Video Game / Baldur's Gate III

Resist, and turn darkness against itself. Or embrace corruption, and become ultimate evil. ^note Clockwise, from bottom-center: Astarion, Shadowheart, Wyll (and Mizora), Gale and Lae'zel. Not pictured: Karlach and the Dark Urge.

"Consider your predicament. One skull, two tenants, and no solution in sight. I could fix it all like that [...] Try to cure yourself. Shop around - beg, borrow and steal. Exhaust every possibility until none are left. And when hope has been whittled down to the very marrow of despair - that's when you'll come knocking on my door."

— Raphael

Baldur's Gate III is a Western Role-Playing Game which serves as the third main installment in the Baldur's Gate series, set in the High Fantasy Dungeons & Dragons setting Forgotten Realms. It is developed by Larian Studios, best known for the acclaimed Divinity: Original Sin duology. For the first time in the series, the game adapts the current 5th Edition ruleset of the tabletop game, as well as Turn-Based Combat. The game entered Early Access on October 6, 2020 for the PC and Google Stadia^note Stadia's service ended prior to the full release, and was fully released on August 3, 2023 for the PC, with the Mac port coming out sometime later, the PlayStation 5 port coming out on September 6, and the Xbox Series X|S^note The Series S dropped the splitscreen coop feature, due to the technical issues with the hardware. before the end of the year.

Set in 1492 DR (over a hundred years after the events of the previous installments), the story follows the events of an illithid invasion into Toril. The Player Character is one of the unlucky souls captured by the mind flayers, and is implanted with an illithid tadpole that will slowly turn them into a mind flayer unless it is removed. After escaping from captivity and crashing the nautiloid ship they were being transported on, they team up with several other survivors of the crash to search for a way to remove the parasite before the ceremorphosis is complete.

In preparation for the game's formal announcement, a 5th Edition adventure module was announced titled Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, which takes place around a century after Baldur's Gate II, and acts as a prologue of sorts for this game. It was released on September 17, 2019, and helps bridge some of the gaps between the two games. In July 2021, Jim Zub (writer of the comic book spin-off series Legends of Baldur's Gate) announced that he is working on a comic mini-series titled Dungeons & Dragons: Mindbreaker, with the first issue released in October 2021. Serving as a prequel to the game, the comic series focuses on a group of adventurers, which includes Minsc and Boo, as they fight to save each other, and their sanity, from a mind flayer-led cult secretly destroying trust between the factions in Baldur’s Gate.

---

The game provides examples of:

• 24-Hour Armor: Zigzagged. Every party member has a secondary casual outfit that they switch into once you make camp for the night, and there's a wide selection of alternative outfits to find or buy if you don't like the default ones. You can also take them from your party if you prefer theirs. Also, you can toggle this outfit on at any time and still receive the benefits of your armor. Or you can unequip the outfit and toggle it on if you really want to run around naked. That said the one time your camp is attacked in the middle of the night at the start of Act 3, all your party members will jump out of their bedrolls fully armored and armed.
• Actually a Doombot: When you come across Elminster, the most famous wizard in all of the Storm Coast, his level is stated to be merely 1. Of course, he is much more powerful than that in reality. If you actually attempt to fight him then it will dissolve into water upon defeat, revealing that it's actually a simulacrum that Elminster sent in his place.
• Actually Pretty Funny: During her quest to save Minsc, Jaheira will lament foolish mistakes she's made and blame it on how old she's gotten. If you respond by saying she's not old (she's ancient) then she will have a hearty laugh at the quip, gain approval and then affectionately call you a bastard.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: Anders, a minor character you meet at the start of Karlach's questline, was an Oathbreaker Paladin during Early Access. In the full version, he's just posing as a Paladin of Tyr — and rather poorly at that as he doesn't know the Creed of the Left Hand; something all his Paladins should know.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Cambions as presented in the 5th Edition Monster Manual are generally low-level soldiers and attendants for greater fiendish powers; dangerous for a level 1-4 party, certainly, but still very much grunts. The cambions in this game, Raphael and Mizora, are beings whose powers far outstrip those of the player characters, with the former casually teleporting the party to his domain to offer a solution to their tadpole problem, and the latter possessing enough power to act as a warlock patron for Wyll. However, cambions are listed as a source for an infernal patron in the Player's Handbook, with Lorcan, the patron for Farideh from the novel Brimstone Angels, listed as an example due to his collection of warlocks.
    • Raphael is justified that he's both the son of Mephistopheles and is old enough that he watched the literal fall of the Netheril Empire.
  • A minor case with mage hand cantrip. In the tabletop game itself, mage hand is a useful non-combat spell for manipulating objects from a safe distance, such as disarming traps or retrieving objects, but that's really the extent of its main uses, and one of the first limits specified in the ruleset as written is that it cannot attack. Also to use it during a combat encounter, it requires using your action to do so. In this game, the mage hand acts as its own entity (even taking its own initiative so as to not rob you of your action), and can attack and shove enemies, even taking attacks-of-opportunity. The hand does have only 3 hit points, but its function is more akin to a summoned familiar than the mage hand proper. The only downside of its adaptation to the game is that you can now only use the cantrip once per short rest, rather than at will like every other cantrip. Except for an Arcane Trickster Rogue. Their Mage Hand practically becomes a Familiar: lasting more or less forever unless dismissed or destroyed, able to pick locks and disarm traps, enable your sneak attacks, and summonable whenever you want instead of once per short rest.
  • Almost every class has had some added ability or functionality from the tabletop. Paladins for example get a new "Channel Oath" ability from their oath atop their usual oath feature and oath spells ^note Oath of the Ancient Paladins can use it as a AOE heal over time, Devotion Paladins get automatic radiant damage to enemies who hit them, Vengeance Paladin can make theirs or an ally's weapon deal radiant damage and inflict Daze. Casters who prepare spells can swap their prepared spells out of combat without resting. This leads to every class being more powerful than their tabletop counterparts.
  • In the tabletop, Elder Brains are completely immobile, living inside liquid tanks that sustains them and the colony's tadpoles. They are sometimes depicted as hovering just above said pool. Their size varies from the size of a large car to that of a pool. Their only physical ability is to use tendrils to grapple and choke threats, depending on their awesome psionics and spells for protection. In the game The Absolute is gigantic, big enough for the entire party to have a fight with a dragon on top of it. It also does not require its tank, being fully mobile. Some of this might be due to having Karsus' Crown, which is the source of its tadpoles' enhanced abilities.
  • On the tabletop, Speak With Animals only affects creatures with the Beast type. Meaning it has no effect on Owlbears (who are Monstrosities) or Familiars (who, while they look like animals, are Fey, Celestial or Fiend). The game employs a much broader definition of beasts, greatly expanding the spell's use and allowing its users to make contact and potentially ally with a lot of creatures.
  • In the first two games Boo is an inventory item for Minsc and any ass-kicking done by him is offscreen and may be the work of Minsc's imagination. Here Boo is a summonable pet with a whopping 20 HP and hits comparable to a long sword. He has better stats than a starting PC fighter. To the point where there's several videos online of Boo delivering the killing blow to various act 3 villains.
  • Lightning Bolt does potent damage, but has to share spell slots with the vaunted Fireball. In 5e it's not common to take it outside of RP reasons because the narrow blast corridor makes it hard to use in comparison, but here the corridor is about twice as wide as it should be, making it much easier to compete with Fireball.
  • In the tabletop, Mind Flayers restrict their choices for hosts for ceremorphosis to humans, elves, drow, githyanki, githzerai, grimlocks, gnolls, human-sized goblinoids, and orcs, as creatures outside the average height range for those races caused the tadpole's evolution to proceed either too fast or too slowly, and both cases resulted in both the host's and the tadpole's death. As a result, races such as the duergar, dwarves, and halflings are considered unacceptable hosts for ceremorphosis, and gnomes typically tend to be seen as unacceptable as well due to the varying success in warping the process to properly ceremorph them. In the game, succumbing to ceremorphosis will result in a healthy, full-sized Mind Flayer regardless of the character's race, even if playing as one of the usually unacceptable hosts. Presumably the tadpoles created by the Absolute allow them to bypass at least some of their usual limitations.
• Adaptational Wimp: In the actual tabletop game, archdruids are some of the most powerful spellcaster NPCs around with a high health pool, a wide arsenal of druid spells, and can wild shape into beasts of CR 6 or less. By comparison, the two archdruids present in the early game, Halsin and Kagha, are actually much more weaker stats-wise than their title would suggest. Then again, Larian probably did this to prevent them from being Early-Bird Bosses. Although this gets downplayed with Halsin if he becomes a party member later in the game.
• Aerith and Bob: It's par for the course in Faerûn. The core companions alone include Lae'zel, Shadowheart, and Wyll. And nobody bats an eye if you introduce yourself as "The Dark Urge".
• Alien Abduction: Or the closest fantasy equivalent, anyway. The mind flayers that captures you in the intro has Combat Tentacles on its nautiloid that teleport people they strike into tanks on the ship for later infestation with an illithid tadpole.
• Amazon Brigade: Of the Origins, the two strongest companions are Lae'zel and Karlach, with Shadowheart not far behind. In contrast, the Origin men are the spindly wizard Gale, the lithe fencer Wyll, and the waifish Astarion.
• Animal Reaction Shot: In Halsin's infamous sex scene, should the player ask the druid to transform into a bear before getting it on, the camera will then cut to an utterly horrified squirrel dropping its acorn.
• And the Adventure Continues: Depending on your choices, some of the characters' endings fall under this.
  • Should you free Orpheus and ensure Laezel survives the final battle, she will become a dragon rider and lead a revolt against Vlaakith. Before leaving she thanks the player character for all that they've done and asserts that they will forever be remembered as a liberator by her people.
  • If you completed Karlach and Wyll's storylines either you or Wyll can convince Karlach to go with one of you into Avernus so she'll live and go on fighting the forces of hell, potentially even killing Zariel and very likely killing Mizora should Wyll be the one to join her. It should be noted that the scene of her arriving with the player character or Wyll in Avernus was patched in due to criticisms of her ending being an Anti-Climax.
  • If you convinced Astarion not to ascend and not to kill the many vampire spawn Cazador sired, he can go join his siblings in the Underdark and help them lead the other vampire spawn Cazador was keeping prisoner. If you romanced him, you can suggest you two go on another adventure together, potentially to find a way to let him enjoy the sunlight again.
  • For Shadowheart, both her Selunite and Justiciar endings can be open-ended. If she's a Selunite and ended the curse, she can suggest travelling with the PC to seek out a fresh start in lieu of homesteading. If she's a Justiciar but freed her parents, she can reject the idea of rebuilding the Sharran Coven in Baldur's Gate and be a travelling preacher instead.
  • If Gale lives, he'll note that the Crown of Karsus is somewhere in the waters near Baldur's Gate. He's wise enough to know that the party should not just hope against hope it remains lost there. If you convinced him to seek out Mystra's forgiveness, he will resolve to find it and give it to her and he seems confident that she'll heal him and make him her Chosen once more. If you didn't do that and encouraged his more reckless behavior he'll decide to use the Crown to command Karsus's weave, ascend to godhood; he essentially resolves to succeed where Karsus failed. He'll even suggest that he'd love to make the player character his Chosen should they become amenable to the idea.
• Anti-Climax: Should you have Gale in your party when you confront Ketheric Thorm and the Absolute, he will use this opportunity to blow himself up if the player doesn't talk him out of it, taking the party, the Absolute, and the Chosen with him. The game ends right there and then without any fanfare.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game does make some compromises with the 5E ruleset for the sake of enjoyability and convenience:
    • PC Drow don't have the Sunlight Sensitivity trait from the tabletop game ^note which forces Drow players to make attack rolls and Perception checks at a disadvantage when they or their target are under direct sunlight. Given how the game is predominantly set in daylight with no option to change the time of day, keeping that trait in would've given Drow players a potentially crippling disadvantage in the game. Some NPC Drow retain this weakness, which can be exploited by things like the Daylight spell.
    • The game also overhauled the Ranger class, which was widely considered in the tabletop game to be the weakest class in 5th Edition (at least until the optional class features from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything came along). Most notably, the Favored Enemy and Natural Explorer class features have been reworked to make them more usable in general rather than being limited to certain creature types (for the former) or environments (for the latter).
    • The optional Karmic Dice system zigzags this. On the one hand, it streamlines dice rolls so that combat and skill checks are less stringent, allowing you to cut through enemies and resolve tricky negotiations more easily. On the flipside, this applies to the enemies as well, which can result in things going pear-shaped for you even if you utilize your knowledge of the 5th Edition to better prepare.
    • Scrolls can be used by anyone, regardless of their class, spellcasting ability, level or spell list. Even non-casters can use scrolls, they just don't get to add any attribute bonus to the attack roll or save DC.
    • Per Fifth Edition tabletop rules, virtually any magic item you can equip will require "attunement", and (unless you have a generous DM) you can only attune to three magic items at a time, with very few options to increase the limit. This isn't a problem in this game; like previous editions, the only limit is the number of slots for equipment.
    • Ritual spells in 5e take a significant chunk of time (often 10 minutes or more), as the fiction of these spells is that you have to complete an elaborate procedure to cast them. In this game, ritual spells are spells you can cast as often as you like without spending any spellslots, provided you're outside of combat.
    • Classes that prepare spells may change them freely outside of combat, meaning a player doesn't have to spend their limited supplies to long rest just to tweak their list.
    • Everything governing attacking more than once in a turn has been streamlined. In tabletop, a character spends their Action to use the Attack Action, which unlocks the Extra Attacks class feature and the option to attack with the offhand weapon as a Bonus Action if two-weapon fighting. In the game, when a character with Extra Attack makes a weapon attack that costs an Action, they may make an additional weapon attack that costs an Action for free at any point in the same turn and are free to move or use other abilities in between. Likewise, all offhand attacks simply cost a Bonus Action and don't require attacking with the main hand at all. This is especially useful for Rogues whose subclass gives them an extra Bonus Action each turn!
    • The Pact of the Blade subclass for Warlock, by default, gives the user the ability to use their Charisma stat for attacking with it, something that required later class features to make possible in the tabletop. This is almost certainly to make them viable right of the gate, since otherwise a Warlock would be awkwardly using their Strength or Dexterity stat to attack with it, and to allow a Warlock to chose other invocations without feeling forced to chose ones to actually use their weapon right away.
  • Like Divinity: Original Sin II, you have an Arbitrary Head Count Limit of four party members. Unlike DOS 2, however, you do not lose access to the remaining recruitable companions after a certain point, as you can always keep them in reserve at your camp right from the outset. Instead, the likelihood of whether or not a companion joins or sticks with you is decided by your Relationship Values with them, as well as the morality of your actions throughout the game.
