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Most CRPGs or traditional RPGs are difficult, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is no exception, especially if you have no grasp of Dungeons and Dragons and its many rulesets. A hit rate of 95 percent, for example, might look like a sure chance, but the game disagrees and will still randomly turn it into a miss several times in a row. Hence, Baldur’s Gate 3 tips and tricks are in order.
That way, you know what to expect and how to travel this kind of road, so to speak. It’s not uncommon for a lot of newcomers to the genre to feel befuddled with the myriad of RPG systems straight from D&D’s tabletop rules. Regardless, we’ll be giving some friendly Baldur’s Gate 3 tips and tricks to help you get an advantage.
Save according to your preference
It’s still a huge debate in the community on whether to save scum or just let the failed rolls flow naturally. After all, this isn’t a tabletop game, and there’s no Dungeon Master to improvise.
Save scumming, for the uninitiated, is the act of saving the game and then reloading if something undesirable happens to your gameplay. They’re practically manual checkpoints if the video game allows quick saves, and Baldur’s Gate 3 allows unconstrained quick saves. That means you can save even during dialog or in the middle of combat.
This is where your preference comes in. Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat and dialog system depends on dice rolls, and sometimes, you can be just unlucky. Whether you want to manipulate the results of these background dice rolls or not is entirely up to you. But to give you a rough pointer:
- If you want a close D&D experience, then don’t save scum.
- If you think the die randomness is too much, then feel free to save scum.
Either way, we recommend just saving often using the quick save button even if you’re not going to save-scum, just so your options are open.
Turn off karmic dice
Karmic Dice is a neat little setting in the Gameplay section of the Main Menu, which sort of removes streaks of bad luck by manipulating the dice rolls in your favor. In theory, it’s great, but in practice, it doesn’t represent the ideal D&D die experience, as rolls won’t be completely random.
Moreover, Karmic Dice goes both ways. If you have a lucky streak, then Karmic Dice will interfere and make your next rolls unlucky.
So basically, what’s going to happen is that you become unlucky with your character’s strengths while becoming lucky with your character’s weaknesses. Somehow, Karmic Dice will occasionally reverse your whole character. It’s best to just turn it off.
Don’t worry too much about the racial bonuses
Speaking of character building, one of the reasons why a lot of players spend too much time in the character creator is due to the dizzying number of available races (and their sub-races). Each one has bonuses, and comparing them if you’re not familiar with D&D can be quite the effort.
The good news is that they don’t matter much. Just pick what fantasy race appeals to you the most. The developers have balanced out the races compared to the tabletop so even Gnomes can wield heavy two-handed weapons with no penalty. There are still racial bonuses, but they won’t affect your gameplay as much as the character class.
On a side note, there are a few benefits to certain races based on their size. Gnomes and Halflings can squeeze into tighter places, allowing for a bit more exploration opportunity. Meanwhile, normal-sized races have better movement speed. Both those benefits can be easily offset with spells or items, so again, just pick a race you like regardless of the racial bonuses.
You can switch difficulties to your advantage
If you’re a beginner, you’ll be tempted to start with the lowest difficulty setting. Explorer.
However, Explorer has a glaring downside; it doesn’t allow multiclassing, which is a shame since everyone– newbies included are encouraged to experiment.
Thankfully, you can work around this. You can change the in-game difficulty anytime while in-game. Just go to the Main Menu and select “Difficulty.” If you change from Explorer to Balanced, you’ll be able to unlock multiclassing on your characters and then re-spec using Withers.
Once you have multi-classed, you can then switch back to Explorer in order to enjoy the lower difficulty (30 percent lower enemy HP, trading discounts, better defense, and free skills). You’ll still retain the multiclass.
You can pick up barrels & use them later
One of the reasons why Baldur’s Gate 3 and its game world feel so alive is how you can hoard most items strewn about. That means you can pick up crates and barrels, even explosive barrels—especially explosive barrels.
You can then transfer these materials to your camp chest and use them later. You’ll no doubt find plenty of uses for dozens of explosive barrels *wink*.
If not nuking difficult enemies to oblivion, you can also use regular barrels or crates to create platforms so you can reach higher places. Sometimes you can even use these objects to block entrances, denying passage to enemies once combat erupts.
The environment is your best weapon
While on the topic of environmental hazards, artificial or natural, it’s also good to remember in Baldur’s Gate 3 that gravity and height can be your ally (or enemy, depending on where your characters stand).
If you see an enemy standing next to a ledge or railing, just push them off the game world. If your push succeeds, then it’s practically a one-hit kill, perfect for dispatching tanky enemies.
Likewise, certain environmental hazards are also present such as frozen ground or greasy ground (which you can also create). These kinds of surfaces can make enemies slip and go prone, allowing you to attack them with an advantage. Steam, created with water/ice and fire, can also obscure or blind enemies.
So just attack every turn. Try to manipulate your surroundings.
Dont ignore bonus action & movement
It’s easy to feel limited by what you can do each turn, especially in lower levels, but you don’t always have to focus on action. There’s a bonus action, too, which you also should remember to cast before committing your action points (such is the case for Hunter’s Mark or Hex or even class-specific buffs).
Meanwhile, you also shouldn’t waste your movement points as you can spend them to reposition or ensure that your characters are space-out so they don’t all die from the same Fireball. You can even drag them away from some precarious ledges. In any case, if you can still do something in a turn, it’s better to do it rather than regret something on the next turn.
Invisibility gives you exceptional control of encounters
You even have to set up some elaborate death traps to cheese enemy encounters in Baldur’s Gate 3. Something as simple and as lazy as full-party Invisibility (courtesy of spellcasters) can trivialize even the toughest boss fights.
You will need to cast full Invisibility before the fight begins if you want to ambush enemies, so the quick save function is ideal here if you want to hear their dialog before bashing their skulls in. Save first, then talk to them; once you’re done talking, reload to set up the Invisibility ambush. You get to have your cake and eat it too, assuming all dialog options lead to combat.
If you start combat while invisible, your attacks will roll with advantage, and your enemies will be surprised, basically denying them a turn.
After that, you can just focus on taking down the biggest threat in one or two turns and then mop up their floor with their weaker minions afterward. This works for almost all boss fights (minus the final one).
Also, this invisibility trick works in other scenarios outside of combat as well, so be creative and resourceful.
You don’t have to win all fights
There’s a fair but clever retreat function in Baldur’s Gate 3. Once your characters are away from the enemies at a far enough distance, they can just flee and return to camp.
Some fights are just not worth it, or perhaps you were ambushed. This retreat system is also great for cheesing the fight somehow, as you can keep bringing in fresh party members to the fray.
It’s also worth noting that if you can avoid a fight with a dialog option, that’s better, as you’ll be rewarded with the same experience bonus most of the time. The only scenario where this doesn’t work is against enemies who can’t talk.
You won’t get to see all the content in one go
Last but not least, don’t worry about missing out on some of the content. You will miss a fairly big chunk regardless.
There are lots of branching paths in the game, and some of them can drastically alter your playthrough and unlock content that’s limited to certain choices. It’s more practical just to finish what you started and play the game again instead of reloading to go back from a big decision a few hours earlier.
There are so many avenues you can take in Baldur’s Gate 3 that it doesn’t matter if you miss some of them. Even as early as picking a class or race, you’ve already missed out on some of the content. When in doubt, just enjoy the game and live with your choices; that’s the spirit of D&D.
