Game Mastering Lessons from Baldur's Gate 3 (2024)

When you play a system long enough, your experiences lead to certain assumptions about the game. For example, when I build a 5e character, I assume that Insight and Perception checks are going to be abundant and rewarding to succeed, so I always choose them as proficiencies when they’re available. Over time, these assumptions can make a system feel stale.

In particular, D&D 5e is often criticized for “breaking down” more and more as players reach higher levels, and it’s commonly believed that after about 10th level, it’s difficult to challenge them. In my experience, that threshold is earlier, at about 5th level. So imagine my surprise when, in my first few hours playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I was already struggling to keep my head above water. Now, after just under 150 hours of gameplay, a lot of my assumptions about 5e have been challenged. I have a newfound appreciation for many of 5e’s rules, and also picked up a few small changes that Baldur’s Gate 3 made that made the game much more exciting.

Note: There may be minor SPOILERS beyond. Read at your own risk.

The Balance of Skills

As I said in the beginning, Perception is almost always a skill proficiency I build into my characters. In the 2014 version of the rules, Perception allows a character to spot hidden enemies and objects, which in turn prevents ambushes and reveals traps and secret doors. While this alone gives it more functionality than other skills (like History or Religion), many Game Masters I’ve played with also have overused Perception to dictate how descriptive they are of an environment beyond just hidden creatures and objects. In many cases, a low Perception score meant your character couldn’t tell that there was anything in a room besides walls and a floor.

Imagine my surprise when I realized after a few hours into Baldur’s Gate 3 that I wasn’t using Perception nearly as much as I had at the table. It was still used to spot secret buttons, traps, and ambushes, but other skills were actually being used much more often to greater effect.

One example is Survival. In Baldur’s Gate 3, there are quite a few hidden treasures buried along the party’s route which can be spotted with a successful Survival check. In most campaigns I’ve played at the table, Survival almost never comes up except for extremely specific situations, like tracking a fleeing enemy, or in campaigns with a very specific style (such as the hex crawl in Tomb of Annihilation). Therefore, at the table, it usually isn’t very rewarding to select. By granting this small functionality, Baldur’s Gate 3 rebalances these two Wisdom-based skills. Perception is still worthwhile to take, but it Survival isn’t so easily ignored.

Like 2014 though, not every skill is treated equally. For example, the Charisma skills (Deception, Intimidation, and Persuasion) are undoubtedly the most valuable. There are several times throughout the game where a successful Charisma check means skipping over a difficult boss fight without any loss of loot. These checks are a high DC with a high reward, meaning that building the highest bonus is far more valuable than the Intelligence or Wisdom skills.

On the other hand, while I rolled Nature a few times, I can’t think of a single instance where having a higher Nature skill would have significantly changed the game’s story. For example, later in the game, the player character can discover a serial killer’s plot to murder a few notable targets. The player discovers one of the targets as they’re about to drink some wine. The player can choose to roll Nature to discover that the wine has been poisoned and can tell the target not to drink it, at which point the serial killer reveals themselves. However, if the player fails the check, they can just tell the target anyways, and the events play out the same way. Unlike Charisma checks, many of these other skills unfortunately end with these kinds of results. A failed check just means the player isn’t given some context, but often the events play out the same way.

I’ve always found that 5e games are more exciting when there’s a diversity of personalities and builds at the table. When everyone has high Stealth, Perception, and a ranged build, gameplay can get stale and monotonous. When one character is the History expert, and another can spot hidden enemies with a high perception, and a third is a smooth talking performer, each player gets their moment to shine. As GMs, I think it behooves us to pay attention to how often we call on the different skills in the game and how much we mechanically reward our players for their choices. Part of why Charisma isn’t as valuable at my table than it is in Baldur’s Gate 3 is that I allow checks to influence each other. For example, if the party Wizard astounds the Queen with knowledge of her nation’s history, a subsequent Persuasion check may have advantage, allowing the party members to play off of each other.

Varying Environments

Early on in Baldur’s Gate 3, there’s an old church that the party comes across that houses a pair of combat encounters. The first time I attempted it, my fighter went first, I selected the spot where I wanted them to go only to have them cross over some weeds and get entangled, leading to a swift and miserable defeat. On the next attempt, I was a lot more careful, and my fighter successfully got into position un-entangled. However, one of the enemy casters targeted them with an ice spell, knocking my fighter prone and preventing the other characters from helping them. It was hard to target the enemy spellcaster because the church walls interrupted the paths of my ranged attacks. When I did finally get line of sight, I found out I was firing from low ground, meaning I was rolling with disadvantage.

When I often see hypothetical cases that demonstrate why 5e combat is boring, environmental factors aren’t usually mentioned. Here I thought I was a master of 5e combat, and yet I found almost every encounter in Baldur’s Gate 3 to be an exciting challenge. One of the earliest dungeons is a temple ruin inhabited by goblins. Many of the combat encounters feature similar sets of enemies, but what made each of them unique was the structure of each environment. One of the rooms had a bridge that could be attacked, causing it to collapse and send anyone standing on it to plummet into a chasm below. Another featured a pair of balconies overlooking a long hall, giving the goblins plenty of cover while the party scrambled to get out of a terrible position. A third involved a race: a pair of goblins rushed out of the room to call reinforcements, while my part tried to drop them to zero hit points before they reached their destination.