  • The blessing of Selûne/Pixie's Blessing in act 2 automatically applies itself to your party members if you swap them out at camp, cutting out the need to get the buff re-applied.
  • A great many areas can only be accessed through the manually used jump ability. You only need to trigger the jump with one character for the rest of the party to follow suit automatically (provided they can jump far enough and won't take Fall Damage in the process), sparing the player a ton of micromanagement.
  • Very early in the game, you face off against some Intellect Devourers. Typically this happens shortly after you've properly recruited Shadowheart into the party, but if you're playing her as your Origin Player Character, you will have to face them alone. Consequently, the Intellect Devourers are both fewer in number and lower on health in this case.
  • The max level is capped out at 12 despite 5E letting you go all the way to 20. This was because levels 13 and onward include a massive bump in destructive power and damage output, and balancing encounters and the like with that in mind would have dramatically increased the developers' workload.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The Player Character can only have as many as three companions traveling with them at a time.
• Arc Words: "Authority" comes up quite often.
• Artificial Brilliance: "Tactician" difficulty mode makes the game more difficult by making hostiles much more ruthless, rather than giving them stat bonuses. They'll target squishy characters first, use consumables and equipment, exploit environmental effects (like oil barrels), and give players their very own Disney Villain Death by using verticality against them. The standard difficulty also has a "crowd control" check, where no more than one party member will be stunned by a targeted crowd control ability, which is removed on Tactician.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • While the game was in Early Access, the enemies sometimes displayed questionable tactics, such as casting multiple spells requiring concentration in a row, cancelling the previous one every time.
  • The full release has a bit of trouble with character pathfinding. Party members taking nonsensical paths that end well short of their target is a frequent occurrence in combat, as is them getting stuck in the terrain during exploration. The jump ability in particular poses a challenge to any character not under direct player control.
  • If you cast a damaging area denial spell in a battle that involves allied characters, there's a good chance they'll walk into the spell, take damage and turn hostile.
  • An intentional In-Universe example is Grym, the Adamantine Golem that protects the Grymforge. It's conditioned to always focus its attention on the last character that attacked it, making it easy to kite around the area to where you want it. Like under the giant hydraulic hammer in the center of its boss arena.
  • One encounter in particular in act 3, the Steel Watch factory if you rescued the captives in the Iron Throne, is somewhat notorious for the poor decision making of the allied Gondians. They repeatedly charge into danger despite not being robust melee fighters, they've been observe walking away from enemies and triggering opportunity attacks only to misty step back into melee at the end of their turns, they disturb enemies under hypnotic patterns and other disabling effects (something other allied characters usually don't do), and they regularly fail to avoid the Watcher self destruct ability, making it altogether very frustrating for players trying to protect all or even any of them.
• The Assimilator:
  • Mind flayers reproduce by implanting their tadpole-like larvae into a humanoid body, which transforms, agonizingly, into another mind flayer over the course of about a tenday. The ship shown in the opening is full of pods which show that the mind flayers have not only managed to speed up the process, but are intent on weaponizing it.
  • On a lesser note, gnolls are shown here to be born of natural hyenas cursed by the demon lord Yeenoghu, who is worshipped by gnolls as their god in keeping with 5th Edition's new canon.
• Bad Powers, Good People: There is nothing stopping you from being a warlock, or a cleric of an evil god, but still acting in a heroic manner. Deconstructed to Hells and back in regards to Wyll, because he's a good-hearted and heroic man who travels the Sword Coast defending the common people using powers he gained from a pact with a wicked and manipulative cambion, and he has to sacrifice much to ensure he keeps these powers, leaving the question open as to whether it's all worth it.
• Bag of Holding: Averted (your inventory is limited by your carry weight, which depends on the character's strength stat), but amusingly referenced by your Player Character, who might sometimes mention they wish they had one of these when you tell them to pick up an item.
• Bag of Spilling: For obvious balance reason, Minsc and Jaheira do not carry over any of their skills or experience from the two first games, being the same level as the main character when recruited, as opposed to the Epic level heroes they should be following Throne of Bhaal. That said Jaheira does retain gear from the first two games, But it's in a hidden area of her home. These are Belm, the Scimitar of Speed +2, as well as The Staff of the Ram from the second game and Khalid's Gift from Siege at Dragonspear.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Being caught in an off-limits area usually gives you the option to try and talk your way out. Do well enough and you can convince the patrolling guards that you're allowed to be there for one reason or another, giving you free reign of the area until you're caught doing something illegal.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Not only will your party get covered with mud, grime, and blood that remains until you take a long rest, but their faces will show bruises and cuts at lower health levels regardless of gender.
  • As their Illithid transformation advances, characters develop twisted black veins on their face and neck, particularly around the eyes.
• Bedlam House: The House of Healing in Act 2. More tragically it used to be a legitimate medical facility complete with a children's ward and anesthetic before the Shar cultists took over. By the time the Party gets there, the staff is only a handful of lobotomized undead nurses and a Undead/Construct Doctor that treats vivisection as a religious sacrament for the victim.
• Begin with a Finisher: If you persist in taunting the eternal god-queen Vlaakith, she uses a Wish — the setting's second most powerful Reality Warping spell — to deliver an instant Total Party Kill.
• Being Evil Sucks: The game likes to look at how miserable a lot of evil-aligned races and beings are, whether it be the perpetual misery of a goblin flunky or the hollow cutthroat existence of devils. Some of your party members also have to deal with this and it is up to you to help them get out of their pits. Even the player can experience this trope. Evil actions rarely end well for anyone and can lead to the game's worst endings.
• Betty and Veronica: Between the romanceable female companions, the Nice Girl Shadowheart is the Betty of the group, with the Bruiser with a Soft Center Karlach being a close second. Meanwhile, both Lae'zel and Minthara fall under Veronica territory, with the former being a Defrosting Ice Queen Proud Warrior Race Girl and the latter being a ruthless Blood Knight.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The Shadow-Cursed Lands is a region stricken by a curse. Undead are very common there, and the area leans even further into Dark Fantasy than the rest of the game does.
• Bilingual Bonus: The name of Tingmiaq, a blue jay found in the druid grove, means "bird" in Inuktitut.
• Bittersweet Ending: Choosing to destroy the Netherbrain and end the Absolute threat ends with the Sword Coast being saved and the party becoming heroes, but there's a high likelihood that the majority of companions will leave you at the journey's end, meaning The Fellowship Has Ended. As for the specifics:
  • Astarion has two endings: Either he becomes a vampire ascendant from hijacking Cazador's ritual and sacrifices whatever scraps of morality he has left, or he remains a vampire spawn and is thus forced into a nocturnal existence once again despite helping save all of Faerûn. The latter ending has him almost tearfully say that being in the sun was nice while it lasted as he scrambles for shade.
  • Shadowheart can free herself from Shar's curse at the cost of her parents' life, or reunite with them at the cost of them all still suffering from Shar's spiteful act. She also remains traumatized by the knowledge of what has been done to her and her family.
  • Lae'zel can either successfully save Orpheus, the prince of the Gith, or let him be killed in order to solidify an alliance with The Emperor. In the latter case, she makes it clear that Vlaakith will never stop hunting her down and she leaves to an Uncertain Doom. Alternately, if you free Orpheus but skip the quests that lead to Lae'zel turning against Vlaakith, she'll try to kill him and you are forced to either let Orpheus be killed or kill Lae'zel yourself.
  • If Gale survives, then the ending shows that he either hasn't learned his lesson and plans to use the Crown of Karsus in order to become a god, or plans to bring the Crown to Mystra to cure himself of his affection.
  • Wyll can either break his pact with Mizora and thus lose his warlock powers, or become eternally bound to Mizora and Zariel, forced to be their pawn for the rest of his days.
  • Karlach's infernal engine finally overheats and she chooses to Face Death with Dignity, satisfied that she managed to save so many people with her actions. The player character can convince her that she's worth hell and can go with her back to Avernus to save her life. If certain choices are made, then Wyll can choose to return to the Hells with her and keep her safe from Zariel. The player can also Take a Third Option and have her turn into a mind flayer, which she seems pretty happy with since it saves her life.
  • A custom origin or Dark Urge character can end the game pretty happily, but they could also have chosen to turn themselves into a mind flayer in order to stop the Absolute, meaning they'll be an outcast with Horror Hunger for the rest of their days. A heroic Dark Urge can also successfully tell Bhaal to screw off at the cost of their life, but Withers will gladly resurrect them for their refusal to back down and becomes their advocate in the next life.
• Body Horror: The ceremorphosis process is shown in its full, gory glory in the reveal trailer, with a Flaming Fist soldier's body contorting in horrific agony before transforming into an illithid.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • When characters hit Level 4, they get access to their first Feat. There are dozens of Feats to choose from, but the standard advice is to pick "Ability Improvement" for everyone, regardless of what class you're playing, which gives two extra Ability points to dump into their primary stat(s). While far from flashy, and not providing any new abilities or tactics, it does provide the bland but incredibly useful bonus of making your character marginally better at everything they do. Strictly from a purely statistical standpoint, this is simply too good to pass up.
  • In Early Access, the Warlock class is amongst the most effective classes, as while they don't have the sheer number of spell slots of a wizard or a cleric, they do have the spammable and very potent eldritch blast cantrip.
  • One of the simplest abilities a character can do is push enemies. It doesn't really do damage, but with the right planning and environment, pushing an enemy can buy you time to regroup and reposition, or even push enemies off of great heights to deal extra damage.
  • Counterspell requires a caster to give up a level 3 spell slot (which contain some of the most useful spells in the game) and their reaction, all to ensure something else doesn't happen. But in the mid- and late-game, when enemies have their own bombshells to drop, it can be the difference between a trivial encounter and a deadly one.
  • Magic Missile isn't flashy as a Level 1 spell staple, but it always hits and can spread its damage, which is extremely valuable for finishing off damaged enemies in a Critical Existence Failure ruleset. It's also invaluable for getting rid of illusory doppelgangers, which are One-Hitpoint Wonders, breaking concentration on casters by forcing them to make multiple saves at once, and for clearing out swarms of Glass Cannons like corrupted ravens.
  • You can pick up an alarming amount of objects in this game provided you have the physical strength to carry it. You can then place those objects wherever you want which the NPCs will need to maneuver around, assuming they even can. If combat starts, the AI will try to break whatever you put in front of them if possible, but if not they'll just attack it ineffectually each turn. A well tested strategy for dealing with cambion commander on the Nautiloid in order to get his Disc-One Nuke of a sword is to block the doorway to the helm with a large iron chest from a previous room. The two cambions that show up halfway through the fight will be unable to get inside, which will give you extra time to get the sword.
  • The Resilient: Constitution feat for pure casters^note Sorcerers are the exception because they innately have Constitution as a saving skill proficiency. All it does is add the character's proficiency bonus to all Constitution Saving Throws. Aside from being a common Saving Throw, this makes it much more difficult for a caster's concentration spells to be disrupted. With how battle-altering some concentration spells can be, preventing them from being lost becomes more and more important as the game goes on, which makes it even better that the proficiency bonus also gets better as levels increase.
• Boss-Altering Consequence: During an Early-Bird Boss, there is an "impossible roll" (which requires a 99 or higher on 20-sided die.) Technically a critical hit passes any roll challenge, however if you do this it looks like nothing happens and you still have to run away. After plot happens and you return to face the Final Boss properly; an effect occurs, "Against all odds", which lowers the Final Boss's hp by 10%. You did hurt it after all.
  • Most of the side quests in the game tie into allies that can be called on in the final ascent to the Netherbrain.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: Grym, the Adamantine Golem, is virtually immune against all conventional attacks. The only things that can really hurt it (a giant hydraulic hammer), or at least make it vulnerable (molten lava), are both found in the area it's fought in. Outside of this area it would be all but unstoppable.
• Boss Subtitles: Many enemies have them, as well as some non-hostile NPCs. These range from generic enemies like goblins ("Novice of the Absolute") to higher-level minibosses ("Flind: Gnoll Warlord") to to actual boss fights ("Auntie Ethel: Sister of the Seeing Pearl").
• Boss-Only Level: The Upper City of Baldur's Gate can't be accessed until you're launching an assault on the Elder Brain.
• Bow and Sword in Accord: Characters can equip a melee weapon and a ranged weapon and swap between them instantly, and probably should do so unless they're in a class that has projectile cantrips and no multiattack (in which case the cantrips will outperform their ranged weaponry). Fitting the name of this trope, one of the best loadouts for most characters is a longbow and a longsword thanks to their power, their versatility, and the fact that nearly everyone has proficiency with them, and Lae'zel, your fighter, will probably use a greatsword if you haven't chosen to give her a Knightly Sword and Shield instead.
• Bullying a Dragon: Early in act 3 you can get in an argument with mercenaries who feel you muscled in on their turf. One of the intimidation options is to point out you have just killed an Avatar of Myrkul so you feel like you can handle them. On a success they immediately realize you are way outside their weight class.
• But Thou Must!: You can't actually accept Raphael's first deal to remove the tadpole. Despite offering to remove it in exchange for your soul he never does so even if you agree and gives the same lines as when the player rejects him. The only difference is that he acts somewhat disappointed at how easy it was to get you to agree and that he wanted more of a fight. By Act 3, however, he does offer a means of freeing Orpheus immediately in exchange for recovering the Netherese Crown controlling the elder brain, with your soul put up as collateral if you don't follow-up.
  • One way or another, the party must be in possession of the mysterious artefact. To wit: Killing Shadowheart makes the artefact fly into your hands, and refuse to leave. Abandoning Shadowheart on the beach results in her later stumbling into camp, and forcing a confrontation in which she's either talked down and joins, or dies, and thus turns over the artefact. Even swapping her out of the party makes the artefact jump into your inventory. Not only that, but even if you make an earnest, good-faith attempt to return the artefact to its original owners at the githyanki crèche, circumstances will conspire to keep it in your possession. This is at least somewhat justified, as it protects the party from the Absolute's influence, so any alternate universe where they don't have the artefact simply ends in them being turned into thralls.
• Call-Back: The Mortal View: Eyewitness Accounts of the Bhaalspawn Crisis runs through several major plot beats of the eponymous saga: The hijinks of Imoen and Gorion's Ward in Candlekeep; the Iron Crisis in Nashkel, and Sarevok's Evil Plan; Bodhi's destruction, along with her vampire guild's ill-fated alliance with Irenicus; and the bloody havoc caused by the Five. It even nods to the Distant Finale of the first Baldur's Gate duology and the canon death of Gorion's Ward, the 5th Edition tabletop module Murder in Baldur's Gate.
• Cats Are Superior: Most of the cats in the game, if you use Speak with Animals, prove to be arrogant and aloof, as you might expect, though amusingly so; one calls you "servant-ape" and tells you to hunt rats on her behalf.
