Baldur’s Gate 3 – Wish I Knew List for New Players (No Spoilers)

Wish I Knew List

I thought it might be useful to list for newbies basic stuff to enhance the game that I wish I knew sooner in my over 1000 hours of life lived in BG3 there are no plot spoilers, builds or tactics tips in this post.

If you are a veteran please add any other non-spoiler guidance for newbs.

• If you want to enjoy the story: Avoid plot spoilers, which means avoid gameplay videos etc. This game is story rich and is very reactive to player choice. That is 80 percent of why it has beaten the best game award record by sweeping all five industry GOTY awards. To get maximum enjoyment and extend replay-ability avoid plot spoilers in posts, videos and the bg3.wiki. Sometimes they slip into combat or build guides especially when items are discussed. so resist the temptation and be careful what you watch and read. Close the eyes and ears when necessary. i am on my fourth complete play-through and still find new lines and events from unusual choices, but I also learned too much too soon from instructional videos.
• To avoid having to get help from spoilers: if you are stuck on a puzzle take a moment to clear your mind and look around the environment with fresh eyes. larian uses misdirection to hide things in plain sight. look up and to the sides and look for spaces you might be able to go that you missed before. look for subtle differences in objects or glows/colors. also follow your characters around with your camera or you won’t see things they notice. so frustrating to hear “what’s that” and have no idea what they are talking about. move objects like crates and furniture to reveal hidden stuff. uses alt to highlight items and hover the cursor over walls and objects to reveal destructibles that it can solve puzzles to destroy. You can climb on and stack crates.
• Use use use the bg3.wiki (except the blocked spoilers) and the tooltips. but the wiki is more reliable than the tooltips. so always check the wiki to understand a term, item or spell. don’t skip the basic wiki articles like classes and spellcastimg even if you’ve played DnD. and read the item, spell and ability entries carefully every word often counts.
• Non-lethal attacks only works with puree melee damage: piercing, bludgeoning or slashing applied in melee. not ranged, no coatings or damage riders. knowing this will avoid killing NPCs that you don’t want to kill. The wiki says this but if not read carefully its not obvious.
• Concentration is the scarcest spell-casting resource and the easiest to screw up if you’re not careful. the game tooltips will warn you if you are breaking concentration on a spell when casting a new spell – IF you read the tooltip for the new spell. hesitate before casting any spell and read the tooltip to avoid grief.
• Any item in party inventory can be moved to any party member BUT to equip an item requires an action, wherever it is. picking up and dropping items is free. drinking a potion requires a Bonus Action wherever it is in the party. Throwing an item requires an Action (except for Enraged Throw) and the item must first be placed in the thrower’s inventory or on the ground.
• Prebuffing can waste buffs if your characters are not in turnbased mode.they will drop out of turnbased mode if combat begins and they are not “in combat” or they leave the combat area. The first happens more than you expect if you are being stealthy or your party is spread out. So if prebuffing … make sure that all party members stay in combat or turnbased at all times.
• Sometimes precombat cutscenes are necessary for quests and they are also some of the best writing and acting in the game so don’t skip them by stealth unless you don’t care about story. also see para 6 – characters sometimes lose prebuffs during or after cutscenes.
• You can hide your party members’ armor amd helmets — there is a little check box in their “paperdoll” slots for that. i spent most of the game not seeing some of the best motion capture performances ever, because i was looking at helmets. don’t make the same mistake. hiding the armor is fun if the character bodies and sexy clothes turn you on – not that I would know about that.
• Some of the sex scenes with the player character are very nsfw so be aware of who is in the room, such as kids or spouse. If you have to skip those scenes, you may not be able to go back to see them if you have a single save game or didn’t save at the right time.

The difficulty elements of Honor

• Mode are best for a challenge once you’ve learned a lot about combat and powerful items. Custom Mode — if chosen at the start of the game — omits the most challenging parts of honour mode rules and they cannot be added, so it’s not ideal for a challenge.
• However you can get Custom Mode with full Honour Mode difficulty in “Dishonor mode” which is the single save mode you get after a TPK in Honour Mode. The game does not explain this and even Larian support does not seem fully aware of it (I asked them a few times before i knew how it worked). In my opinion Dishonor Mode is the best mode after you’ve gotten your Golden Dice for completing Honour Mode.
• If you win Honour Mode you need to activate your Golden Dice they don’t pop up automatically and I spent two weeks writimg to Larian support about the “missing dice.” They did not explain how to activate them.