While environmental factors are exciting, there are a few considerations to make before employing them. One is that having more factors risks disorganization and miscommunication. I was once a part of a session with many environmental factors, but the GM tried to use a combination of abstract maps and theater of the mind. It was far more difficult to understand what was happening (and hence it was immersion breaking) than just having a 5-foot square grid and showing exactly where each feature was. Even assuming you’re using a map however, depending on your player roster, it may be difficult for your players to keep track of everything going on. The benefit of Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it’s a video game, meaning all the work is being done by a computer. All you have to do as the player is assess its probability and make a decision.

That being said, if everyone is on board with the increased cognitive load of having interesting environments, it can lead to a more engaging, thoughtful experience.

Action Economy

One of the things you’ll hear over and over again in 5e optimization circles is the importance of “action economy”, or in other words, getting the most bang for your buck when using your action, bonus action, movement, and reaction. Baldur’s Gate 3 offered this as a stark reminder, and by extension offered a great model of how I’ll probably design encounters moving forward.

The simplest way to increase the challenge of combat is to add more enemies. In the earliest parts of the game, I found myself continually frustrated that I didn’t have enough actions or resources to use to balance the scales, not to mention that many of the minion enemies had full on spells and battle master maneuvers at their disposal. Every encounter felt like I wasn’t just battling a group of enemies, but a group of similarly leveled player characters.

There’s a common story that’s told by 5e Game Masters (including myself) that goes something like this: you set up one big bad guy to single-handedly take on the party, complete with legendary resistances and legendary actions. Still, the party just manages to do more than them and before you know it, your big bad guy is dropped to zero before they can do anything significant.

For the most part, I noticed that every major encounter in Baldur’s Gate 3 included multiple enemies, and any one that didn’t ended just as predictably as at the table. About two thirds of the way into the game, the party confronts an avatar for the God of Death, a huge skeleton wielding a massive scythe. And yet, my party, at Level 7, was able to lock out the minions, which let my paladin go to town hacking away at the big boss one-on-one. Strangely enough, it was one of the easier encounters I overcame despite the boss representing a (literally) grave threat. Fast-forward about twenty minutes later, and again I found myself struggling against some Githyanki monks because there were just more of them. To reiterate, the same party that just steamrolled the God of Death was struggling against nameless Gith squad #4.

As I moved into the last parts of the game, each major boss had several strong lieutenants, and often a good number of minions. Some even cleverly included mechanics where the boss had extra protection during the first few rounds, incentivizing me to take care of the cronies first. While we Game Masters may love the storytelling device of having one powerful boss take on a whole party single-handedly, most likely the encounter design that’s going to create the most engagement with our players includes multiple units on the board.

Little changes make a big difference

In addition to adding units, Baldur’s Gate 3 also adds in some rules changes to 5e’s base system that drastically changed my approach to its gameplay. A common criticism of 5e is that falling to zero hit points isn’t as dangerous as it should be. After all, if a player character falls to zero, as long as they have at least 1 hit point restored before their next turn, their only penalty is the use of half of their movement to stand. They still have their full action, bonus action, and reaction. This leads to a loop called “yo-yo” healing, where for a relatively small cost, a player character can drop to zero, be brought back up, and continue from where they left off. Level 3 and later, players tend to have enough spell slots where falling to zero isn’t a real threat anymore.

In Baldur’s Gate 3, a player character that reaches zero hit points loses their action for that round, even if they’re healed. Characters that drop to zero are at a serious disadvantage, which changes a player’s calculus for whether or not it’s worth it to heal during different points in combat. There are several little changes like this, from Inspiration only applying to Skill checks to jumping being a bonus action that lead to a more comprehensible and challenging system.

Design encourages habits.

Overall, if you find that you’re dissatisfied or bored with 5e, pay attention to how your players respond to the game’s design and how you’re using the tools on hand. Again, I like when my players choose a diverse set of skills rather than all showing up with proficiencies in Perception, Stealth, and Athletics. As a result, I’ve toned down how much I reward Perception checks and increased how I reward less common skills, like History or Performance.

Little changes, like how you design your environment set up and how many enemies you include, can change the feel of your game. Personally, I ended up enjoying the challenges Baldur’s Gate 3 had to offer. However, I know a few players at my table that would get overwhelmed with the amount of variables they’d have to factor in, like having disadvantage on attacks from the low ground or having their attack’s path interrupted.

I did find that once I started grasping some of Baldur’s Gate 3’s more complex variables, I started approaching character building very differently. I ignored options that didn’t produce a tangible result (like minor illusion or disguise self) and started optimizing heavily. This was to meet the greater challenge the game presented.

A GM once confided in me that they were frustrated that players weren’t taking any “fun” options, that they only brought optimized characters to their table. It turns out that they were running their combat encounters very much like Baldur’s Gate 3, with lots of enemies equipped with class features. The complicated nature of their combat encouraged players to optimize as a way of protecting them. When their players caught on that they were easing up their combat difficulty, the players in turn started creating more diverse characters without feeling that they needed to pick the best options.

It’s a tricky balance, and one that’s unique to each individual table. As W. Edwards Deming said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”

If you find that you’re dissatisfied with the results you’re getting, remember that you’re part of the system. By all means, analyze the rules and how your players are responding to them, but also recognize that as the Game Master, you also have your part to play. You choose which skills are used for checks and how much they matter, and you choose how many enemies are involved in a particular combat. Sometimes the rules are fine, and the biggest benefit comes with a change of how you use them.

-John