• Cave Behind The Waterfall: Downplayed, but the Emerald Grove has a somewhat hidden back entrance that's partially covered by a waterfall.
• Character Class System:
  • There's a huge variety of classes to choose from, including each of the 12 base classes from 5th Edition (although there are currently no plans to include the 13th class, Artificer, as it is a Canon Foreigner borrowed from Eberron).
  • Each class also contains several subclasses to choose from upon reaching a certain level (except for clerics, sorcerers, paladins, and warlocks, who can choose their subclass at Level 1).
• Character Customization: Much like Larian's previous game, players have the option of creating a Featureless Protagonist from scratch, or choosing from several pre-made origin characters.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Zigzagged. Party members can always be revived regardless of how badly mutilated their corpse is, and even if they're launched down a chasm, they leave behind a spirit on the nearest surface that can be targeted. Certain attacks with multiple stages, or spells that apply multiple hits, can cause a character to skip the "Dying" state and go straight to actual death. Some environmental effects the Netherese bomb and the Grymforge will always kill. However, you can't Speak With Dead on a corpse that's too badly damaged, meaning a post-battle interrogation can be rendered impossible if your intended target died in a gruesome fashion.
• Children's Covert Coterie: Mol, among the tiefling refugee children in the Emerald Grove, runs a gang of grifters to get by. They can go as far as supplanting the Thieves' Guild in Baldur's Gate if supported by the player.
• Circles of Hell: The Nine Hells of Baator are made up of nine descending layers, ruled by nine archdevils in ascending order of rank. The prologue sees your Player Character awakening aboard the nautiloid shortly after the ship transports to Avernus, the topmost layer, a barren Fire and Brimstone Hell that serves as an eternal battleground in the Blood War.
• Circus of Fear: The Circus of the Last Days is a rather complicated example. As a plane-hopping circus that operates with considerable help from fey forces, it comes off as Creepy Good overall, but has its fair share of unsettling twists:
  • Its ringmaster is a necromancer who's perfectly affable despite her skeletal helpers.
  • There's a mummy running a perfectly legitimate facepaint stand, and a kobold selling stuff he nicked off corpses (which he tells you to your face almost immediately).
  • A djinni is running a somewhat pricey chocolate wheel game with bizarre, questionably-useful magical consolation prizes, and a mysterious 'jackpot', which is rigged so it can never be won unless you beat the djinni at his own game, which he's not happy about.
  • The long-standing star attraction is Dribbles the Clown, a widely-beloved Non-Ironic Clown whom player characters with Baldurian backgrounds will have positive memories of. Even Dribbles has the uneasy secret of having been recently murdered and impersonated by doppelgangers.
• *Click* Hello: Jaheira pulls this on the PC upon entering the Last Light Inn, albeit with crossbows from her soldiers and a spell from herself.
• Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: Par for Larian, nearly every encounter or problem has many solutions which can be roughly sorted into these three buckets, although they're heavily personalized depending on the skills you're drawing from. However, all three buckets can be useful depending on your class, and you're not limited to a particular bucket even if your class would favour one. Barbarians can be unhinged in diplomatic solutions, wizards can use spells in trickery and misdirection, and even Paladins can use their background as oathsworn warriors in displays of force.
• Coming in Hot: The opening sequence is aboard a Mindflayer Nautiloid, heavily damaged and hurtling through Avernus as githyanki dragon-riders and hellish denizens raid the ship. The player's objective during this is to regain control—not to avoid a crash, but to make sure it doesn't crash in Avernus specifically, since that would mean certain doom for all involved. Naturally, once the Nautiloid has been redirected to a less hostile plane, it almost immediately gives up the ghost and crashes to the ground.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Certain weapons or abilities can only be used by the player inbetween short and long rests after their charges are expended. This does not apply to the enemies you face, as they will use them as much as they want. A great early example is the fight against Drog Ragzlin who will use a powerful melee ability every single turn if allowed. When you get the weapon from him that allows you to also use it, you'll be disappointed to see that it has a single use before needing to be recharged.
• Con Man: At Silvanus' Grove, a young tiefling boy will try a con on the PC, also doing a sleight of hand trick. If the PC is a rogue or has the Charlatan background, you can identify all of the boy's tricks by name, and then proceed to show the boy that there's Always a Bigger Fish. If the PC doesn't rip the kid off and just tells him "yeah, good luck with that kid", he'll laugh and tell the rogue he'll focus on the real pigeons.
• Conspicuously Light Patch: Often an area of walls or floor that hides a secret stands out from the areas around it, such as weak floorboards looking warped compared to the ones near them. You still can't interact with them unless at least one character passes a Perception check, though.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Among the possessions of archdruid Kagha is a book of Shadow Druid philosophy written by Faldorn, which goes some way to explaining Kagha's hostility toward outsiders and eagerness to seal away the natural splendor of Silvanus' Grove from encroaching civilization, including abandoning the tiefling refugees to the goblin horde.
  • If Astarion completes the Vampire Ascendant ritual, he will triumphantly declare himself the greatest vampire to ever walk the land, and gloat that even the Pale Knight - soubriquet of the vampire lord Mordoc SeLanmere - would have knelt before him.
  • Bhaal's Court of Murder is composed entirely of antagonists from the first two games: Sarevok, the Big Bad of the first game, and the echoes Amelyssan, Bhaal's high priestess, as well as that of Sendai and Illasera, both members of the Bhaalspawn group known as the Five. All three from Throne of Bhaal.
  • Baldur's Gate II famously shifted the action from Baldur's Gate to the nation of Amn. If Tav chooses to depart Baldur's Gate at the end of III, they mention Amn as a prospective destination.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Zigzagged again. Some major antagonists are just ordinary humanoids, so there's nothing stopping you from pushing them off a cliff, other more fantastical ones will have a long list of resistances and immunities, or be too large to be forced-move, so it's not too easy to "game" the encounter.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Fully invoked. All characters in the Grymforge are depicted as sweating profusely while surrounded by lava at all times. The Grymforge itself even uses lava as a mechanic in its boss encounter, with the party jumping over lava-filled channels mere feet below their boots. Even touching the lava isn't instant death (though it is a large amount of damage, so a non-fire resistant character is likely to die).
• Cool Airship: Not very cool being held captive aboard one, but the mind flayer nautiloid is a huge, flying Living Ship that jumps between dimensions, with Combat Tentacles that can teleport those they touch into one of the countless assimilation pods stowed in its hold. Given the number of open references to Spelljammer, it's very likely a Cool Spaceship as well.
• Cool vs. Awesome: The opening cutscene depicts githyanki knights mounted on red dragons pursuing a mind flayer nautiloid across multiple dimensions.
• Cool Sword: Plenty of examples. Just one being the Phalar Aluve, a magical singing/shrieking longsword with the Finesse property that seems like the weapon of a Bladesinger pledged to Eilistraee, the Chaotic Good drow goddess of beauty, song, dance, freedom, moonlight, swordplay and hunting.
• The Corruption: The illithid tadpole in the brain of your party members gives them Psychic Powers, but using it stirs more of its sentience to the surface and it will eventually absorb their brains and transform their bodies into mind flayers.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: Typically averted given the Dungeons & Dragons structure, but one case in Act 3 stands out regarding the Astral Prism. You discover that it is a prison for Prince Orpheus, whose power has been protecting you from the Absolute thanks to the Emperor leveraging it, but keeping Orpheus contained in exchange. You might expect helping Orpheus' githyanki honor guard free him is the better idea — except if you kill the Emperor before Orpheus is freed, you lose your protection from the Absolute and become mind flayers on the spot. You are thus forced to fight against the githyanki, regardless of if you side with Orpheus or the Emperor afterward. Orpheus is understandably pissed at you, and only stays his blade because he recognizes the delicate situation you were in (but doesn't mince words when stating letting yourselves transform and die would've been more honorable).
• Cthulhumanoid: The octopus-like mind flayers, known as 'illithids' in their own language or 'ghaik' by the githyanki, play a major role in the story, starting by infesting you and your potential companions with an illithid tadpole that will eventually turn you all into mind flayers, as seen in the gameplay demo's intro.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The extended introduction cinematic, as well as conversations with certain NPCs confirm that, at least canonically to the game, the outcome of Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus was with Elturel returning to Toril. Also during the nautiloid section of the game, one of the devils attacking the ship refers to the archdevil Zariel, which more or less confirms that Zariel was neither redeemed nor killed by the adventurers that saved Elturel during the events of the adventure. This outcome is drawn from the events that unfolded in Legends of Baldur's Gate, particularly the Infernal Tides story arc which was based on the aforementioned adventure module. It is further confirmed that Sarevok was redeemed by the main character of the original games, but ultimately it didn't stick, Bhaal's influence was too strong and he fell back into his old habits.
• Cutting the Knot: In Act 3, as part of the quest to find and hopefully enlist Ansur to help against the Absolute, one of the challenges involves playing a game of lanceboard (essentially D&D's version of chess) and eliminating the king piece in three moves. Fairly trivial for players who know chess well enough, but if you find it too difficult, you can just destroy the king piece with a lightning spell and the challenge will be completed.
• Damsel in Distress: Quite a few. Lae'zel, needs rescuing from a cage on the beach. Other examples include but are not limited to: Shadowheart, Mayrina, Sazza, several of the tieflings and gnomes who find themselves in trouble, Mizora, Florrick, Isobel, Aylin, Hope, if the companion Orin kidnaps is a woman. Note that most of these women who get kidnapped, imprisoned in a dungeon, trapped in a cage, or sealed in a pod are usually good fighters, and there are a few times when males can be in a similar situation.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • This is one of the rare times a Dungeons & Dragons game (usually acceptable by teenagers) got a Mature rating thanks to Body Horror and being both Bloodier and Gorier and Hotter and Sexier.
  • The Bhaalspawn's circle of companions had its share of possible evil companions such as Viconia or Edwin, but it was balanced by neutral and good companions like Jaheira and Keldorn. By contrast, the available companions in this game all are some manner of morally ambiguous, including a vampire spawn, a githyanki warrior, a cleric to an evil god, and a Blood Knight barbarian. Gale, without any malicious intent, harbors an ancient, uncontrollable magic which, if not fed, will detonate and wipe out a significant portion of the Sword Coast. Even the heroic Wyll is a Fiend warlock, albeit a repentant one.
  • Likewise it is ill-advised you play as the Dark Urge if you have a sensitive stomach and an aversion to blood and gore.
• Dark Fantasy: Noticeably more so than its previous installments, see Darker and Edgier above.
• Deal with the Devil: The inhabitants of the Nine Hells play a major role in the plot and several characters have made various bargains with a number of devils.
  • Fiend warlocks such as Wyll have forged one in exchange for their arcane powers. Wyll in particular regrets the bargain he had made with his patron and is looking for a way to break it.
  • The cambion Raphael appears to the party in visions and offers to remove your parasite in exchange for your soul. Several party members point out that he seems a little too eager to make this deal, suggesting that he might be desperate enough for the tadpole itself that he might accept a lesser payment.
  • The tieflings are descendants of those who struck a bargain with Asmodeus, Zariel, Mephistopheles, or some other archdevil in exchange for infernal power. Though these people have made no such promises themselves, their horns, barbed tails, reddish skin, and Hellish Pupils branded them as 'devilkin' in the eyes of others, and they are subject of substantial Fantastic Racism. The party encounters a large group of tiefling refugees early in the game, who were cast out of Elturel and on the verge of being driven out of a druids' grove as well.
  • And of course there are the warlock characters in general, particularly those with a Fiend patron.
  • Mayrina made a deal with a green hag named Ethel to bring her dead husband Connor back to life. In return, she would have to give up her then-unborn child to her, with the hag promising that she will raise the child and teach them magic. Unbeknownst to Mayrina, Ethel is using this deal to devour the newborn child later on so that she can give birth to her own hag. Despite this, the hag still upheld her end of the bargain by creating a wand that can be used to bring Connor back to life, albeit not in the way Mayrina would expect it.
  • Raphael makes another appearance in Act 3, offering the means of freeing Prince Orpheus from the Astral Prism, in exchange for the Nether Crown. Tav has to put up their soul for collateral, however, and all you get from Raphael in terms of whether he'll wreak havoc on the material plane after he gets the Crown is a pinky swear that his intentions are turned to the Hells.
• Decapitated Army: Invoked word-for-word in Act 1: The goblins are too organized, and both the Tiefling refugees and Kagha think that taking out whoever's marshalling them will render them much less of a threat.
• Deconstructor Fleet: The game revels in taking just about every RPG character cliche it can get its hands on and twisting them into much more realistic interpretations ala the first two games.
  • Astarion deconstructs the Ladykiller in Love archetype- the suave, handsome casanova who gets with everyone he wants. Astarion is this way because he is the manservant of a truly terrible master vampire named Cazador, who freely manipulates and abuses Astarion to the point of sexual assault. Astarion himself is a victim of being forced to constantly engage in sexual intercourse, whether that be for his master's satisfaction or to lure victims for him. Astarion really struggles to deal with his growing feelings for the player, and he actually staves off a romantic tryst because he wants to make sure he really does love the player. Sure enough, if the player presses forward during this event, Astarion recoils from it and ends up breaking things off from the player. Astarion demonstrates how an obsession with sex can ruin you, especially if you're forced into it to survive.
  • Lae'zel is a deconstruction of Proud Warrior Race Guy. The githyanki are a proud, dogmatic race, and Lae'zel is deeply invested into their culture. It comes to the point where Lae'zel actually begins to get cognitive dissonance when faced with the ever-increasing evidence that her fellow gith will shoot her dead because of the tadpole in her brain, rather than help her. Sure enough, they eventually fully turn on her. Lae'zel's obsession with her culture and inability to deal with how paradoxical it is end up making her look pretty pathetic, but there is an element of tragedy to it too. Lae'zel shows how cultures like these are far less stable and cohesive than they might appear, and that they breed individuals who struggle to think for themselves in spite of their incredible martial prowess.
  • Wyll deconstructs Bad Powers, Good People. His infernal-borne Warlock powers have allowed Wyll to do quite a lot of measurable good. He's a national hero and the most heroic party member by far, having accomplished more than any of the other companions barring the returning characters from the first two games. The problem is that Mizora loves to undermine Wyll, and the game sees their pact slowly turn more and more sinister over time. Mizora begins to manipulate Wyll, including a demand to gut Karlach (who is innocent and should be outside the bounds of their contract), and then using Loophole Abuse to punish him through mutating him. Wyll ultimately sacrifices a lot over the course of the game, and can potentially end it in willing servitude to a devil as per the means of his contract. While good people can do a lot of good with their bad powers, said bad powers can force said good person into uncountably large personal sacrifices, making it questionable if having said bad powers was worth it.
