowind, XCOM, and the STALKER games but not Souls games?
Should I be concerned.... Should me wife be?
Xcom and Morrowind have high degrees of dicerolling in the gameplay. Progression has a lot to do with controlling or improving your odds. You can have a whole lot of different outcomes based on adapting to each roll.
Souls games usually lack that level of randomness, at least in the calculations phase of gameplay. That's how you see speedrunners standing still and circling around all these explosions and attacks without repercussions, etc. You either know the steps or you don't.
Stalker games are a bit different in that they're FPS games. I think when you can stealth headshot snipe something, the whole dynamic changes. (Which probably also flows into Elder Scrolls a fair bit.)
Well, that's three different genres of game.
XCOM balances strategy and turn-based tactics in a way that's a bit unusual. Games like Civ or Crusader Kings let you do the strategy, but you've not much influence in battles. Something like Hard West or Invisible Inc. let you do the turn-based tactics, but are fairly light on the strategic choices.
The STALKER games are survivalist FPS; although you combine looting and shooting, they aren't looter-shooters. As Strelok, your role-playing choices are quite limited - you can 'get out of here, stalker' if you wish - and you've no stats. I wouldn't have described the world as particularly reactive - the 'bad ending' in the first one depends on what you've been doing.
Morrowind and the Souls games are both Western RPGs; you fight enemies with weapons and magic, it's not obvious what's going on, certainly at first; and the world changes as a result of your decisions. DS doesn't generally let you know when you're making a decision, which makes it quite tough to progress some storylines. But as to how the fighting plays out, they're about as different as can be.
So I wouldn't worry about it. Wish there were more XCOM-like games, tho, since I love the mix.
the Souls games are both Western RPGs
From Software and Hidetaka Miyazaki might disagree.
Not to mention that Morrowind has bullshit rpg chance to hit calculation running on every strike. Meanwhile Souls like are skill based and hitbox/invuln frames.
That normally only happens when a weapon without a proper weapon skill is used, especially when combined with low stamina. Someone who tries to fight with a empty stamina bar using an hammer and a blunt weapon still of 5 will get his ass whipped hard.
Should we blame the government?
Or blame society?
Or blame the images on TV?
No! Blame stamina
Blame stamina
With all their empty little bars
And flailing hands so full of flaws
Blame stamina, Blame stamina
Not sure what you want to say with that, but ok.
I take it as Art, and Art doesn't have to have any kind of coherence or have to make sense.
So, thank you for your Art installation!
it's a 1 in 1000 event, that really hurts (or doesn't in this case)
We lose the notion of how many shots we fire in the game, so very unlikely events like that are very likely to happen at least once in a playthrough, but they still feel absurd. Our minds simply aren't made for statistics
I can't remember where I heard it but I remember someone saying for every 90% shot you miss, how many 10% did you hit and not call unfair.
None, I'd never attempt a 10% shot. 50-60 is the most desperate I've gotten. Anything less and you might as well overwatch.
The hit percentages in XCOM are a complete lie. I remember one time my sniper up on a rooftop missed a ~95% chance shot on a mook, who then turned around and crit the same sniper with a pistol aimed through two box trucks and cover. I think that's when I quit.
That's XCOM baby!
Yes, they are. But posting this without context is misleading completely in the wrong direction.
I remember reading an article about how they tuned all of that way into the players favor because the subjective impression of the mathematical probability was far too negative and punishing.
The newer XCOM games actively remember and give you the same result if you reload. To discourage save scumming. I would get stuck in one where I'd miss a 90%, reload, and still miss. Because the next shot was always going to miss. So I'd take a different shot with someone else that wouldn't matter, come back, and suddenly I'd make that 90%.
The original 90's games, you could just save scum. But you'd still miss that 90 sometimes.
This can be easily solved by just going to a different tile and bumm, new possibilities. (I save scum)
Two things:
-
It wasn't missing on a 90% that was an issue; you could miss shots that showed 100% because it was actually a 99.5% chance and the display number got rounded up.
-
It still doesn't use real probability. They literally programmed it so anything over 50% was actually a much higher percentage behind the scenes to make you feel like you were doing better (and because computers can't do truely random numbers). This is actually a super common thing in all video games that use percentages or dice rolls. And becsuse it's a computer, if you opened up the code to see the starting seed and all the math applied to it, you could accurately predict everything in the sequence.
(and because computers can't do truly random numbers)
Ok, well... there are good cryptographic ways of getting psudo-random numbers that are essentially just good as true random numbers.
Also, Intel chips actually do have hardware that uses quantum effects to generate actual random numbers. I'm not sure if AMD is doing the same these days, but I wouldn't be surprised.
AMD's supported it since 2015, but it's not something a normal app would use anyway (They'd just ask the OS for it).
More likely for the app to get it wrong though, generating unpredictable random numbers (Which is all you realistically need) is pretty easy, not screwing up and making them more predictable is hard.
Nice, yeah that's basically what I thought.
I understand that it's just bad luck, but I was still so fucking pissed off every time someone missed while litterally standing infront of someone and dying because of that.
That's XCOM baby!
That's probably why in phoenix point they made it trajectory based, to feel more realistic
The "modern" XCOM games cheaped out on their game mechanic budget.
The game Phoenix Point made by a much smaller studio with fewer resources came up with a vastly superior way to tackle hit probability. In that game you can free aim using a reticle made of two concentric circles. The outer circle represents where your shot(s) have a 100% chance falling inside of. The inner circle represents where 50% of your shots have a chance of being inside. The more accurate weapons have smaller circles. Then when you shoot the game simulates the path of your shots and any character or environmental object that gets in the way will be taken into account. If you fire a burst or shoot a shotgun, you're not bound to only 100% hitting or 100% missing. You can have a partial number of rounds or pellets hit the target, while others might miss, be blocked, or even hit another enemy or ally if they were sharing that cone of probability.
This makes the whole thing feel far more real than the shitty dice roll system XCOM relies on that just feels cheap and simplistic in comparison especially for a game of that price. Too bad that overall Phoenix Point had difficulty curve issues and the story was not every interesting to me at least.
If they ever make a new XCOM game I really hope they make that mechanic more like Phoenix Point's. And also lose the arbitrary turn limits that they've introduced in XCOM2 because they force a reckless game style that I absolutely hate in those types of games.
I really like Phoenix Point, but I don't start a game on a low enough level to be successful, and then quit part way through in frustration and play something else.
I need to accept that it's hard, I'm learning, and play on the easiest setting.
What is XCOM?
It's an alien invasion defence game where RNG hates you.
Xenonaughts is also quite good! Very punishing, if your into that sort of thing.
xcom percentages are also not how probability works. When you need 95%+ just to have an effective 50/50 outcome, something is royally fucked.
IIRC it's a variation of the "double random number" system that Fire Emblem uses:
https://serenesforest.net/general/true-hit/
https://fireemblemwiki.org/wiki/True_hit
tl;dr humans are bad at percentages, so the displayed percentage is actually not the true accuracy, but a skewed number that "feels" more accurate
It's definitely not accurate, though. Sure, any one roll can screw you over if it's not 100%, but xcom is literally known for having shitty actual percentages over many rolls even while it's showing 90%+.
I'm pretty sure that's by design. By spoofing the real accuracy, you get more dramatic moments which is good for engagement.
It's the same as GMs in tabletop games that fudge rice rolls sometimes.
I don't remember why it worked, but I remember that it didn't like it when you only took high accuracy shots, and if you missed a lot first, your 90%s usually hit.
The fairest Gollop accuracy is in the GBA game though.