Summary
Thanks to Baldur’s Gate 3, we have a faithful adaptation ofDungeons & Dragonsto video games, giving us a lot to do while the rest of our group decides which day works for everybody to finally play the campaign’s next session. Baldur’s Gate 3 takes the core rules of the tabletop game and does wonderful work translating it into an RPG. It does such wonderful work, in fact, that it can help you with your tabletop experiences.
Granted, not everything that works in one format will work in the other. Nevertheless, whether you’re a player or a Dungeon Master, you can study the latest entry in theBaldur’s Gateseries and learn quite a few tricks for future D&D campaigns with your friends.
6Balancing Encounters
Make It As Easy Or As Hard As The Group Wants
Video games tend to have difficulty settings. Baldur’s Gate 3 is no different, with Explorer, Balanced, Tactician, andthe very difficult Honour modeserving as the typical suite of easy, normal, hard, and expert options respectively. If you want to see how differently a D&D encounter could go depending on these settings, try the same Baldur’s Gate battle under each of these options in turn and see how things escalate.
With the tabletop game, you should consult your players on how punishing they want the game to be (remembering that the Dungeon Master calls the shots and your opinion is important too). You can adapt any fight by changing the number of minions or more challenging enemies involved, tweaking their abilities, and adjusting how merciful or merciless you’ll be with your tactics.
A boss in Baldur’s Gate can go from relatively harmless to terrifying through a simple difficulty swap, and seeing how the game changes can give you many ideas to implement in D&D sessions later.
5Using The Environment
Outsmart Baddies By Analyzing The Battleground And Using The Assets On Offer
Baldur’s Gate 3 is quite vertical with its level design and also adds lots of additional elements to the map, like barrels or paths made of web. Such features can be game changers during an encounter. Sure, implementing such things in D&D will increase your prep time when planning sessions (and will be complicated to use if you’re playing with Theater of the Mind), but taking advantage of the environment can change the game drastically.
Adventurers could explode flammable objects, activate traps from afar to catch targets on them, push enemies off ledges, create a fiery, wet or icy surface (among other options), and so on. Such tools will allow players to solve situations through extremely clever thinking, and even defeat far stronger opponents using their brains, just as they can in Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s vital to note, though, that opponents could also have the choice of punishing the party’s poor positioning by using these very same terrain features against them.
4Equipment Ideas
Baldur’s Gate 3’s Weapons Could Be Great Fits For Dungeons & Dragons Too
So, you want to give one of your players a magical item. Sure, there are a lot of those already in the tabletop title, from classics such as the Vorpal Sword to odd but wonderful ones like the Immovable Rod. Still, Baldur’s Gate 3 has a robust selection of legendary weapons and items, or official items, so you can see how they work in that environment and decide whether they’d be good additions to your D&D game.
Giving a player character who focuses on heavy weapons something like the Balduran’s Giantslayer, or giving a specialist in one-handed weapons the likes of the Blood of Lathander, will turn them into powerhouses. Just be careful to keep the intended challenge level of your campaign in mind.
When balancing the game or handing out items like these, remember: These weapons and Baldur’s Gate 3’s difficulty are both tailored for a group of four. If you have more players and you start giving all this powerful gear to them, you may unbalance your game quickly and feel the need to buff some enemies.
3Changing Core Rules
Tweaking A Solid System To Suit Your Own Tastes
Not every rule suits everyone. Sure, you shouldn’t need to change every parameter of the game (and if you feel the need to you should probably try another tabletop RPG), but if some rules are not fun for you and your friends, remember: the DM has the power to change them.
Baldur’s Gate 3 changes many things, and though some changes are mainly to accommodate the medium of video games and wouldn’t work properly on a tabletop (like ludicrously high jumps that cost a bonus action or only two short rests), they have changes that can mesh well with the format. The classic “Potion on a bonus action” homebrew rule is one great example.
You can even have rules such as letting someone cast a spell with their action and another with their bonus action, thereby allowing for unique spell combinations. Tweaks like these are still very much in keeping with the spirit of the game, but adjusting the parameters as Baldur’s Gate 3 does will add a brand-new layer of possibilities, even for the most experienced of D&D players.
2Developing Player Characters' Stories
Even If Their Story Doesn’t Connect To The Campaign
When starting a D&D campaign, the players must create characters that should be okay with going through the specific adventure that’s unfolding. If you’re playing Lost Mine of Phandelver, you should want to help the city, whether it’s out of the kindness of your heart or for a chance to profit from the rewards. If your character wouldn’t get involved, why are they even in the game?
Still, it’s up to the DM to make sure the PCs (player characters)will have a personal connectionto the events that unfold in the campaign, even a rather distant one. Perhaps their personal enemy NPCs are involved in the main story, for instance, or maybe they were given a side quest that focuses on a particular player or players.
Take Lae’zel and Astarion, for example. Baldur’s Gate 3’s main story deals with Mind Flayers, Githyanki’s biggest enemies, so connecting Lae’zel to the plot is easy. Even when her side content involving Vlaakith and other Gith begins, it’s easy to tie it all together.
Astarion, however, is just someone caught in the tadpole business and has no reason other than self-preservation to be here. Still, his issues are explored more deeply in side quests. While these can be skipped, they ultimately make the character shine and experience some fantastic development. DMs, them, must give the players time to chase their moments.
1Give Players As Much Agency As Possible
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
Have you already noticed how many options Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you? From being kind to utterly cruel, the choice is yours. You can even decide to deal with enemies in different ways, only to realize the game reacts appropriately to your choice. This means the developers considered what you’d choose to do and programmed accordingly. It’s shocking how many possibilities they’ve covered.
However, as a D&D Dungeon Master, you actually have the potential to do better. Sure, the game can be updated to include more choices, but it was only a matter of time until someone would do something Larian Studios didn’t see coming, such as finding a way to kill Withers or Mizora.
In D&D, you canchange things on the flyto best suit your players or the game. Such things can range from making an enemy suddenly weaker because you you don’t want a TPK (Total Party Kill), to adapting to the outcome of whichever ludicrous idea your players decided to try.
That doesn’t mean accepting whatever your players want to do and letting them derail things for fun, obviously. If you are going to play Baldur’s Gate 3, you must accept that your story is about getting rid of a Mind Flayer tadpole, the Astral Prism needs to stay with you, and other such fundamentals. You can, however, let them choose how to approach their obstacles.The beauty of Dungeons & Dragons is how limitless the game can be, and there’s a lot of inspiration to take from Baldur’s Gate 3.