  • Gale deconstructs Ditzy Genius. Normally, "high int but low wis" characters are a source of comedy. Their genius makes them cool and enviable, but their lack of social sense keeps them grounded and belivable. Gale, meanwhile, is currently walking around with a nuke lodged in his chest, making his situation pretty dire. He got this way out of hubris, and now Gale's personality failings threaten to destroy a huge portion of the game world unless he specifically takes care of it. There is also a nasty case of Aesop Amnesia he can get at the end of the game (where he tries to recreate the artifact that lodged said nuke in his chest) even if he's made aware of the consequences. Gale's high intelligence and the ego it gives him can override his kinder aspects, making his lack of wisdom less of a comedic point and more of a potentially destructive personality flaw.
  • The Emperor is a deconstruction of Token Heroic Orc. To keep things simple, mind flayers are inherently corruptive and predatory beings. While they can work together and treat each other with respect, they are simply incapable of seeing any non-flayer lifeform as being on their social or mental level. Their need to consume sentience also makes them ultimately dangerous to civil society, as no human, orc, elf, goblin, dwarf, etc. is safe from their predation even if they are "docile". The Emperor protests to be a "good" mind flayer, but careful examination of his words and deeds proves otherwise. His views on ceremorphosis also demonstrate that he wants people to become mind flayers because he personally finds it enthralling, and views it as a gift. He is extremely manipulative, often deceiving or using Lying By Omission to skirt information around the player. Sure enough, if you propose the idea of dominating the Absolute to him during the finale, he admits to having thought of the idea himself. If you follow through he then averts We Can Rule Together and turns you into a thrall, dooming you to a life of servitude under him. To sum it up, while The Emperor may have good desires for Baldur's Gate in stopping the Absolute, he is still an ilithid and cannot be trusted as an equal.
    • By that measure Omeluum can be taken as a Reconstruction of Token Heroic Orc. Unlike the Emperor he doesn’t bother hiding the fact he’s an illithid, genuinely tries to help the party get rid of their tadpoles, joined the Society of Brilliance to make the world a better place, and has survived long enough to become concerned about eating others’ brains that he’s researching alternative means of nutrition.
• Degraded Boss: The first time you fight a Spectator (assuming you didn't take the Schmuck Bait in another quest) is in the Underdark and the beast is treated as a very special fight with a cutscene intro and a special arena allowing to make this more of a Puzzle Boss to make the encounter more unique and yet doable for a low level party. Later in the game you'll fight Spectators in more mundane encounters, such as fighting two at once in Raphael's House of Hope and then one amongst other mooks in the lead up to the final battle.
• Developer's Foresight: Has become somewhat infamous for being chock-full of this:
  • There are a lot of race-specific dialogue changes, especially for drow and githyanki, as the former are only just losing some of their hated reputation and the latter are outsiders with a history of combat against the mind flayers central to the plot. There's also a huge amount of custom Dialogue for a Tiefling in the druid's grove due to the refugees. There's also a lot for a Druid. And of course, if you're BOTH of these things there's specific lines for that.
  • If Gale dies through methods unconnected to the story, a magical projection of himself will give you instructions on how to resurrect him the first time this happens. However, if you yourself kill Gale and then revive him, Gale will tell you how he would normally thank you, but you killing him to begin with leads to him having mixed feelings about you.
  • If you use the tadpole, then after your second dream involving it, Shadowheart will suggest that you stop using its powers as it seems to be gaining stronger influence on you. If you agree, then use an illithid power anyway, your companions will call you out on it after the next dream. But if someone besides the protagonist used their illithid power instead, they'll be the one called out. Shadowheart in particular will get put on blast for being a hypocrite if she's the one who does it.
  • After Astarion is revealed as a vampire spawn, you can tell him not to feed on "anything we can have a conversation with" - if you have the speak with animals spell, Astarion will point out how this brings his options down to rocks and trees. If you're a druid and therefore can also talk to plants, he'll unhappily note that this means he's down to just rocks.
  • Speaking of Astarion's reveal: if you approach the story in a way that skips the camp cutscene in which he tries to bite you, he'll just tell you the truth about his true nature in a regular camp conversation a bit later.
  • If you take either Volo or Auntie Ethel up on their offers of assistance in trying to remove the tadpole, the other one will refuse, as by that point you'll only have one working eye left.
  • During the tutorial level on the nautiloid, it's possible to shove Lae'zel off the edge of the ship and to her death. If you do, her body spawns on the beach at the start of Act 1, allowing you to bring her back to life with the aid of Withers. This does run into some serious Gameplay and Story Segregation though, seeing how you shove her off in Avernus but find her body in Toril, a completely different plane of existence.
  • In several dialogues with Astarion, you can choose to Leave wordlessly, which will actually prompt parting comments from him.
  • If you somehow meet Gandrel with only Astarion in your party, but not as the main character, it triggers a scenario where Astarion automatically attacks him.
  • There are some camp events and cutscene aftermaths where all of your companions have something to say. The game will actually track who you talk to, so speaking with someone first yields a slightly longer conversation than if you'd spoken to the second, while your latter picks may comment about apparently being lower on the priority list.
  • Astarion has been a vampire for 200 years, which seems like it was chosen specifically to give a reason why you can't use the game's only Scroll of True Resurrection on him to cure his vampirism - it only restores life to undead creatures who died under 200 years ago. (Your ability to bring him back other ways is simply a gameplay mechanic.)
  • If Astarion for some reason tries to bite Karlach (eg, mind-controlled by an enemy into attacking party members), there's specific dialogue for him burning his mouth on her. If Karlach is your player character, then there's also a unique version of the scene in which Astarion tries to feed on you in your sleep.
  • The Vicious Mockery spell has an impressive number of variations for individual companions and for all the base player races.
  • The game has caps on party size (4) and spell level (6), but is ready to accommodate more than that if forced to via a Game Mod.
  • If you don't meet Raphael in Act 1 by avoiding all of his spawn locations, then he'll eventually show up at your camp.
  • When you meet Philomeen, you immediately enter a conversation where she threatens to detonate a barrel of explosives if you move. If you swap to another party member mid conversation and sneak around her to move or remove the barrel without her noticing, then return to your conversing character and refuse to talk down Philomeen, she'll fire a firebolt where the barrel was, then upon no explosion occurring, realize you moved it and the conversation will continue accordingly with her feeling like you cornered her.
  • If you pick the lock on the crypt at the beginning, and go through it backwards, there are special reactions for dealing with the bandits out front, including pretending you're some sort of undead come to attack.
  • A rather dark one for Dark Urge players: thought you could be clever by knocking Alfira out before she shows up at your camp and suffers her unavoidable Cruel and Unusual Death at your hands? Meet Quill Grootslang, an incredibly innocent and excitable Dragonborn Bard showing up in her place looking for a safe shelter. Cue the exact same outcome. Not even leaving your character dead overnight will save Alfira or Quill; Sceleritas Fel will commit the murder on your behalf.
  • Pressure plates are generally armed when they are compressed, but most are built to only unleash the rest of their mechanism once the compression is later removed. This means the player can accidentally compress a pressure plate but then disarm the trap by weighing it back down with another object.
  • If you try to shove a flying or hovering creature into a chasm, they poof back onto the ledge. The animation is a bit strange, but it's conveying that creatures with these capabilities would use them instead of falling to their death.
  • You need all three Netherstones to defeat the Absolute, and to make sure you don't go throwing one off a cliff, they can only be dropped, rather than thrown. However, as player BOB_BestOfBugs discovered, there's nothing to stop you putting one inside a container and throwing that off a cliff... but doing so triggers a Non Standard Game Over where the Emperor points out what a stupid thing you just did, followed by a cutscene of the Elder Brain transforming your party into mind flayers.
  • Your Camp will change depending on the general location you are in when you go to it, such as it being outdoor and forest like if done in an area that is more woods like, or it will be in a cave section if you were in an underground location.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Though merely an avatar and thus far less mighty than the real deal, you still do manage to punch out an apparition of Myrkul, God of Death, at the end of Act 2.
  • It's noted to be exceedingly difficult to kill a devil, but you have the option of killing Raphael, the son of the archdevil Mephistopheles. In one of their endings, it's also heavily implied that Wyll and Karlach will hunt down Mizora, the devil who forced will into a contract in exchange for saving Baldur's Gate, and possibly even Zariel.
• Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?:
  • Partway through the game, you would soon discover that the guardian that you encounter in your dreams is actually a psychic manifestation of a mind flayer known as "The Emperor". And if you romanced the dream guardian prior to this revelation, you may also choose to extend this relationship to the mind flayer himself.
  • You can even choose to romance Mizora, Wyll's cambion patron. Although Wyll himself will not take it lightly given who she is. Karlach will also call you out, for similar reasons.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?:
  • While extraordinarily difficult, you can mislead The Emperor when hatching a plot to free Orpheus with Voss. You have to outmanoeuvre him psionically to dodge his mind-reading, and then lie convincingly, both of which are very high DC skill checks.
  • You can also beat Mizora and Raphael at their own respective games. The latter in particular is even more difficult than the above example, although it mostly plays out through combat rather than dialogue skill checks.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • The player can straight up tell Raphael they're willing to give him anything, even their own soul, in exchange for removing the tadpole. He's surprised and sort of disappointed at how easy it is...but doesn't actually offer a deal and continues as if the player rejected him anyway.
  • If you enter the Astral Prison on Queen Vlaakith's command to kill the Dream Protector, they kneel before you and offer you their sword. Actually picking it up and running them through with their own weapon takes them completely by surprise, as they genuinely didn't expect you to do it.
• Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation: Like previous titles in the Baldur's Gate series, this game uses Dungeons & Dragons for its mechanics, rules, and setting, specifically using the Forgotten Realms of the game's Fifth Edition. Gameplay from the Early Access build features a Dungeon Master, multiple different references to gods of the Forgotten Realms (through NPC dialogue and player choices), and the mechanics are based on Fifth Edition rules for combat and movement.
• Dimensional Traveler: Several characters come from other planes. Devils and gith in particular are noted for traveling back and forth between multiple worlds and their home dimensions, the Nine Hells and the Astral Plane, respectively.
• Disc-One Nuke: See here for details.
• Disney Villain Death: Several bosses can be given one for a quick and easy win. Of course, you can't loot a corpse that's at the bottom of a cliff, so this method does have an inherent downside by depriving you of unique and often quite powerful equipment.
  • One of the earlier boss battles can see you grant Wicked Witch Auntie Ethel a quick demise by shoving them into a Bottomless Pit almost as soon as the fight begins. Unfortunately, this only works the first time you encounter her...
  • A similar fate can befall Minthara, the drow paladin that's part of the goblin leadership in Act I. If you make the right dialogue choices, they'll lead you over a rickety wooden bridge whose supports you can destroy with minimal effort, sending the boss tumbling down into a bottomless chasm.
  • Balthazar, General Ketheric's court necromancer in Act II, can be shoved into the void the moment the battle begins. However, unlike how things like this normally work in gaming, this won't make their undead minions drop dead as well, so you'll have to fight a small platoon of Dem Bones regardless. Not having the boss around still makes it a lot easier of course.
• Distant Sequel: Enforced by the massive Time Skip that took place in the Forgotten Realms setting between 3.5 Edition and 4th Edition. Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal took place in 1369 DR; BG3 picks up over a century later in 1492 DR and, at least of what's been shown so far, has little to do with the Interplay series' storyline other than location and some returning characters. (Larian, however, has insisted it's called Baldur's Gate for a reason, and that the full game will have more links to the original duology that make it clear why it's part of the series.)
  • As we learn in the full game about these links, the plot is orchestrated by the Dead Three, one of its members, Bhaal, is the Greater-Scope Villain of the previous games. Also, if you play as the Dark Urge origin, you are a Bhaalspawn just like the previous protagonist before them.
• Distressed Dude: Orin can kidnap one of your party members, including the male ones, and should you get to the temple of Bhaal in time, you'll find them on a stone slab magically being kept unconscious.
• Divine Intervention: To a greater extent than the preceding games — save for the deceased Bhaal and Cyric (who usurped his portfolio), godly meddling in the Bhaalspawn Crisis was minimal, not to mention forbidden by Ao the Overgod. In 3, a wealth of gods and goddesses take an active interest in manipulating affairs through various pawns and champions, and several of them step from behind the curtain to influence their desired outcome. Their presence isn't confined to the main plot, either: steal from the Bit- er, Water Queen's treasure trove and Umberlee herself will crack your stealth and sic her sahuagin on you.
  • If you steal from the treasures underneath the main temple in Baldur's Gate, the offending character picks up a crippling divine curse that also makes a powerful angelic enemy rise from their corpse upon their death (or upon removing the curse).
  • Clerics gain an ability of this exact name at level 10. It allows them to perform one of several extremely powerful feats^note "Arm thy Servant" gives you a +3 legendary magical mace, "Opulent Revival" restores all fallen characters back to life at half health and restores all their abilities as if they just did a full Long Rest, "Sunder the Heretical" inflicts a truly colossal amount of radiant damage on all enemies within a 15m radius effectively winning any tough boss fight immediately, and "Golden Generosity" spawns a trove chest of camp supplies and potions of uncommon rarity., but It Only Works Once in this entire playthrough.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: In the course of your investigation into the Githyanki, you encounter a manifestation of Lich-Queen Vlaakith CLVII herself. Should you choose to indulge in this trope, you will find out very quickly why this is a very bad idea.
  Vlaakith: You wish to see godhood?! I wish you to end.
• Dragon Rider: The githyanki, ancient foes of the mind flayers who once enslaved them, ride on the backs of young red dragons, gifted to them as part of an age-old pact between the githyanki's immortal queen Vlaakith and the goddess Tiamat, patron deity of evil chromatic dragons. Massive and terrifying as the nautiloid is to the ordinary folk of the Material Plane, it proves almost defenseless against the dragons' assault and spends the entire prologue fleeing across multiple planes before crashing into a beach back on Toril.
• Dramatic Drop: Played for Laughs. A squirrel drops an acorn in shock upon witnessing the player character having intimate relations with a man who has shapeshifted into a bear.
• Dump Stat: Every class has a recommended one, and based on the recommended stats distribution, for most it's Strength. Interestingly, in Patch 3 of Early Access, the rogue class actually switched the recommended dump stat from Intelligence to Strength due to how the Arcane Trickster archetype relies on Intelligence as well as the class having a proficiency in Intelligence saving throws.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: There were multiple rewrites between the Early Access release and the final one. Such rewrites include, but are not necessarily limited to:
  • Wyll had a rather different arc in Act 1. In Early Access, he is searching for his kidnapped patron at the start of the game and has a severe hatred of goblins. In the final release, he starts the game on a mission from his patron (who is very much still around and willing to show her displeasure should he choose not to kill Karlach) and his hatred of goblins is no more, causing him to oppose them simply because they are attempting to kill innocents in the Grove.
