The famous Dungeon & Dragons tabletop role-playing game has inspired generations of developers. Its rules and universe are sometimes used directly, as with Baldur's Gate, or serves as a foundation for developers, as with the Diablo franchise.
The rules have evolved over the years in order to balance them out, and make them both simpler and more intuitive to use.
The changes the 5th Edition will bring to Baldur's Gate III
The gameplay is simplified thanks to the 5th Edition ruleset, mainly through reducing the number of rolls and calculations. The old Baldur's Gate games are based on the 2nd Edition, which was full of problems — from THAC0 to the arbitrary saving throws, different for each type of threat.
In the 5th Edition, almost everything takes the characteristics as a base, to which we apply different modifiers, skills and advantages or disadvantages. This is followed by a 20-sided die roll in the vast majority of cases, with only damage being calculated by other dice.
You won't have to manage all of this yourself, as the game will do all the calculations for you. However, understanding them remains a huge advantage when designing your character, and when training your group in order to optimize everything and be more efficient.
Unlike previous games of the license which made use of real time with an active break, Baldur's Gate 3 will follow in a much more strict way the rules of D&D 5th Edition by adopting a turn-based system.
It might make those who prefer real time cringe, but D&D has always been designed for turn-based play, and it's much easier to balance the game by faithfully using the elements built and balanced by decades of experience.
Note that the turn-by-turn of D&D 5th Edition is rather simple. There'll be no action points like in Divinity, and each character is entitled to one action per turn (an attack or a spell for example) and a movement, as well as some rather simple bonus actions. Additional attacks or spells like Haste can happen, but the basics stay simple. The order of turns in combat is determined by an initiative roll.
We will see a little more detail about the main changes and the elements of gameplay in the following pages, but note that this will remain very superficial. The basic rules book for the player has 320 pages, and as much for the Dungeon Master's Guide, so it's not something that can simply be condensed into a handful of lines or even pages.
Don't worry, most of the elements of the game should be familiar to you if you have played previous games or other RPGs. It's generally very intuitive.
We will start with everything related to the characteristics, masteries, and throws in general in the following pages.
