Baldur's Gate 3 Beginner's Guide – Tips & Tricks for Starters

Our Baldur’s Gate 3 Beginner’s Guide will help you during your starting hours of this massive RPG with some helpful tips and tricks. These tips and tricks will cover a wide range of topics that you should be aware of while starting your journey in Baldur’s Gate 3 and even if you are a veteran of the RPG genre, this guide will still point you in the right direction regarding some of the complex in-game mechanics of Baldur’s Gate 3.

Beginner’s Guide – Baldur’s Guide 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 is not your typical, casual RPG and it strictly follows the D&D rules, and every major move requires a dice roll. So, it is vital that you go into the game with everything at your fingertips.

Always Save Manually

Baldur’s Gate 3 comes with a built-in autosave system, and it will save your game at key points but that is all that is does. As I mentioned earlier, it saves the game at key points and that is it. The key points are mostly pretty far from each other and otherwise, it also saves the game after every ten minutes. If you have played Baldur’s Gate 3, then it means that 10 minutes is a lot of in-game time and a lot can happen in these 10 minutes and if anything, bad happens, you will want to have a saved file that is not from too long ago.

To counter this, you must make a habit of saving Baldur’s Gate 3 as much as possible. Every time you complete a conversation or even before starting one, before tackling a difficult enemy or a big combat scenario, always save the game so you can quickly reload to this state and try out a different approach the next time instead of starting from a long time ago. I am telling you that the more saved files you create, the happier you will be while playing Baldur’s Gate 3 because even a wrong dialogue selection would make you regret it later if you forgot to save before it.

Choose Your Party Carefully

This tip actually goes along the lines of making relationships because the party is pretty much pre-defined, and you will have little choice in this department. However, what you can do is ensure that you make and maintain good relationships with people who you actually want to work within the game. Nearly every choice that you make in Baldur’s Gate 3 will make one of your companions happy and one of them angry or upset. You can only control this to a certain extent so make sure that you are making decisions that make the companions that you want happy and skip the other ones.

Obviously, you cannot alienate party members too much to the extent that they will just stop helping you out so you will need to figure out a balance between doing good and doing bad for certain members. Check which skills you want the most in your party and work along those lines to keep them happy so that they stick with you and do not leave your party. Abandoning happens when you are really bad to someone so make sure that you try and maintain a balance between making everyone happy and upsetting them at the same time.

Ensure That Your Party Remains Together

You will need to command your entire party through every thick and thin in Baldur’s Gate 3 but there is a chance that you might accidentally get some distance from one of the party members and if that happens, that particular party member will start acting independently. When this happens, any order given to the entire party will not apply to them and you will need to select them separately and give them orders until they come back to the rest of the party and join them once more.

You must try to keep your party members close to each other at all times to prevent this from happening. If someone is refusing to walk through a certain area, try to manually control them and bring them back to the party by taking another path or whatever you need to do as this will ensure that your party remains together and can work together. You can give a single command to the entire party this way, otherwise, you will need to manually select and give orders to party members which is just not that convenient.

Interact with Party Members at the Campfire

During your journeys, you will often spend time around the campfire during which you will have nothing else to do but rest and prepare for the long road ahead. You can take this time to chat with your party members and learn more about their previous lives or just chat with them in general. While you can always chat with them, if a party member has an exclamation mark on top of their head, it means that they have something important to say and you must listen to what they are trying to tell you.

If you have good relationships with everyone, that will unlock additional chat options for you. It is not required for the main story in any way, and it will also not affect how things work out in the end, but it is just a good mechanic in the game that lets you know more about the party you are traveling with on this dangerous quest. Before sleeping around the campfire, make sure that you exhaust all conversation options with your party members because it immerses you more into the story and your party members.

Try to Loot Everything

Since Baldur’s Gate 3 is an RPG, collecting things and items is a base game mechanic and one that you should get acquainted with fairly quickly. Looting plays an important part in this, and you must try to loot everything that you find in your way. When you kill an enemy, make sure that you go and loot their dead bodies. This will ensure that you are always getting something from the enemies that you kill in the game. Apart from dead enemies, you should keep an eye out on boxes, chests, and everything else that looks like something that looks like it can hold something inside. Loot everything that comes your way.