  • The Dream Protector appears to have been completely rewritten. In Early Access, they are implied to be a manifestation of the tadpole inside your head attempting to seduce you into giving into its power. And "seduce" is the operative word; the character is described as "who you see in your dreams" and has a very seductive manner around you. Also, each companion gets a different vision. Wyll sees Myzora for example, while Astarion sees Cazador. In the final release, the character is described as your "guardian" at their creation screen, and rather than seduce you, they state they are trying to protect you so together you can save the realm. And they are most definitely not the tadpole in your head but rather a being within the artifact that Shadowheart carries at the start of the game. And in the final version, every companion gets the same dreams (though it's implied each of them see the Protector differently).
• Easy-Mode Mockery: A heavily downplayed example. The only drawback to playing the Explorer mode difficulty is that the option to multi-class characters is disabled, which takes away some of the flexibility in developing your build, but also protects you from dealing with the pitfalls of this mechanic as it isn't exactly beginner-friendly. Players can also change the difficulty settings without penalty, so they won't remain locked out of multi-classing if they decide to play a harder mode midway through their game.
• Effortless Achievement: You can unlock achievements by performing mighty deeds like long-resting four times, reading a bunch of in-game documents, shoving an enemy to their death, recruiting a hireling, or digging up five buried chests.
• Eldritch Starship: The nautiloid ship that kidnaps the player character in the opening cutscene of the game has Combat Tentacles and organic components, and flies between dimensions.
• Escort Mission: While the game is built brilliantly to accommodate organic or accidental NPC deaths and no missions are really "mandatory" other than eventually confronting the Chosen's Netherstones and confronting Absolute/Elder Brain, there are several quests where an NPC's survival is the premise:
  • One of the tiefling children on the beach near the Druid's Grove is being lured by harpies, and his side quest only advances if you save him.
  • Isobel has to survive the attack on the Last Light Inn, or else the barrier falls and the player loses the Harpers and Jaheira.
  • Jaheira has to survive the assault on Moonrise Towers, which is much easier to do if she accompanies you than the Harpers, if you want to see her story in Act 3 and if you want to recruit Minsc.
  • Hope has to survive your encounter with Raphael to get her ending after the heist in hell.
• Everyone Has Standards: Amoral as most party members might be, there are a few things that prove to be too much for everyone.
  • Despite the Teeth-Clenched Teamwork - bordering sometimes on outright hatred - of certain other party members, none of them will be happy to see you take the bad ending path to their personal character arcs, or stand by and let them get killed. Be it out of genuine standards or simple pragmatism depends on the party member. Conversely, bringing a party member's quest to a positive conclusion will usually be met with universal approval, even by those who normally can't stand them.
  • The party universally gawks at Mystra's order for Gale to turn himself into a Fantastic Nuke to deal with the Absolute, once more either for moral reasons, or pragmatic reasons as he's a talented and powerful magi and his death would be a huge waste.
• Everyone Jointhe Party: People you helped throughout the game helps you in the Final Battle.
• Evil vs. Evil: A multi-evil Gambit Pileup. The plane-hopping^note And typically lawful evil on a good day githyanki raiders attack a mind flayer ship full of abductees implanted with their parasitic spawn at the very beginning of the opening cutscene. Said ship ends up teleporting into Avernus, where it is almost immediately beset by imps, and later a greater devil (what looks like to be a horned devil) while your party is scrambling to get to the controls before the fatally-damaged ship splatters itself across Avernus with you aboard. Meanwhile, demonic and devilish armies battle in the background. Your own party can also fall into this, potentially consisting of mostly morally ambiguous characters, and game allows you to carry out reprehensible actions like helping goblins slaughter a bunch of innocent people if you so desire, yet you are ultimately still opposed to the mind flayers for obvious reasons.
• Evil Is Easy: This is mostly averted, even with everything being Darker and Edgier with some Grey-and-Grey Morality, the game likes to show Being Evil Sucks and evil actions rarely grant you anything helpful.
  • An excellent example of this is in Act II's Shadowlands. If you take the evil route by letting Shadowheart kill the Nightsong in Shar's name, you lose a ton of support both for the upcoming boss battle and in later chapters, as well as multiple potential companions, without getting a whole lot in return.
  • Although its evilness pales in comparison to the really nasty stuff you can do, being a capable pickpocket makes the game's economic side somewhat easier because you'll always be flush with cash, potions, equipment and camp supplies. That said, money is rarely an issue past the early game, and loot is abundant, so you're still not missing out on much if you keep your sticky fingers to yourself.
• Evil Is Petty: In addition to some truly horrible stuff, you can engage in some extremely petty villainy, such as telling a grieving woman her singing sucks, snatching the lute out of her hands, and smashing it.
• Exact Words: As per Devilish standard, Wyll's contract with Mizora allowed her to send him after "the demonic, infernal, heartless and soulless". Wyll interpreted that to mean "evil", but Karlach, who literally has no heart, but an infernal engine instead, was fair game. If you choose to kill Karlach, Wyll has a sad introspective moment when he wonders just how many of his marks were innocents who got through his contract through similar loopholes
• Exploding Barrels: It's a Larian Studios game, so this is to be expected. There are various flammable and explosive barrels littered throughout various areas like the goblin camp or the Zhentarim hideout, placed either to make combat easier or traps more deadly, such as explosive barrels placed next to a treasure chest designed to explode when opened.
• Expy: The Steel Watch constructs are basically Robocop 2 from the movie of the same name: giant metal robot(s) controlled by the brain of a dead person. Both are law enforcers, too.
• Extreme Omnisexual: Your character. More specifically, you have the option of romancing and sleeping with nigh everyone and anyone, and everyone and anyone are receptive to your advances. In short, every companion is playersexual (potentially attracted to you regardless of your character's sex, gender, or anything else). You can even romance and sleep around with multiple people at the same time. The player also has the option of engaging in some quasi-bestiality (a male druid shapeshifted into a bear) and incest (by having a foursome with a pair of drow twins), as well as potentially sleeping with devils and even a mind-flayer.
• Eye Scream: As seen in the opening cinematic, the mind flayer infects its victims by inserting parasitic tadpoles through their eyes. In the game proper both Volo and Auntie Ethel will offer to try and remove the parasite from your head. Doing the latter gets you nothing but a permanent stat debuff and the loss of being able to make critical hits. The former, however, ends up granting your character the permanent ability to see invisible enemies, so it's weirdly worth the ordeal.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: As per Dungeons & Dragons canon, this is how illithids reproduce; they insert their tadpole form into the brains of sentient hosts, whereupon the larva absorbs the brain and metamorphosizes the host's body into a new adult mind flayer.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Tieflings are on the receiving end of this in the druids' grove, where they're on the verge of being kicked out into the wilderness by the archdruid Kagha, who accuses them of being thieves and parasites and plans to erect a wall of thorns to segregate the grove from the outsiders. Subverted, when it turns out she actually has a different motive.
  • Drow, traditionally Always Chaotic Evil in the setting^note or rather, Usually Chaotic Evil. There's always been at least a minority of non-evil drow., are still hated and feared throughout most of the surface world, though this reaction is softening and many characters are aware of the civil war that has seen some drow break from the traditional worship of the evil spider goddess Lolth. Inverted in the goblin camp, where other races are mocked and threatened, but most goblins assume that the player drow is part of the Cult of the Absolute's leadership and bow and scrape before you (while still mocking you behind your back).
  • Gur are a nomadic culture in the Forgotten Realms who get saddled with the Roguish Romani stereotype, something that Gandrel acknowledges in sarcastically claiming he'll curse your livestock and steal children. Astarion hates them, but he has a more specific reason: they're the ones who killed him and some of them, Gandrel included, are now trying to drag him back to his former vampire master.
• Final Boss Preview: You first see the Elder Brain in Act 2, along with two of the other antagonists you'll need to deal with in Act 3 in order to finish the game.
• Fission Mailed: One of the stat checks you need to pass during your first direct meeting with the Netherbrain has a DC of 99, but no matter what you roll during this conversation, your attempts to dominate the brain will always fail, even with nat 20s. Fortunately, the Emperor quickly comes up with a Plan B and the story continues.
• Flash Step: Comes in so many flavors. The most accessible to the player is Misty Step, a level 2 spell that lets the caster teleport to any unoccupied spot they can see. Githyanki have a psionic version with a different name but pretty much the same effect. Certain warrior skills turn the user into a Personal Space Invader by teleporting them right in an enemy's face for a follow-up melee attack. Dark creatures like shadows and meenlocks can teleport to any spot that isn't brightly lit. Many bosses have their own unique abilities for instant relocation.
• Fooled by the Sound: Using Speak with Dead on Demir and asking "Did you find your sister?" has him respond that he heard her screaming, but that the thing making the sound wasn't actually Mayrina. It's not specified what was imitating the sound, but it's implied it was the nearby redcaps and that Mayrina's screams were used to lure and kill Demir and his brother.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The Absolute's holy symbol is an amalgamation of each of the Dead Three's symbols.
  • If you end up thrown in a Moonrise Tower prison cell, the most obvious escape route is through a gaping hole in the floor, which leads not into a tunnel or sewer but an illithid oubliette, foreshadowing the later reveal of an entire mind flayer colony hiding underneath the tower.
  • Snooping through the githyanki inquisitor's documents in their créche reveals that Voss is being suspected of treason. It takes a couple more hours of playtime for this topic to come up again. Big time.
• From Bad to Worse: At the end of the extended introduction cinematic, the player character gets free from their prison and goes to the hole in the hull to see where they have ended up. Only to find out they are in Avernus, the first layer of the Nine Hells. And to make things even worse, the nautiloid is about to come under attack by an army of devils.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Unusually few for a game of such complexity, but there are a few major bugs that can cut off entire quest lines. Most of these happen in Act III, like one that prevents the party from interacting with the Hell Gate to Raphael's House of Hope, which is a mandatory part of multiple quests and thus has a huge impact on the game's ending.
• Game Master: Of the Author kind, with elements of the Director. The narrator acts in the manner a Dungeon Master would, describing events in terms of how they appear or occur in order to present what the character sees, feels, or is thinking. For example, early on the player finds an illithid tadpole and wants to kill it, but the narrator describes how the tadpole in your head makes you feel about it, resulting in your character having to resist it to kill it if they wish.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Items can be equipped by any party member, even if it doesn't logically make sense. For instance, one of the best characters to wield a mace that's a sacred relic literally made from the blood of the good god of light is Shadowheart. She'll do so without complaint, despite being dedicated to the extremely petty and jealous goddess of darkness.
  • This is practically guaranteed to happen if you choose to respec your party members. Some like Astarion, Lae'zel and Karlach downplay it because their class plays no significant role in their characterization, but Halsin for instance is explicitly stated to be an archdruid, so making him any class other than druid breaks his entire backstory. The same goes for Gale, Wyll and Shadowheart (although in her case it can actually lead to the opposite if you turn her into a cleric of Selûne after her potential Heel–Face Turn in Act II).
  • Using the ilithid powers granted by the tadpole in your brain and/or empowering it is described by almost everyone as a bad idea, since no one knows how far the protection you have from turning into a mindflayer go and making your tadpole stronger could eventually allow it to still transform you. Only your Dream Protector encourages you to use them, and that's because they're actually a sentient ilithid, and don't see anything particularly wrong with becoming one. Gameplay-wise, however, there are no side-effects from relying on your ilithid powers and you're always safe.
• Geo Effects:
  • Early in Early Access, in a departure from how the tabletop works, spells, including cantrip, cause areas of elemental effects on the ground under their targets. Ray of frost, for example, causes a sheet of ice to appear under its target, and is almost guaranteed to knock people prone. Fire bolt is basically a different spell entirely than in the tabletop, with reduced initial damage, but now igniting the target for damage over time and igniting the ground. It can potentially splash and ignite two enemies if close enough. This was toned down in a later patch. Similarly thrown weapons like alchemist's fire leave an area of elemental damage behind them. Also like in Divinity: Original Sin, elements can interact. Dousing flames with water will cause steam which can be used for stealth, for example. Oil slicks can be ignited, etc...
  • Attacking from higher ground now gives a bonus to attack rolls, similar to the Divinity: Original Sin games. Conversely, attacking targets on the higher ground gives you a penalty to your attack rolls.
• God Test: You can demand to know why Queen Vlaakith doesn't just do the thing she's demanding of you when she's giving an order. In addition to being a slightly weird assumption you keep making, since the character is not in fact a deity (just revered like one), it's a very bad idea. She prepared Wish.
• Godzilla Threshold: Almost literally. The threat of the Absolute is deemed so great that one of the allies you can try to call on is an ancient bronze dragon, the very same one that Balduran rode before he founded Baldur's Gate, and that can be awakened only once to defend the city in a time of greatest peril. One problem though: the dragon was killed a long time ago by the Emperor, who was Balduran, and the reunion soon turns into a battle between your party and a powerful Dracolich.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The Dead Three, Bane, Bhaal and Myrkul are the ones who instigate the plot in their latest quest for domination and death. They are the ones who picked their respective Chosens, Gortash, Ketheric and Orin to do their bidding. Bhaal is particularly significant because he is the father to Dark Urge, who in turn assisted Gortash in stealing the Crown of Karsus from Mephistopheles's vaults.
  • To a lesser extent, Karsus. Although he is long deceased by the time of the story and only mentioned, his quest for godhood led him to create the Crown of Karsus. This crown bestows the power to control an Elder Brain and, by extension, an army of Mind Flayers, which forms the backbone of the Chosens of the Dead Three's plan to conquer Faerûn. On a more personal level, he also created the Orb that Gale eventually inhabits, which forms a significant portion of his personal quest.
• Great Escape:
  • Multiple sidequests require you to break one or more characters out of prison. These can be some of the trickiest tasks in the entire game, at least if your goal is to succeed without getting into open combat. Freeing the tieflings and goblins from Moonrise Towers is arguably the most difficult example, requiring tons of preparation, knowledge of the area, some very specific combinations of party characters and skills, near-perfect timing, and a good amount of dumb luck to make it through without aggro'ing the whole dungeon.
  • If you're caught engaging in particularly illegal activities, you yourself might find yourself locked up and forced to find a way out of your predicament. There's a large number of unique prisons in the game, all of which require specific approaches to escape (and no, you can't just pick your cell door's lock; you have to get creative).
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: Downplayed. There are definite villains and heroes in the story, but there's no alignment system and the game heavily encourages you to play your character in a morally nuanced manner. And even though many characters you encounter can be comfortably characterized as heroic or villainous, most of them have Hidden Depths to them.
