Baldur's Gate 3

TL;DR It does NOT stabilize your rolls. It DOES Stabilize your number of successes/failures (which I think is bad for the system).

There is a lot of confusion in this thread about how this works.

If you understand the mechanics of bg3 and are try to optimize your build you should definitely turn it off. If you don't care about that and just want to play without understanding all the mechanics I would still turn it off, but it's fine to leave on probably.

What it does is make rolling a success more likely the more you fail and vice versa. It also applies to enemies. So if you have put all your resources into Armor Class so that enemies miss you more often... well you might be marginally less, but the whole point is that enemies will hit you at a fairly regular frequency and you will hit them back at a similar rate. It means you won't keep failing and that you won't succeed at everything.

It punishes you for being really good at something and rewards you for taking more actions rather than being good at the ones you take. It is kind of good for new players that used a scuffed build because it means they won't fail all their checks even if they made terrible choices, but if you make some basic common sense choices like getting a high armor class or pairing expertise in stealth (Rogue 1 ability) with a high DEX then it can be very frustrating.

On lower difficulties karmic dice can even out your streaks, which feels good but ultimately isn't game-breaking.

On higher difficulties they can get you killed because they also work for the enemy, meaning you'll get hit a lot more, which is a real problem.

Nay, although there have been a couple times losing a stack of lockpicks consecutive lost coin flips where I almost regretted it. :P

Nah, I don't want anything fucking with my dice rolls, especially in combat. If I stack AC, I should be an unhittable tank. If they only worked for skill checks, I would probably leave them on to help with unlucky streaks but even those I can just save scum.

As a programmer, the idea of replicating the randomness of dice in a game is... tricky. Simply: computers don't do random, so we must do our best to imitate randomness. So then attempting to 'curve' that artificial randomness also makes me feel weird.

I turned it off myself, though, now I can tell myself that my improbable high rolls are 'earned'... and using 3 inspiration points to only keep rolling 2s and 3s are also 'earned.'

I left it on. I haven't seen any datamined information on the system so it's all just placebo as far as I'm concerned. Like a fake thermometer that people can adjust all they want to make themselves feel better. Maybe it does something, maybe it doesn't (though it probably does).

But I put 0 stock in how people "feel" about the randomness since they're not doing real testing and it's all likely confirmation bias.

Playing on easy for my first game. I have left it on and I still fail on some of my rolls. Over all I feel like it's boosting my rolls to be better. Fights are easy unless a spell or mechanic I don't know or understand goes off. The dialogue, if I select the option I have the best bonuses in I tend to get by all of them. Really stealth and traps have been my biggest hurdle. The AI keeps walking into them when I move.

I just leave it on and don't think about it too much. If I saw some hard details on how exactly it works (not guesses) I might have a stronger opinion. I've never turned it off and never thought twice about it.

I turned it off because it’s not real dnd if there’s dice weight. Rolling a hot streak or cold streak is just part of the dice, the dice giveth and the dice taketh

I just left it on, I don't really understand it though. I still fail even trivial skill checks repeatedly with anyone other than Astarion so I'm not actually convinced it does anything at all.

I know there is a kind of philosophy in random dice roll design for software where you slightly skew the distribution of subsequent rolls based on previous ones because it feels more random (rather than getting e.g. 1, 2, 1, 2, which could be 'truly random' but feels like ass), but I don't think that's what karmic dice is doing. I do play really high AC, with Laezel and Shadowheart in full endgame plate plus a buff here or there I think they run 24~27. It is very hard for enemies to hit us and it feels about right. I would be very surprised to learn that karmic dice is benefiting enemies too, because that seems unintended and not in the spirit of how the tooltip is written.

What does karmic dice do?

No for me. Let luck be free of influence.

Besides, I feel lucky.

No way. I want true dice rolls, good or bad.

It's still shitty algorithmic pseudorandomness either way, and I can still have winning or losing streaks with karmic dice on, despite that being its advertised reason to exist.