Mechanics

Baldur’s Gate 3 runs on tabletop rules, and tabletop rules are a list of prices. Everything you do costs something: a key press and nothing else, one of the actions a turn allows, a roll of the dice, a spell slot, a purse of gold, a long rest that moves the world on, or a choice you cannot take back. This guide sorts our 99 mechanics pages by that price, from the cheapest to the dearest, because the price is what the tooltip leaves out and what most of the pages exist to explain.

The order matters. The free systems at the top are the ones a new player should learn in the first hour. The rolls and slots in the middle are the game’s arithmetic. The long rest near the bottom is its only clock, the thing every missable quest and every camp scene waits on. And the permanent choices at the end are the ones our pages spend the most words on, because they are the ones you would want to have read about first.

A key press

Thirteen pages cover systems that cost nothing but knowing the button. Hold the key to highlight objects and every lootable thing and person in view gets an outline, which is the single most useful habit in the game. Right-click, Shift-click or Ctrl-click to add junk to wares and sell it all in one press at the next trader. Press R to toggle dual wielding once two light weapons are in the slots. Change your dice skin from the purple hexagon during any roll, and your face at the camp mirror since Patch 3 with the change appearance option. The Karmic Dice toggle is the one setting with a sting: the page explains how it smooths streaks and why that helps enemies too.

Movement and management are free as well. Fast travel between Ancient Sigil Circles costs nothing once each is found, and the page lists every waypoint in all three acts. Changing party is a fast travel to camp, not a rest, so it does not advance anything. Preparing spells is a menu. Non-lethal attacks are a toggle on the action bar, and the reason Minthara can be recruited on a good run. Multiplayer is four players online or two on a couch, with the host assigning companions from the session menu. The Teahouse marker page fixes a quest pin that will not go away, and our beginner tips and six combat tips are the two pages to read before any of the rest.

An action or a bonus action

A turn is one action, one bonus action, marked by the orange triangle, and movement, and nineteen pages describe things that spend one of them. Throw hurls objects, enemies and allies, scaled by Strength; jumping reaches ledges and is extended by Enhance Leap and a few items; unarmed strikes are what Tavern Brawler turns into a weapon; stealth hides you from the red vision cones that the surprise rounds page shows how to exploit for a free turn. High ground costs a climb and pays +2 on ranged attacks, and the fall damage and kill with fall damage pages cover the trip down for you and for the enemy you shoved. Holes and crevices need a small shape or a leap, and illuminating darkness is a torch or a cantrip.

The criminal actions are actions too. Lockpicking spends Thieves’ Tools on a Dexterity roll, disarming traps spends a toolkit after a Perception check finds them, pickpocketing and stealing spend Sleight of Hand and, if it fails, your standing, which the Enemy of Justice page explains how to lose again by killing witnesses, reloading, or reaching Act 2. Mattis and Silfy are the first people to try it on you. Two more pages are about actions you can hand to someone else: temporary companions like Us, and the Owlbear top rope, a Wild Shape, an Enlarge and a jump that lands for over a thousand damage. The Chicken Chaser minigame at the Goblin Camp is a minute of actions for Krolla, and Akabi’s jackpot at the circus is one spin of a rigged wheel, rigged back with Greater Invisibility and a stolen ring, for the legendary Nyrulna.

A roll of the dice

Ten pages are the arithmetic. An attack roll is a d20 plus modifiers against the target’s armour class, which is armour plus shield plus Dexterity. The roll modifiers page covers what gets added, ability bonuses and the proficiency bonus, and the proficiency page covers where proficiency comes from, race, background and class. Skills lists every check by ability, skill proficiency explains why they do not stack, and increasing Perception is the one skill worth chasing on purpose, since it finds traps, buttons and ambushes. Three conditions from gear change the rolls: Arcane Acuity stacks to +7 on spell attacks and fades a stack a turn, Reverberation lowers the target’s Strength, Dexterity and Constitution and comes from items like the Gloves of Belligerent Skies, and Lightning Charges discharge at five for extra damage. The equipment features page indexes more than ninety of these passives and the item that grants each.

A spell slot

Eleven pages are about magic as a budget. Spell casting explains which classes have slots and how a scroll lets anyone else cast once; learning from scrolls is the Wizard’s trick of copying a scroll into the book for good. Upcasting spends a bigger slot on a smaller spell for more damage, range or targets, and maintaining concentration is about not losing the slot you already spent when something hits you. Several pages are one spell each, because the spell does something the tooltip undersells: Speak with Dead and its rule that a corpse you killed will not talk to you undisguised; Detect Thoughts as a way to raise approval; Speak with Animals, which any character can get through a potion; Summon Quasit from a scroll, and Shovel, the quasit who can be kept as a permanent minion with an achievement attached. The Gnarled Door at Auntie Ethel’s and the Ornate Mirror under the apothecary cost no slot but are gated the same way, by saying the right words.

