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If you’ve been following along these “die roll” posts, you may be confused.

If you’ve haven’t been following these posts, I strongly advise you to start with 46! and read them in order. That will put this post in context.

What’s the confusion? Clearly I’ve rolled a 67 in an Ability Check in Baldur’s Gate 3:

There are two potential confusions:

• First of all, why the double exclamation points? Is it a double emphasis?

  

  In math, when you write something like 12!, it doesn’t mean TWELVE said with great vigor. It means “12 factorial”, which is 1×2×3×4×…×10×11×12. So mathematically the title of 46! in the first post in my “die-roll series” would be 1×2×…×45×46. That’s a number large enough that I guarantee your pocket calculator can’t handle it (though Wolfram Alpha can).

  Now you now the meaning of the first sentence of my 46! post, and have become an even more amazing human being.

  

  The meaning of 67!! in math is a bit more obscure. It’s a double factorial. In this case, that means it’s 1×3×5×7×…×65×67. In other words, it’s the product of only the odd numbers up to 67.

  The point of all this math (isn’t this supposed to be a post obout BG3?) is that 67!! is less than 67!.

  

  In other words, this die roll of 67 means less than my previous high roll of 59. We’ll get into why in just a moment.

  

• The second confusion comes from the discussions of the highest possible roll in my previous posts, notably the aforementioned 59. In that post, I said that the highest possible roll I might get is 61. How could I get a 67?

  

To address these confusions, let me first remind you of a couple of the mods I’m using for playthrough 12:

• Adjustable Party Limit, which allows you to have up to 16 members in your adventuring party, higher than the normal BG3 limit of 4.
• Unlock Level Curve, which allows you to level up characters to level 20, higher than the normal BG3 limit of level 12.

At the end of my 59! post, I implied that I’d keep trying for a higher roll. To get these high rolls, I needed a Bard so they could cast Bardic Inspiration.

Since the odds of getting a roll of 60 or 61 were low, I decided to pursue it more aggressively by adding two more Bards to my group, for a total of three. That would give me many more uses of Bardic Inspiration before I had to Rest to restore them.

Here are those three Bards, who are also my Three Protector hirelings for playthrough 12:

Their names are derived from Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe of the Three Stooges.

As I had Astarion continue to pick every lock and disarm every trap I could find, I noticed a new potential buff appeared in the list of what I could add in the attempt.

The following two pictures may give you an idea of the list I saw. They show the screen just before I make the Ability Check die roll. I had so many bonuses due to items, skills, and spells that it takes two screenshots to show them all.

The “x1” in the lower left of the first picture means that a Trap Disarm kit must be used to… wait for it… disarm the trap.

I’ve described most of the other buffs in my previous posts in the “die-roll” series. The new one is Peerless Skill. Through observation, I figured out that it has the same effect as Bardic Inspiration (add a +1D12 bonus to an Ability Check), but stacks with a Bardic Inspiration instead of replacing it.

Peerless Skill is part of D&D, but it’s not in BG3. I figured out where it was coming from: the Unlock Level Curve mod.

The author of that mod (listed as nitram166 on NexusMods and Dustbag on mod.io) couldn’t implement all the official D&D rules for all the classes from level 13-20. By their own admission, they didn’t try. The range of additional abilities and rules would amount to writing a whole second game.

Mostly the benefits of the extra levels is to allow characters more hit points, Feats, and spell slots following the BG3 pattern of level progression.

However, here and there the mod’s author added an additional ability in cases where it wouldn’t require much additional coding. Peerless Skill is one of these abilities. In D&D, Lore Bards gain this at 14th level.

Based on what I’ve seen on the web, I’m not sure if the Peerless Skill ability is supposed to be able to stack with Bardic Inspiration according to the official D&D rules. If you recall my antipathy toward D&D, it’s not the kind of thing I’m inclined to research further.

The option to cast Peerless Skill was coming from Larrana, the Lore Bard.

As in the previous “die roll” posts, let’s examine the details:

I had Moana or Curly Joanna cast Bardic Inspiration on top of Laranna’s Peerless Skill. If you look at the numbers, clearly the “67” is coming from that.

That’s one reason why 67!! is less than what 67! might have been, if it were possible to roll that high in BG3.

Up until now, my previous high rolls were possible in BG3 without mods. You’d need to:

• Play Astarion for Happy.
• Be a level 12 Thief Rogue with maximum Sleight of Hand Proficiency.
• Use both leveling up and a game event to get Dexterity to 22.
• Use a Disguise Kit or similar tool to become a Gnome, then wear the Nimblefinger Gloves
• Wear The Graceful Cloth, or have another character apply Cat’s Grace using the spell Enhance Ability.
• Also wear the Smuggler’s Ring and the Shapeshifter’s Boon Ring.
• Have two other members of the party cast Guidance and Bardic Inspiration.

It’s a lot, to be sure. It requires familiarity with the game. I couldn’t have planned to do anything like this until my 12th playthrough.

One might reasonably say that adding mods makes the roll meaningless. There are mods out there to cheat BG3 rolls; you can make them all 1 or 20 or whatever.

My only defense: While this result is not possible in unmodified BG3, it would be possible in regular D&D. Maybe. It would depend a lot on the GM, including what items they placed in their campaign and how they handled abilities.

There’s another, separate reason why the roll may be meaningless:

I farmed for it.

While there are many places in the game which have many traps close together, by this point in playthrough 12 I’d passed most of them. I found myself in a room in which there were four devices close together that could be disarmed.

Previously, I came by the high die rolls “honorably”: I tried to pick a lock or disarm a trap, hoping for a high roll. If I didn’t get it, I moved on.

This time I got the roll by save scumming: I saved the game just before attempting to disarm those four devices. If I didn’t get a high roll, I restored from that save and tried again four times.

I didn’t keep count, but I think I restored the game roughly ten times (about forty disarm attempts) before I got the 67. I’d previously got 62, but I wanted to go higher. I continued, hoping for a higher roll than 67, but didn’t get it.

If you look at the detail above and crunch the numbers, you’ll see that with my current setup it’s possible to get as high a roll as 74.

At this point, I’m done with farming. There are still some more locks and traps left in playthrough 12. If I get a higher roll than 67, I’ll probably write another blog post about it.

But I’ll put “!!” after the number, to reduce its value.