Baldur’s Gate 3 – General Character Building Tips for Beginners

Here are some very general character building tips for people new to Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons and who didn’t play ever.

New Players Tips for General Character Building

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General Tips

You want your stats to be even numbers, because you get a +1 (or -1) every two points up or down. 16’s, 14’s, and 12’s are good. Later you’ll have chances to add one +2 or two +1’s to your stats, so if you have a 17, have a 15 also (so you can bump them up later to 18 and 16 respectively).

Strength is your melee stat and how much you can carry; Dexterity is bow and dagger/rapier (“finesse weapon”) melee and adds to your armor class; Constitution is your health; wisdom is cleric or druid magic; Intelligence is wizard magic; Charisma is conversation checks and bard, sorcerer, and paladin magic.

Each class has a primary stat (e.g., strength for fighters and barbarians and paladins, wisdom for clerics, Intelligence for wizards, charisma for bards, dexterity for monks). Some also have a secondary stat (wisdom for monks, charisma for paladins). You want to put as many points as you can in your primary stat, whatever you have left to spend in a secondary stat if you have one, and generally whatever’s left you put in constitution. You can’t “dump” a stat below eight, but all stats come up fairly frequently, so it’s not a bad idea to leave things at 10 if you can.

You may feel you “have to” pick a Charisma-based class, for advantage in out of combat dialogues. That’s not a bad choice, but it isn’t mandatory either; the system is versatile, there are often multiple options to resolve situations (e.g., barbarians can just shout and intimidate people as a class feature in many conversations), and end of the day sometimes resolving things with combat is better (more experience and loot!). Make the character you think you’ll have fun playing, there will be a way to make it work well.

You can generally pick whatever race seems cool, but each race gets a few minor flavor abilities and thus there are some synergies to look for (e.g., half-orcs get a bonus to melee weapon critical hits that tends to make them good fighters or barbarians). At this point though character race is more a roleplay choice than a mechanical one — people you meet will have different reactions to Drow and Tieflings than to Gnomes and Dwarves.

Based on the Early Access, the skills you probably want to grab in character creation, in rough order of priority, are Perception (to spot hidden things), Insight (to help in conversations), at least one of either (Persuasion, Deception, or Intimidation, all for conversation checks), Athletics (to push people and resist being pushed in combat), and optionally Stealth (it helps to have the option). Sleight of Hand can help with traps and locks but companions can cover it for you adequately. You probably won’t be able to grab all of those on the same character, and that’s fine; almost all skills are useful and the ones you don’t have your companions probably will (except Perception, which they unaccountably seem to skip).

There are prewritten companions for every class in the game except bard and sorcerer; the Paladin companion is a dark paladin and unavailable unless you take a fairly evil game path.

Multiclassing is an option but unless you have a lot of game knowledge it’s probably a bad option. 5e D&D is designed to make it really hard to **** up a single-classed character so long as you put points in your class’s primary stat, but once you start multiclassing that goes out the window and you can significantly hamstring your progression if you aren’t careful or plan poorly.

Dual Wielding Melee Build Tips

1. 3 levels of ROG is highly recommended o you can grab Fast Hands from Thief. That 2nd bonus action is huge.
2. If you don’t want to use Gloves of the Balanced Hands, you need to grab Two-Weapon Fighting to maintain a high DPR. Missing your DEX bonus on your off hand can mean losing 8-10 damage per turn.
3. FTR and – surprisingly enough – BRD are your best dual-wielders because they get access to short-rest recharging damage boosts in the form of Superiority Dice (Battlemaster) and Flourishes (Swords BRD). You’ll need 6 levels in BRD or 5 levels in FTR for max efficiency in this regard. BRD ends up being a bit better overall because you can grab some extra kit utility like Plant Growth, Bane, Faerie Fire, Enhance Ability, or Cloud of Daggers, that don’t dip into your damage resources and multiply your action economy.
4. Look for items that give damage riders. Helldusk Gloves in Act II are a great example of this, since they add a d4 to your weapon damage. Also look for good concentration spells like Hunter’s Mark (2 level RNG dip) or Enhance Ability (BRD innate at level 3), because Strange Conduit will be your best friend here. An additional d4 there will mean that with KotUK and any shortsword or scimitar, you have 1d6+2d4+DEX+Flourish/Superiority per hit, averaging about 17-27 damage each totaling 68-108 DPR.