  • This is shown off as early as the character creation screen. Paladins must choose an oath. Of the three choices, two fit squarely into the mould of a stereotypical Lawful Good holy warrior. The third is the Oath of Vengeance, dedicated to enacting revenge, a much more Lawful Evil ideal. And the hidden Oathbreaker subclass that lets you be anything but a stereotypical Lawful Good holy warrior.
• Guest-Star Party Member: An intellect devourer who goes by the name of "Us" is able to join you in the nautiloid at the beginning of the game, if you don't kill it. However, Us is unavailable after the nautiloid crashes, but can potentially be reacquired as a summon much later in the game.
• Guide Dang It!: Let's just say that in a game as deep and complex as Baldur's Gate 3, you're bound to run into situations you just can't figure out how to resolve to your satisfaction without some outside help. Side quests almost always have an impact on the current main quest one way or another, as do companions and their own quests, and the myriad ways they intersect with one another can make it seem impossible to predict how any given decision might turn out a couple hours of play time down the road.
• Happy Ending Override:
  • As mentioned above, the events of Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus ended with Elturel and its people returning to Toril from Avernus, including Grand Duke Ulder Ravengard, and are on the road to recovery. Soon after that, it's revealed that Elturians have blamed the tiefling population for the crisis (despite the fact that their own ruler, Thavius Kreeg, doomed them all in the first place through a pact with Zariel) and drove them all out of the city. Not only that, but it's also revealed that in the midst of Ulder's return trip to Baldur's Gate, he ends up getting captured by members of the Cult of the Absolute and was reportedly taken to Moonrise Towers.
  • Forgotten Realms lore by 5th Edition states that Bhaal successfully resurrected himself when all his Bhaalspawn died, which means that the player character of the first 2 Baldur's Gate games is not only dead, but their efforts to stop Bhaal's resurrection was ultimately All for Nothing. In the adventure module Murder in Baldur's Gate, Abdel Adrian (the canon version of Gorion's Ward) was attacked by a fellow Bhaalspawn while he was speaking to a crowd in the Wide. And although the victor of the fight remains unknown, both of them ended up dead while a giant soul-sucking monster eventually emerged from the confrontation, which was slayed by other adventurers, freeing Bhaal's essence and allowing him to return, albeit in a weakened, not fully divine form. Worse still is that even after his resurrection, there are still a handful of Bhaalspawn that continue to menace Faerûn in the present day, such as Orin, Sarevok, and (quite possibly) the Dark Urge.
  • Viconia's two endings in Throne of Bhaal have her either dying after her romance with Gorion's Ward or she undergoes an implied Heel–Face Turn in her solo ending. In this game, she's an unrepentant follower of Shar once again and Shadowheart's Evil Mentor, with Shadowheart's quest arc possibly ending with the player killing her once and for all.
  • Sarevok could be turned Chaotic Good with the implication that he'd try to be The Atoner. This game shows him back under Bhaal's yoke, which Jaheira sneers at as him wasting the chance he was given.
  • Though there is a case of it being inverted with Jaehira. Her non-romanced epilouge was bittersweet with her never returning to the Sword Coast due to all the events of the games, and her relationship with the Harpers being chilly due to trying to kill Gorion's Ward. Now she's considered one of the greatest protectors of Baldur's Gate and can lead the Harpers openly, when normally they stick to the shadows.
• Healer Signs On Early: Downplayed with Shadowheart. She's likely the first potential companion you can encounter and recruit after the nautiloid crashes and the only one who starts out with healing spells. That said, while all 5e clerics do have access to healing spells, the only cleric subclass to heavily lean towards being a healer is the Life Domain. Shadowheart starts out with the Trickery Domain, which is more geared towards being a Stealth Expert and a Master of Illusion.
• Heroic Team Revolt: If you sided with Minthara and the goblins during the raid on the Emerald Grove, Wyll will either turn hostile towards you if you have him in your party or, if he remained at your camp during the raid, will call you out later at night after the raid before leaving your camp for good. Karlach will also leave your party permanently for doing so. Gale will also call you out for your dubious choices and threatens to leave your party as well. Unlike with Wyll and Karlach's case, you could either let Gale go or convince him to stay with a successful skill check.
• Hitbox Dissonance: The upshot of Larian drawing so heavily from their Immersive Sim roots is that you can target just about everything on screen, including the environment, corpses, random objects, scenery, what have you. Which also means you can missclick on just about anything on screen, which you'll be brutally reminded of if, say, you missclick with a flaming weapon in hand on something flammable.
• Hijacked by Ganon:
  • A very rare case in which the Protagonist can inflict by siding with Bhaal in the Dark Urge-exclusive Sins of the Father alternate ending, betraying the Emperor and hijacking the Cult of the Absolute's plans at the last possible minute to seize control of the Netherbrain instead of destroying it and allow Bhaal to begin with his murderous tendencies once more on a truly gargantuan scale thanks to the army of pawns now at his disposal.
  • What at first starts off as heroes facing off an enigmatic cult that employs and worships modified mind flayer larvae is eventually revealed to be the machinations of Chosen champions of the Dead Three gods, Myrkul, Bane, and Bhaal. With the Chosen of Bhaal in particular revealed to be a Bhaalspawn like the villains of the Baldur's Gate and Throne Of Bhaal, as well as plotting behind the other two Chosen's backs.
• History Repeats: On a Dark Urge playthrough, Baldur's Gate is once again the location of a fight between two Bhaalspawn half-siblings, an evil one who seeks to uphold Bhaal's legacy and leads a secret society, and a potentially redeemed one (or not) who opposes them and leads a party of adventurers. The confrontation between the Dark Urge and Orin draws many parallels between that of Gorion's Ward and Sarevok at the climax of the first game.
  • Each of the three main antagonists takes a different cue from Sarevok, the original game's Big Bad. Ketheric Thorm is the indomitable armoured figure with a Freudian Excuse, Enver Gortash is the incumbent grand duke of Baldur's Gate exploiting a crisis of his own design to propel himself to greater power, and Orin the Red is a Bhaalspawn, and Sarevok's granddaughter to boot.
• Hope Spot:
  • Going with Karlach to Dammon to get her infernal engine fixed will finally allow her to touch others without hurting them. This is especially heartwarming if you're romancing her, since now the two of you can finally be physically intimate. Unfortunately, this news is then followed by that there is no way to permanently fix Karlach's infernal engine heart and if she doesn't return to Avernus then she will die. Currently there is no way to save her from this, unless you count turning her into a Mindflayer.
  • If you save Wyll's father he'll give you the task of finding the "Heart of Baldur's gate", which is supposed to be a brass dragon named Ansur that sleeps beneath the city and will protect it in times of great need. Unfortunately when you pass all of Ansur's trials and go to his lair you'll find that he has been Dead All Along and can no longer help you. Worse, he'll awaken as a Dracolich and recognize the Emperor as his old friend Balduran, the one who killed him in the first place, forcing you to put him down. No dragon cavalry for you.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: At the Blighted Village, the player can interrupt an ogress and a bugbear while they're having sex in a barn. Most of the party is extremely shocked at the bizarre pair. Depending on the dialogue picked, the player character will describe the experience as a "puny rutting", much to the humiliation of the bugbear.
• Hotter and Sexier: While romanceable companions are par for the course for the Baldur's Gate series, 3 adds a cinematic presentation, sex scenes, sex worker NPCs (who also have scenes), full nudity, raunchy jokes, one-night stands, and polyamory, all of which are built by steamy writing fit for a bodice-ripper.
• Hungry Jungle: In act 3, if you expose an Efreet part of the circus cheating, he'll teleport you to Chult, an island Jungle full of dinosaurs and undead. And true to the form the player is almost immediately set upon by raptors.
• I Am One of Those, Too: Karlach is being pursued by a group of servants of Zariel masquerading as Paladins of Tyr. If you're a Tyr Cleric, you can expose them pretty much instantly:
  Player: You say you serve Tyr. Recite the Creed of the Left Hand.
  Anders: Wh - I - please, I am wounded. Overcome. I can hardly remember my own name.
• Immersive Sim: While somewhat downplayed because of the constraints of 5e, Larian's biggest releases draw more heavily from immersive sim conventions than traditional RPG, with BG3 being no exception.
• Implacable Man: Illithids are beyond stoic. In the opening cutscene, the reaction by the lead illithid to finding the corpse of a crewmate is to widen its eyes and register it for future reference. It goes hand-in-hand with the species' Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Improbable Weapon User: You, potentially. Aside from all the crap you can throw at enemies, you can also beat them to death with a salami.
• In a Single Bound: Everyone, thanks to the game engine, although downplayed for characters without high Strength. Being strong means you can jump further and be less likely to take damage from it, but even a Squishy Wizard has a 10-foot vertical leap for reaching ledges overhead.
• Interdimensional Travel Device: The nautiloid comes equipped with one on its main bridge, referred to as a transponder, activated by connecting a pair of tentacles and pulling on the resulting bond.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • It's a well-known fact that when playing D&D: make your players roll Perception, and even if they all fail, they'll know there's something there they're missing. If you see the little Perception dice roll over your character's head and it comes up a failure, it does much the same thing. Amusingly, given how closely Larian Studios stuck to the 5e rules when making the game, this makes it even more like traditional D&D.
  • Want to find that invisible enemy near you during combat? Pull up the move option and watch for where your projected path bends around what seems to be nothing.
  • Early on in the game, you're likely to encounter Auntie Ethel, and if you right-click and inspect her, you can see that her ability scores far exceed what an old woman should have, such as having 18 strength, darkvision, and her race being listed as 'fey.' This is due to her actually being a hag in disguise.
  • The D&D universe has a massive pantheon, but the loading screens only ever talk about six gods: Shar, Selûne, Jergal and the Dead Three (Bane, Bhaal, Myrkul). The first two are heavily involved in one of your first companion's backstory from the very start of the game, but the others seem like an odd choice to feature so prominently. Unsurprisingly, they'll become very important later on.
  • If you're perceptive enough to spot an impending ambush but not the ambushers themselves, just prepare any AoE attack and move the cursor around the area ahead. Any potential targets will be marked with a red outline as usual.
  • Larian built the game to be fully transparent, mechanically, through Examination—meaning some of the more complicated boss gimmicks can be figured out by Examining and then reading carefully what their abilities and status-effects say.
  • Keen-eared players can tell whether they've succeeded or failed a skill check before the dice-rolling animation is finished based on the sound effect that plays in the background. It even applies if you only succeed or fail based on bonuses, so if you roll low and still succeed thanks to your stat bonus, it will still play the success sound before the bonus has been added to your result.
• Interrogating the Dead: Speak With Dead works on most corpses, with varying usefulness. Sometimes it's another way to learn info you might've accidentally lost, other times it's fluff, and on occasion a corpse has unique information that will only be learned by asking them.
• Interrupted Intimacy:
  • You can discover a bugbear and an ogre having sex in a closed barn outside Moonhaven. They won’t appreciate your intrusion and will attack you if you open the door. A Barbarian or a Bard can pass a skill check to prevent the encounter from turning violent.
  • Later in Act III you can walk in on a wood elf prostitute and a Flaming Fist mercenary. The Fist immediately turns into a mind flayer upon spotting your party, forcing a fight. Amusingly, the wood elf has a bit of a thing for mind flayers and is thus turned on by this revelation, much to the party's consternation.
• Intoxication Mechanic: Booze can just be used for camp supplies to fuel your long rests, but it can also be directly consumed, giving you a debuff and an achievement if you kill 10 enemies while drunk.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: The assistant druid healer Nettie, upon hearing you have an illithid tadpole in you, will try to Mercy Kill you, forcibly if necessary, because the lead healer Halsin isn't around and they believe you can turn at any moment. She'd already killed and dissected a drow for the same reason.
• Jack of All Trades: Since the level Cap is 12 and there are twelve classes in the game, it is possible (though extremely challenging) to multiclass one level into each and every class in the game - otherwise known infamously as the Abserd build. There is even an achievement of the trope name for completing a story playthrough as this kind of character^note The caveat is that it must be done organically in one run - using Withers to respec doesn't provide the achievement.
• Killer Game-Master: As is typical of Larian releases, playing at higher difficulties is like playing the game with a DM who really wants the party to die at nearly every fight. Even the Early Access experience had been reported to be rather treacherous, and this build's difficulty was eventually rebalanced into the full game's Balanced mode.
• Killer Rabbit: There's a small frog living in the swamp that covers the southern reaches of Act I. Its health is pitiful, but antagonize it at your own peril because that critter packs a terrifying punch delivered through various poison attacks, and its tiny size makes it extremely hard to hit. It's not uncommon to lose multiple party members to something you should be able to just squish under your heel.
• Legendary in the Sequel: Trailers show this being the case for Minsc. He is mentioned by Jaheira in the Launch date trailer as being "not just a friend, a legend".
• Living Ship: The mind flayer nautiloid, true to its name, resembles some deep-sea Mix And Match Creature, with jagged shells, tentacles, and mucus membranes.
• Logo Joke: On the website, the initial announcement for the game was simply the Roman numeral III... with tentacles suddenly bursting out and wrapping themselves around the digits. In all promotional videos for BG3, the Larian Studios logo turns into an illithid◊.
• Losing Your Head: Well, in the case of an intellect devourer, losing your brain, as it's just a brain with legs.
• MacGuffin: The mysterious artifact that Shadowheart possesses counts as this. While its function is a mystery even to her, it's actively being sought after by both the Cult of the Absolute and the githyanki and she is secretly tasked with delivering it to her coven in Baldur's Gate. The artifact is revealed thus far to be a powerful weapon of githyanki origin, and it's possible that her mission was to steal it from them, which might explain her lingering distrust towards githyanki, including Lae'zel. In addition, the artifact is able to protect the party from the Absolute's influence as well as being unable to part with its wielder. A close examination on the artifact also reveals that there is something alive that is contained within it.
• Mad Doctor: Dr. Malus Thorm is a Shar worshipper who's been warped by the shadow curse, turning him into an insane, undead monster. He performs grotesque surgeries on unlucky "patients", allowing his nurses to murder them under the belief that the absence of life is the only way to "cure" them. His ideology is so twisted that you can convince him to let the nurses perform this surgery on him, causing them to murder him without a fight.
• Massive Race Selection: The game includes each of the base races from the 5th Edition Player's Handbook, with the addition of githyanki, Mephistopheles and Zariel tieflings, deep gnomes, and duergar. You can also go even further by playing as a high elf vampire spawn in the form of the Origin character Astarion.
• Meaningful Look: When you run into Gandrel and get him to tell you that he's hunting Astarion, if Astarion himself is in your party he will shoot you a "back me up here!" look.
