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A fortunate Baldur's Gate 3 theorycrafter has discovered that one of the RPG's weapons has the potential to turn a Critical Failure into a Critical Success, all by using the kind of glitchy math made famous by the Civilization series.
As highlighted in a post on Reddit, at the start of Baldur's Gate 3's second act you can purchase the Defender Greataxe from Quartermaster Talli at the Last Light Inn. It's a rare axe with a +2 enchantment, which means a +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls. It's also ideal for your tank thanks to an effect that allows you to sacrifice one point of that enchantment to increase your armor and saving throw bonus – you still get +1 to your attacks, but now you also get +1 to your defences.
The choice of whether or not to make the swap triggers on your first attack of each round of combat. But as the post on Reddit attests, you can roll a Critical Failure - a one on your D20 - and still choose to lower your Enchantment by one. Traditionally, you don't add modifiers to a Critical Failure or a Success - they're simply a 5% chance of an automatic win or lose situation. But an Enchantment isn't a modifier, so if you take one away from one, you're left with zero, a number that doesn't appear on any dice.
According to this player's findings, that means that "in Civ 1 Ghandi fashion, the counter rolls over to 20," immediately turning your Crit Fail into a Crit Success, with all the extra damage that comes from that.
In case you're not up on your 4X history, that's a reference to the Indian leader in 1991's Civilization, Mahatma Gandhi. A now-debunked legend claimed that all leaders had an inherent aggression score, and Gandhi, a known pacifist, had the lowest possible score - one. But once India formed a democratic government in a game of Civ, Gandhi's aggression would drop by two, taking it to -1, and since Civilization couldn't handle negative numbers, the aggression seemed to circle all the way back around to the highest number, tuning him from a pacifist into a nuclear aggressor. The myth of 'Nuclear Gandhi' has long-since been dismissed by the Civilization devs, but it remains a popular story of video games not working as intended.
Dubbed by one comment as "the dirtiest 20 I've ever heard of," it's safe to say that this isn't a reliable strategy, but it does sound as though it can work out pretty nicely. Our Baldur's Gate scientist was playing as a Paladin turning their weaponized critical failure into a huge Smite. It doesn't seem to be a sure thing, but other players have noted the same maths in other parts of the RPG.
-1 modifiers on Strength or Charisma checks have reportedly also caused the game to glitch and come full circle, although nobody seems to have replicated the feat with the same success rate as the Defender Greataxe. If it's a glitch, it's a pretty handy one for the player, so even if it doesn't connect every single time, it's something I wouldn't mind popping up in one of my games.
Baldur's Gate 3 knocked my RPG halo off, and it's all Astarion's fault.