Try Out the Karmic Dice Mechanic

Baldur’s Gate 3 comes with a unique gameplay mechanic which is called the Karmic Dice. Since every major move in Baldur’s Gate 3 is performed after a dice roll, there are chances that things might go awry, and you might keep getting bad rolls during the dice rolls. When this happens, you will get disheartened because you will not get the result that you are looking forward to. To keep things in balance, Baldur’s Gate 3 comes with the option of Karmic Dice.

With this enabled, you will have a good balance between good and bad rolls. It is worth pointing out that this makes good rolls in a row go away too. Since the game’s engine handles all of the rolls and everything else, this system can make it fair for you to get some good results and some not-favorable ones to maintain a good flow of rolls. This setting is turned on right from the start of the game, but you can play around with it to see whether you would like it to remain on or off.

Keep Your Companions Well-Stocked

It might come as a surprise to you but if you keep your companions well-stocked on resources, they will make good use of the items in their inventory during difficult situations. Make sure that all party members have health potions with them because this will eliminate the use of one move during combat just to heal them. If they get damaged and want to use an item, they will automatically do it so and this will open your moves to remain on the offensive rather than supportive. The bonus actions do not take your spell slot, and this is extremely helpful in difficult fights.

Limit Stealing or Bre Prepared for It

If you want to steal things in Baldur’s Gate 3, you must be prepared for it as well. If you steal something with someone around, they will instantly notice it and will turn against you. To prevent this from happening, you will need to stay in the shadows or ensure that you are all alone when you are stealing from someone. There are some tasks in the game that will require you to steal different things, but you need to ensure that you are staying out of sight and try not to steal anything that you do not instantly need.

Understand Skills and Their Use

Skills in Baldur’s Gate 3 work a little differently when compared with other RPGs and they are directly dependent on your character’s base stats. Try to reach the description of each skill and how they are affected by your stats. Focus on skills that complement your playstyle and get a boost from your stats because this will be beneficial for you. Going all-rounder might not work for you because skills become more effective when the stats required for them are higher.

Try to Land Status Effects When you Can

Status Effects in Baldur’s Gate 3 are extremely helpful in combat, and you should try to leverage them every time you can. You should always survey the battlefield at the start and try to look for different opportunities where you can use your skills to implement a particular status effect on enemies who might have an advantage over you. Ranged enemies are always located farther and higher from you but if you can land a particular status effect on them that causes them to feel threatened will make them miss their attacks more and even if they land, their damage will be low.

Similarly, you can use the status effects to your own benefit as well. For example, if you can charm an enemy, they will boost your charisma and it will ultimately make your charisma-based skills stronger. If you are playing as a magician, landing these status effects on your enemies will be really easy because you can cast spells on the enemies which cause these status effects. Other than that, using a melee class that can land powerful attacks can also inflict status effects on your enemies.

Use Your Entire Party for Conversations

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a huge game and there are different factions and races which will have their own differences and problems with certain races. Sometimes, talking with an NPC with your base character may not be beneficial for you if they do not have a good relationship with your particular race or class. For this, you can switch to another class or race that might have a better shot at getting what you want from that particular NPC. These opportunities will often appear in the game and the more you play the game, the more you will understand the politics, racial tension, and other potential issues that might hinder your progress in your desired way.

Don’t Let Death Bring You Down

Death is a common occurrence in Baldur’s Gate 3 because it features a dangerous world, and every little mistake can sometimes lead to your death. For this very purpose, you should not just keep saving your game manually but also prepare yourself mentally. Depending on your skill level with RPGs and particularly DnD-inspired ones, you might die a lot during your early hours as you are trying out different things and trying to find your perfect balance in the game. Just make sure that you are mentally prepared for it and do not let the deaths take the good of you.

That is all for this guide, for a complete list of Baldur’s Gate 3 guides, check out the links below:

This concludes our Baldur’s Gate 3 Beginner’s Guide. If you have any tips or tricks for us to follow in Baldur’s Gate 3, let us know in the comments section below.