• Mecha-Mooks: The Flaming Fist mercenaries that traditionally protect Baldur's Gate have been reinforced with a legion of Steel Watchers, 12-foot humanoid Animated Armor-style golems made of gold and infernal iron that speak with a disturbingly pleasant female voice but won't hesitate to turn you into paste for the slightest infraction. They're controlled through a Wetware CPU under the direct control of one of the primary villains and so dangerous that getting rid of them all in one fell swoop makes up an entire expansive and very complex quest chain. They even have a unique Super Prototype that serves as that quest chain's final boss.
• Mercy Kill Arrangement: Lae'zel wants this from the player, and at one point demands the player slit her throat. They can oblige, and have her Killed Off for Real.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: You can meet owlbears, which have the body shape of a bear and the head and feathery features of a giant owl.
• Multiple Endings: Of the Last-Second Ending Choice variety. There are two endings, albeit with different variations that depend on your actions throughout the campaign, including how you handled your companions' personal quests.
  • Endgame:
    • Good Ending: Prince Orpheus or the Emperor succeeds in bringing the Netherbrain to heel, either subjugating it or destroying it. Baldur's Gate is spared from destruction and the Cult of the Absolute's armies swiftly crumble.
    • Evil Ending: Before Prince Orpheus or the Emperor can subjugate the Netherbrain, Tav betrays them and takes control of the Netherbrain, essentially taking over the Cult's plans for themselves in a bid for world domination.
    • Sin of the Father: The ending exclusive to the Dark Urge origin. It plays out similarly to the Evil Ending, but whereas Tav takes control of the Netherbrain for their own purposes, the Dark Urge corrupts the Netherbrain and everyone connected to it, including your companions, with the same murderous impulses that plagued the Dark Urge throughout the game, creating an Ax-Crazy army with the sole purpose of waging bloody conquest across all of Faerun in the name of Bhaal.
  • Companion Sidequests:
    • Astarion: Astarion's sidequest will end with either him killing Cazador in a fit of rage when the latter attempts to sacrifice his vampire spawn in an attempt to gain more power or hijack Cazador's ritual for himself and become a Vampire Ascendant and quickly becomes mad with power. In the game's good ending, Astarion will either lose his ability to walk in daylight due to the loss of his tadpole or be unaffected because of his newfound rise to power. His romance with the Player Character will also change for the worse if he becomes a Vampire Ascendant as he treats Tav/The Dark Urge as more of a plaything, or he'll break things off if they become a mind-flayer.
    • Karlach: Karlach's questline will end in one of three ways when her infernal engine finally sputters out. She'll either choose to go out peacefully in Faerun, happy she died out of Zariel's reach or go back to Avernus to keep the infernal engine going. In the latter, the Player Character can choose to go with her, or Wyll will go with her so as to protect her from Zariel's henchmen, or they can both accompany her together. Alternatively, it's possible for Karlach to become a mind-flayer herself and render her infernal engine useless, though she will now have to deal with the Horror Hunger that comes with her new condition.
    • Shadowheart: Depending on your actions in Act II, Shadowheart will either be abandoned by Shar for refusing to kill the Nightsong and become a cleric of Selûne or become a Dark Justiciar and a faithful Sharran. Her parents die in both routes, albeit under different circumstances. Whether Shadowheart continues following Shar will also determine if you can continue your romance with her.
    • Lae'zel: Lae'zel's standing with the githyanki changes depending on whether you side with Prince Orpheus or the Emperor toward the end of the game. If you side with Prince Orpheus, Lae'zel's experiences with being on the receiving end of the githyanki's xenophobic behavior for associating with the party and seeing first-hand how corrupt the githyanki are (or at least the majority) makes her realize her kind is not perfect or as proud as she thought they were. If you side with the Emperor, Prince Orpheus' supporters decry her for regicide and are out for her blood, with the implication being she'll be hunted by them for the rest of her life.
• Mundane Utility: Several examples:
  • A zombie (un)living in Baldur's Gate uses the fact he can no longer feel pain to make some gold by letting people pay to punch him.
  • Gale uses a literal mirror image spell to check his appearance while camping in the wilderness.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: The spell animate dead is, in D&D 5th Edition, a 3rd level spell whose base effect is to raise a single corpse to act on the caster's behalf; you can raise more, but it takes higher-level spell slots to do so. The level 5 duergar Gekh Coal, should you pick a fight with him, will cast it and raise FOUR corpses to fight for him, something that should require a 5th level spell slot, which other characters can't access until 9th level at the earliest.
  • For that matter, having a Psychic Link is treated as something unique and special because of the illithid tadpoles in your head. Yet you can play a Great Old One Warlock, who in the tabletop rules gets unlimited telepathy with anything that can think at level 1.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Perception checks in a nutshell. Sufficiently perceptive characters can detect all sorts of (often quest-relevant) anomalies in their immediate surroundings, as well as hidden treasures or enemies lying in ambush. Even if all four of your party members fail the check, the mere fact that there was a check to begin with can be helpful because minor things like hidden goodies can usually be interacted with anyway if you mouse over them, with a successful check merely highlighting them with a blue glow.
• Nature Versus Nurture: The Society of Brilliance wants to seize a githyanki egg so they can raise it with (what they see as) prosocial values, specifically to test whether violence is taught or an inevitable part of githyanki nature. It's also a central theme for Shadowheart, whose memory wipe raises interesting questions about her gentle nature chafing against her brutal Sharran nurture (although it can be argued that, given her age when she was taken in by the Sharrans, her gentleness is actually the result of her Selûnite nurture provided by her parents).
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The prologue offers several chances to accidentally kill various thralls and transform one of them into a mind flayer. Granted, they were likely doomed anyway, but there's still a marked difference between a Mercy Kill and getting them killed simply because you were curious.
• Nominal Importance: Played with. No matter how inconsequential they are or the number of lines they speak, all sapient creatures have a name in the game. Even some characters who are, in fact, not sapient have a name, namely wild animals (such as Timber the squirrel).
• Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious: Okta's gruel restores a good amount of HP and is exceptionally quick to eat in combat, but is described in such glowing terms as "watery sludge" and "grey goo".
• Non-Mammal Mammaries:
  • Averted and possibly invoked in the case of dragonborn. Unlike some other D&D artwork depictions, female dragonborn do not have mammalian breasts. They do by default have casualwear that resembles a bra, however, and it's possible this is an attempt to conform to other races' expectations regarding gender and this trope.
  • Played straight, however, with githyanki, which are oviparous. Dialogue with Lae'zel has her comment that all githyanki eggs are laid by a caste of breeders hand-selected by Vlaakith, so there's no real reason for non-maternal gith to have humanoid breasts, but they do anyway.^note One In-Universe theory is that the gith races were human before millennia of magical and genetic experimentation at the hands of the mind flayers, followed by many more thousands of years of evolution to acclimate to the Astral Plane.
• Non Standard Game Over: There's more than a few ways to die that will result in the game over screen, outside of a Total Party Kill in combat, though generally speaking, they're easy enough to avoid.
  • An early, perhaps the earliest one, is the part where you find a dying mind flayer. If you approach it with the primary PC, it will try to turn you into a slave. If you successfully roll for intelligence and subsequently either submit to it or try to escape it but fail a roll for wisdom, you will turn into a mind flayer slave, leading to an instant game over.
  • The first notable one will be after enough long rests, when Lae'zel corners you with intent to wipe out the party, believing you're undergoing cerebromorphosis into a mind flayer and she's right, but your dream companion saves you. The roll to convince her to stand down and give the party a chance to make sure it's just a normal fever is trivial no matter which stat you use to roll the dice with (and if you're really worried about failing, you can attack her in self-defense with no roll, but this will result in her permanent death), but it's totally possible to give in and let her execute you, followed shortly by the rest of the party and herself.
  • The Dark Urge PC gets a unique one. Late in the game if you've taken a Love Interest, the Urge will make you roll to resist killing them in their sleep. If you fail the roll and the worst comes to pass, you can play as having crossed head over heels into the Despair Event Horizon. Depending on how hard you play into this, it can result in them begging the rest of the party to kill them, and convincing them to follow through, because after killing their lover they're beyond the point where they ever want to hurt someone again.
  • Taunting Vlaakith causes her to spend a wish to kill you.
  • Playing with Raphael and his incubus lover, and failing the saving throws, turns you into their sex slave, causing a game over.
  • Gale can detonate the Netherese Orb, either at Ketheric Thorm's encounter with the elder brain, or at any other time, leading to the narrator describing half the coast as a smouldering crater and giving you a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero speech. A simpler version of this happens if he dies early in the game and you fail or neglect to resurrect him within two days' time. In this case you merely get a brief cinematic of Gale going nuclear, followed by the game over screen.
  • Entering the Underdark by jumping into a specific chasm in the phase spider lair underneath Moonhaven without casting Feather Fall first gets you a unique cutscene of the controlled character smashing into the floor at terminal velocity.
• Non-Heteronormative Society: The full spectrum of real life gender and sexual diversity is depicted through the fantasy lens, and is fully integrated in the story as ordinary. Some examples:
  • Shadowheart makes a lot of flirtatious gestures to Karlach, from remarking on the size of her arms when recruiting her to saying bugs are biting Karlach because they "mistook her for a tasty treat."
  • Astarion has suggestive and flirty lines for every Origin companion.
  • Astarion's victims found in Cazador's chamber are of all genders, though predominantly men, and he keeps a soft spot for one of the men.
  • Multiple Gondians mention same-sex spouses, as do their Banite captors. While the latter taunt about torturing and killing said spouses, it's for evil leverage purposes rather than homophobia.
  • Nocturne is played by a trans actress, and her journal mentions Shadowheart going to her defense on respecting her new name when they were growing up in the Coven. Nocturne also describes her friendship with Shadowheart in intimate terms, making it a possible Implied Love Interest or precocious romance among youth.
  • The player can romance all the Origin companions, regardless of gender.
  • Since character customization has different independent sliders for body types, voice types, and genitalia, the player avatar doesn't have to be cisnormative, and no one will consider it unusual if the PC does so.
  • Some companions will agree to polyamory if you discuss it with them; Lae'zel and Halsin don't practice monogamy to begin with.
• No Ontological Inertia: The easiest way to deal with the beastmaster type of enemies is to kill the master to make the pet disappear. Justified in the case of spellcasters as summoning a creature to fight for you requires maintaining control over either it or its ability to remain summoned, without that the summoned creature cannot remain on the material plane. Just keep in mind that since undead aren't summoned from another plane, killing a necromancer does not make their minions fall apart.
• Not So Above It All: Your companions can use Boo as a thrown weapon. They even have voice lines.
• Number of the Beast: The cambion Raphael boasts a fitting health of 666.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: There is an encounter with a Gur named Gandrel who is hunting Astarion. Should Astarion be in the party, the conversation becomes a double between the Gur and the PC and Astarion and the PC. The Gur is talking about hunting Astarion, how he's extremely dangerous and should be dealt with. Astarion agrees - the Gur is extremely dangerous and should be dealt with.
  PC: Only a spawn? Pity. Not like it's a real vampire.
  Astarion: I don't know. I'm sure a vampire spawn could still rip your throat out if he felt like it.
  Gandrel: He is right, unfortunately ... During the day, we have the advantage. But at night, when they hunt? You will not find a more deadly quarry.
  PC: Yes, I'm sure they can creep right up on you.
  Astarion: We've all survived so far. Let's focus on that.
  Gandrel: It would still be wise to post guards at night. The threat is real.
  Astarion: Indeed it is. We should do something about this threat.
• Optional Boss: Quite a few bosses, usually the ones encountered in side quests, play no role in the main story but can be fought for high-level loot and/or bragging rights. Arguably the most high-profile one is Commander Zhalk, the cambion locked in combat with the mind flayer in the tutorial level. You're supposed to just run past him, but defeating him earns you an achievement and one of the most powerful two-handed weapons in the early game.
• Optional Sexual Encounter: Should you have a sufficient approval rating from one or more of your companions, they may offer you the chance of sleeping alongside them while resting for the night. And depending on the choices you make, you can develop a deeper relationship with the companion of your choice and even have sex with them. Outside of your Origin companions, you can also choose to have a romance with the drow paladin Minthara (who's also recruitable later in the game), but only if you sided with her and the goblins during the raid on Silvanus' Grove and gave in to her desire of spending the night with you soon afterward. Siding with the tieflings and the Grove instead allows the player to recruit and romance the wood elf druid Halsin.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Thanks to his illithid tadpole, vampire spawn Astarion can walk in the daylight again and enter homes without invitation, but is still bound to the curse's hunger for blood. During early access he also could not cross running water, but this was added to the pile of benefits his tadpole provides on release.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: While most of the game is Dark Fantasy, it sells the Shadow Curse in Act 2 by leaning hard into other horror subtropes not otherwise in use in Acts 1 and 3 (even with Dark Urge PCs), such as Slasher Movie antagonists, Nothing Is Scarier, hauntings, etc.
• Overly-Long Gag: If you accidentally set off the bibberbang around the dwarf in the Underdark, he dies within the first few seconds. However, the chain reaction will take the better part of a minute and a half to complete, for no reason other than to make the player stew in their hilarious shame.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Orin's shapeshifters, as well as Orin herself, are this both In-Universe and out during Act III. Once you've been blindsided by them for the first time, neither you nor the characters in-game will ever feel certain again that whoever they're currently talking to really is who they claim to be.
  • Also, as usual, the ever-popular Mimic. You'll eye every large wooden chest with suspicion after your first encounter with one, at least until you remember to always have a highly perceptive character in your party.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • It's disturbingly easy to miss out on something as crucial as party members. Some like Astarion and Gale are easy to walk past accidentally if you take a wrong turn while exploring after the tutorial level, and there's little reason to return to where they are found later. Others like Lae'zel, Wyll and Karlach can end up Killed Off for Real without the player even knowing they were supposed to be permanent companions. And even if you do manage to recruit them, acting against their interests too often can still result in them leaving your party permanently.
  • The Underdark can only be accessed in Acts I and II, so make sure to explore it before you make for Baldur's Gate, to avoid missing out on a huge chunk of content.
  • Jaheira has two different moments in Act 2 which can lock her out of your campaign, and if she's lost, you also have fewer signposts pointing you to Minsc.
  • Karlach's entire romance subplot is contingent on a specific, optional scene with her at the party after saving the druid grove. Failing to trigger that for any reason, such as not having recruited her yet, apparently means missing the one night of her life she would have been receptive to a new relationship.
• Physical, Mystical, Technological: The Chosen of the Absolute's three leaders. Orin the Red is the Physical, a knife-wielding murderess whose shapeshifting ability stems from her Changeling physiology. Ketheric Thorm is the Mystical, an immortal necromancer capable of summoning undead armies. Enver Gortash is the Technological, a talented inventor who created the Steel Watcher constructs.
• Pixel Hunt: Many items, even very plot-relevant ones, are incredibly tiny, like keys, notes, and jewels, and sometimes it can be nearly impossible to even mouse over them. Thankfully, there's a button to highlight all visible items nearby and you can use the item's name bar to pick it up instead.
