I used to always try for the best outcome but with this have it seems like half of the time a failure also leads to an amazing consequence and story.
Like this from act one in the Underdark:
spoiler
I had to find a hidden gnome that could supply me with gunpowder, but she was so much on edge that she lit up the barrel of gunpowder and blew up the whole room, leaving half of my party dead. A suicide gnome bomber. I couldn’t convince her that I was not an enemy. Reloaded just to see if I could successfully do it, but much preferred the first outcome of the dice roll, so had to reload and try 6 times until I failed again. What a game!
I feel like this is one of the aspects of DnD the game doesn’t do a great job of. In the tabletop you sometimes have one character handling the conversation but you can usually switch pretty easily. Like the paladin could be talking to someone and fail to persuade them, then the barbarian steps in to intimidate or something.
It does bother me quite a bit how conversations are so one-on-one. I really appreciate the peanut gallery comments from my companions, but they’re too few and far between. I would love if there was some way to make manual checks based on the dialogue but still totally dependent on the player understanding what types of check they might need.
E.g., I’m talking to an NPC as Tav, but the NPC mentions something which I pick up on as sounding religious (and my Tav isn’t versed in religion). I should be able to make a religion check as whichever companion I want – essentially, let the player role play for the whole group the same way an actual group of people would in DnD. The game is already meta-gaming for you in exactly this way, by performing, say, a religion check when my character probably wouldn’t have picked up on any religious undertones, and now I’m wondering why my character suddenly knows about some obscure religious proverb or some such.
Yeah, I wish that would have been implemented. Maybe at a later update or a mod?