Gold

Seven pages price things in coin. Merchants lists every trader in the game by act and how bartering and stealing from them work. Gold farming is exploration, selling and pickpocketing the rich. Withers sells three services: hirelings at 100 gold each, up to three, in any class; a respec at 100 gold that rebuilds class, stats, spells and feats with all experience kept; and a revive at 200 gold, the fallback when no Scroll of Revivify is at hand and the death saves fail. The best loot locations page is the counter-argument to buying anything: every item in the game is hand placed, and the page maps the ones worth a detour in each act. The Scuffed Rock on the beach is the first of them, a Harper cache under a boulder a strong character can move.

A long rest

Eight pages turn on the one resource that also moves the story. Recovering spell slots is a long rest, with the Sorcerer’s points as the exception. The rest also costs camp supplies, 40 on Balanced and 80 on Tactician, where enemies also carry 30 percent more health than on Balanced, hit 5 percent more often and save at +2. What a rest buys, beyond slots, is the reason to be careful with it: camp scenes for romance and approval, the Guardian’s visits, the Owlbear cub’s arrival, and every timer on the missable quests page, from Gale’s second rest to Florrick’s fifth. The points of no return page is the other half of the clock, the five thresholds that close an act rather than a quest. The Owlbear cub comes to camp over several rests, Bloodless is the debuff Astarion leaves that a rest removes, and the approval ratings page lists, companion by companion, the choices the meter reacts to between rests.

Something permanent

The largest group, 31 pages, is the decisions that stay made. They begin at character creation, with backgrounds that fix two skill proficiencies and background goals that pay Inspiration Points for acting in character across all eleven backgrounds. Feats and the longer feats guide cover the three slots at 4, 8 and 12 that the builds guide is organised around; multiclassing is the choice to split those levels; best party is the same decision made four times over, and recruit companions shows how, since Patch 5, all ten can share one camp. Only Withers undoes any of it, and only for a fee.

The tadpole is the permanent choice the whole game is about. Illithid parasites maps all 23 specimens, Illithid powers lays out the three tiers they unlock, used as a bonus action, and the choice page argues that using them does not ruin an ending. Two go further: the Emperor’s Astral-touched tadpole, which the Displacer Beast shape page explains, and the Mind Archive Interface in the colony, which reads Mind items for backstory and the Githzerai Mind Barrier. The Dark Urge origin is permanent from the first screen, with the Slayer form and Unholy Assassin of Bhaal as its rewards for giving in, and becoming a vampire spawn is Astarion’s ending applied to you.

Then there are the buffs and brands. Permanent buffs collects every lasting bonus from BOOOAL’s Benediction onward and where each is earned; the Selune Gilded Chest in the Owlbear cave is opened with a prayer sheet, costs Shadowheart’s approval, and can be dropped in the Goblin Camp to burn every goblin who touches it. Two Act 1 decisions leave a mark: killing or sparing the three goblin leaders, which fixes the fate of the Grove, and letting a companion die in the fight for it. The Strange Ox follows you through all three acts if you let it, Zethino’s love test at the circus has one right set of answers per partner, Suspicious Sounds behind a Moonrise wall are a one-time find, and the Punch Drunk achievement wants twenty kills while a party member is drunk. The finesse weapons page closes the group by explaining the property that decides, permanently, whether a weapon reads your Strength or your Dexterity.

How the prices connect

Read down the table and each price contains the ones above it. A pickpocket is a bonus action and a roll. A spell is an action, a roll and a slot. A revive is gold, or a slot, or a rest. A rest is supplies and time, and time is what the quests guide counts in missable encounters and the companions guide counts in ways to lose a party member. The classes guide tells you which of these prices your class pays most often, and the spells guide what each slot buys at each level.

Mechanics questions

What should a beginner learn first?

The free things: highlight objects, add to wares, the bonus action triangle, and what a long rest advances. Our beginner tips and combat tips pages cover the first hour, and the Tactician page is the one to read before choosing that difficulty, since it doubles the cost of every rest.

Is there any permanent choice that can be undone?

Class, subclass, stats, spells and feats, through Withers for 100 gold. Race, background and origin cannot be. Neither can a consumed tadpole, a broken oath without paying the Oathbreaker Knight, or the Mark of the Absolute.

How many long rests can you take?

As many as you have supplies for, and the game never runs out of them on Balanced. The limit is not the count but the timers: each rest can end a missable quest, and the points of no return end whole acts regardless of how many you took.