• Poison Mushroom: The Suspicious Poison is a flask that looks like a standard Potion of Healing, but poisons any character who drinks it. It can be automatically added to the hotbar when collected (just like regular healing potions), risking mix-ups for inattentive players.
• Potion-Brewing Mechanic: Included with the release version of the game is a deep alchemy system that allows you to create a huge selection of magical concoctions, including all sorts of potions, from the countless herbs and other ingredients you can pick up while exploring.
• Power Floats: Standard for illithids, which usually move around by levitating a few inches off the ground. Sure, they can walk — but why walk when you can float?
• Prefers Going Barefoot: Many of the usual creatures in a D&D-based game, such as kobolds, ogres, bugbears, many goblins, sahuagin, meazels, kuo-toa, and a few others.
• Press X to Die:
  • In the end of Act 1, you have the opporunity to speak with Vlaakith, Lae'zel's queen. She is very proud and also a very powerful lich. And if you mouth off to her, she will simply Wish you out of existence, leading to an instant game over.
  • At around the same time you get access to the devastating magical artifact in Gale's chest, which shows up as an innocuous icon on his ability bar. Click it and you blow up half the Sword Coast, with predictably final result for your adventure.
• Produce Pelting: You can occasionally find rotting produce in containers that, if you picked it up for some reason, can be thrown at enemies. It has no effect whatsoever, but the option is there.
• Product Delivery Ordeal: Shadowheart, who has gotten her memories (including her real name) suppressed, only remembers that she was instructed by Lady Shar to deliver a sacred artifact to Baldur's Gate, no matter the cost or the means necessary to do so. The reason why her memories are suppressed is to ensure the secrecy of this mission, since it's extremely confidential.
• Promoted to Playable: It was originally planned that the druid Halsin would only be an NPC, which is how he appears in the Early Access builds of the game. His voice actor, Dave Jones, confirmed that positive fan reaction to the character led to him being promoted to a potential party member and romance option in the full release.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The illithid tadpole in your brain is already sentient, and will try to influence you into doing things beneficial to the mind flayers.
• Pstandard Psychic Pstance: Characters tend to make this gesture when using their tadpole powers in dialogue.
• Psychic Link: Those who have an illithid tadpole implanted in them develop a telepathic connection to those who also have one, as well as with illithids themselves and their minions. This is demonstrated by the player characters' emotions being shared with the first companion they meet, and the reverse happens too. It seems to be an outgrowth of the mind flayers' Hive Mind, but co-opted to some unknown end by the same force halting your transformation into a mind flayer.
• Puzzle Boss: A few bosses are built this way.
  • The Spectator in the Underdark is likely too much for a party who just got there. But it'll un-petrify and charm drow scattered around the arena. If you damage the drow, it'll break the charm and they'll turn on the Spectator, eventually overwhelming it.
  • The guardian of the Adamantine Forge has resistance or immunity to almost all damage types. It must either be kited under the forge's pneumatic hammer and the hammer activated to kill it (the easier way), or exposed to lava to make it slightly vulnerable to regular attacks (the hard way, required for an achievement).
  • The second fight against Auntie Ethel requires not only dealing with her illusory double spam, but also with a trio of special fungi in the area that constantly heal and revive her and themselves unless you kill them with fire. The latter can be preempted by doing your homework before the battle.
• The Queen's Latin: It seems to be combined with Animal Stereotypes, as a wide variety of British accents are given to animals and certain monsters if you use Speak with Animals according to their type - a Noble Bird of Prey has a posh, pompous accent and manner, while a loyal dog has a lower-class accent. Doesn't explain why a giant spider speaks with a sultry Scottish accent, though.
• Random Number God: For a game that attempts to emulate the tabletop D&D experience, Baldur's Gate III prays at the altar of the Random Number God. For example, if you want to sneak Sazza out of Silvanus' grove, you'll have to do a difficult skill check for every single guard you encounter. Fortunately, the game also offers an optional Karmic Dice setting, which increases the chances of getting higher rolls when enabled.
  • The game also differs from the tabletop by having nat 1s and nat 20s be automatic failures and successes no matter the roll and regardless of any modifiers. While a common home rule, Fifth Edition only applies it to attack rolls; on Skill Checks and Saving Throws even if you rolled a nat 1 or 20, you still have to apply the modifiers to determine a success. So the lowest usable roll in the game is a two because the modifiers can still push it over the top.
• Railroading:
  • While the game, even in Early Access, gives you considerable freedom in deciding what to do and who to ally with, the one thing you cannot do under any circumstance is sell out Shadowheart for the sake of appeasing the Cult of the Absolute, even after finding out she has the artifact they're looking for, nor can you just hand over the artifact yourself in case you're playing as her Origin, or have killed her beforehand. Even if you ally with Minthara, who's one of the Cult's primary enforcers, and slaughter the people of Silvanus's Grove with her, she will turn on you during the victory celebration. And if you talk her out of it and part ways on amicable terms, you've still doomed her to being eventually forsaken by the Cult, given that she never found the artifact they wanted.
  • No matter what you do, you cannot exit the Githyanki Creche mission without having made an enemy of them and Vlaakith. Either you refuse her order and she orders your death, you leave (which causes the same), you insult her (she kills you with a Wish) or if you accept her orders, she orders your execution when you return from the astral plane no matter what you did there (as she knows the task she ordered is impossible). What your decisions affect is Lae'zel's loyalty and your relationship with the Dream Visitor.
• Rat Stomp: You receive this quest very late in the game at a point where your characters are already toppling demi-gods. The slight twist is that it can be given to you by a bunch of lazy snooty cats who don't want to leave the kitchen for fear of missing food and instead pawn it off on a lesser being (the player) or by a chef who is too busy dealing with this to care about the serial killer planning to assassinate him that you came to warn him about.
• Recurring Riff: The melody of "Down by the River" is reused in several parts of the game, from the title screen, to the protagonists' camp, to a creepy circus.
• Red Right Hand: All members of the Cult of the Absolute are identifiable either by a brand on their skin bearing the mark of the Absolute, or by wearing an amulet bearing such a symbol. Meanwhile, those who are infected with illithid tadpoles are seen by the cult as 'True Souls' and are often held in high regard. Upon meeting Priestess Gut at the abandoned temple, you can choose to let her brand you with the mark of the Absolute. While this option would obviously garner disapproval from most of your companions as well as marking you as a member of the cult, the brand itself can actually be useful when conversing with other members of the cult (e.g. the duergars in the Underdark) as well as those employed by the cult (e.g. the ogres in Moonhaven).
• Relationship Values: The game utilizes this in the form of an approval rating, similar to that used in the Dragon Age games. Depending on the decisions and dialogue choices made by the Player Character, certain companions would approve or disapprove of your actions and could lead to varying opinions regarding you as the story progresses, from having a Neutral stance towards you to having an Exceptional outlook on you. As such, getting a high approval from a companion would give you the opportunity to engage in a romantic relationship with them. On the other hand, getting a very low approval from a companion would cause them to leave your party.
• Released to Elsewhere: Githyanki are told they'll "ascend" after reaching a high enough level and killing a mind flayer, flown off to live with Vlaakith in a physical Warrior Heaven. In fact, she eats their souls when they get there. Previous editions of the tabletop game suggested she just wanted to prolong her lichdom and prevent anyone from overthrowing her, but now it seems she has designs on becoming a deity.
• The Reveal: The true nature of Shadowheart's mysterious artefact is drip-fed over several reveals: it's Githyanki in craft, it's a prison, it contains your dream visitor, the dream visitor is preventing your ceremorphosis, the dream visitor is actually The Emperor, and the suspended ceremorphosis and psionic protection is actually at the grace of Orpheus, whom The Emperor has been keeping imprisoned to keep him under control.
• Scenery Porn: From the mountaintops above to the Underdark below and Baldur's Gate itself in between, the dungeons and maps of this game are gorgeous. And to make absolutely sure you get every chance to enjoy the view, almost all of them have at least one scenic overlook somewhere that dials it up to eleven, usually with your party members also commenting on it.
• Schmuck Bait: The game loves serving up choices that are very obviously inadvisable, but nonetheless still there for you to take:
  • After being rescued from the Goblin Camp, Volo will offer to extract the tadpole from the player's head with a procedure that he admits to having no experience in (though he boasts that he "dreamed" of it thousands of times!). Despite being given several opportunities to stop the attempt and Volo gradually escalating in implements from a sewing needle he has in his pack to an ice pick, the player can allow him to go through with the extraction, with predictable results. Though it winds up being downplayed in that Volo will offer a prosthetic eye as an apology for the botched operation, which restores the player's sight and comes with a useful passive effect.
  • You can sleep with Raphael's incubus, and need to pass saving throws to avoid a Non Standard Game Over as the incubus uses the chance to try and make you a sex slave.
  • You're tutorialized on the game's potential Schmuck Bait in the first room—passing an investigation check on the brine pool lets you know the pod is about to burst, and if you touch it, it explodes.
  • Taking up the Hag's offer to remove your tadpool is arguably one, given how poorly the rest of her bargains went for others involved.
  • A sign posted in the off-limits section of Sorcerous Sundries warns you that "trespassers will be disintegrated." If you try to rob the Sundries' vault, you'll have to navigate dozens of traps.
  • The first thing you find upon entering the secret part of the Masons' Guild in Act II is a note on a wall that basically says "take one more step and you're dead". The next thing you find is a treasure chest standing right out in the open in the middle of a long corridor. No points for guessing that it's trapped. It's also empty.
  • The first time Astarion tries to feed on you, you have the option to let him continue. The game gives you multiple chances to push him off, but you can also choose let to him indulge... all the way up until you're dead.
  • In fine D&D tradition, not every chest is actually a chest.
• Schrödinger's Player Character: The Dark Urge is nowhere to be seen if you play any other character, and the same goes with "Tav", by default, the custom character if playing as The Dark Urge or another character. In a strangely literal example, this is presumably because the Urge murdered Tav at the end of Blood in Baldur's Gate, assuming the Featureless Protagonist is meant to be the same character. If Tav is alive, the Urge appears, dead, late in the game.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Missing Shipment sidequest revolves around a mysterious iron flask a lot of people have already died over by the time you become involved. If you open it, out pops a Beholder, one of the stronger monsters out there, and one that can easily ruin an unprepared party's day.
• Separated by a Common Language: A common point of confusion in fantasy works, in D&D "Enchantment" is the name of a specific school of magic which revolves around monkeying with people's minds, while "enchantments" are the various traits and effects that may be infused into a magical item. The process of creating a magical item, not governed by any specific school, is simply referred to as Crafting.
• Servant Race: Deconstructed by a biography written by a tiefling called The Devil You Know, because they're still referred to as "devilkin", despite not following Asmodeus anymore.
  By what method can we redeem ourselves? I would drive a blade into every warlock that aided Asmodeus' damned ritual, but personal vengeance cannot undo the will of a god, much less one as slippery as the Lord of Lies.
• Shout-Out:
  • A number of background-based inspirational events happen to be these:
    • "A Smile Better Suits..." for the Folk Hero is a reference to the well-known line "A smile better suits a hero" in Final Fantasy XIV.
    • "Brain Blast!" for the Sage is a reference to one of Jimmy Neutron's Catchphrases.
    • "Heavy is the Head" for the Sage is from a famous paraphrase of the line "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" from Henry IV.
    • "Needs of the Many" for the Acolyte is a reference to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
    • "Not to Worry, I Have a Permit" for the Charlatan is a reference to a memetic Ron Swanson scene in Parks and Recreation.
    • "To Sleep, Perchance to Dream, Tentacled Dreams" for the Haunted One is a reference to Hamlet.
    • "Trust and a Little Pixie Dust" for the Guild Artisan is a reference to Peter Pan.
  • The way the nerve clusters of the transponder aboard the nautiloid look and connect with each other calls to mind the Avatar movies.
  • The city proper has a cabbage merchant ranting about how difficult it was to get his cargo past the checkpoint. He'll even get angry at you if you're playing a monk.
  • One of the books you can find is titled "The Butler's Cane Has A Knob On The End".
  • The Jack of All Trades achievement requires the player to take one level in every class, a reference to Puffin Forest and his infamous "Abserd" character who did just that.
  • Several treasures are trapped with pressure plates, and players can hot swap to avoid them.
  • The PS5 "Launch Party" trailer by Mashed features a cameo from three adventurers who look a lot like Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends: a blue-haired half-elf rogue, a blonde gnomish wizard in a yellow coat (Tails), a monk with red dreadlocks (Knuckles), and a pink-haired human paladin with a large warhammer (Amy Rose, whose armor looks just like the "Paladin Amy" skin from Sonic Dash).
  • One gnome standing alone near the windmill in Rivington comments that he used to be scared of windmills as a child, thinking they were actually giants waving their arms threateningly.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The announcement video went deep into ceremorphosis, the process by which the mind flayer parasite transforms its host's body into another mind flayer.
  • The dragons in the trailer are also a close match for the Monster Manual illustration◊.
  • Raphael plays (lanceboard) chess using a specific set implied to be cursed for mocking the gods (which is perfectly in-character) from an obscure magic item supplement.
• Soup of Poverty: The tiefling refugees in the Druid Grove have a pot of gruel on the boil. Despite the unpleasant description, it's quite healthful.
• Starter Villain: The first chapter has the leaders of a goblin horde operating from an abandoned temple of Selûne: Priestess Gut, Dror Ragzlin, and Minthara. The goblins and the novices that serve them introduce the adventurers to the Cult of the Absolute, who are heavily associated with the mind flayers that abducted them at the start of the game, as well as True Souls, members of the cult that are infected with illithid tadpoles to carry out the Absolute's will. They were also responsible for the raid on Waukeen's Rest that resulted in the abduction of Grand Duke Ulder Ravengard, and are currently on the hunt for Silvanus' Grove as well as survivors of the crashed nautiloid who might be in possession of a powerful weapon. Once the leaders have been dealt with (either by killing them or by siding with Minthara during the raid), your party would later earn a new lead in finding the cure to ceremorphosis by heading out to Moonrise Towers.
• Static Role, Exchangeable Character:
  • If you pick Lae'zel as your playable character, her role in the intro will be replaced by Losiir, a male gith. Other than acting a bit more cordial towards Lae'zel, his lines are mostly identical to the latter's in a standard playthrough. Once the nautiloid crashes, his body is found on the beach.
  • During a Dark Urge playthrough killing or knocking out Alfira before she shows up at your camp causes a female Dragonborn bard named Quill Grootslang to show up instead, with the exact same results.
• Story Branch Favoritism: Of the Origin Characters, the Dark Urge, Lae'zel and Shadowheart seem to be favored the most and their personal quests tie into the main story at some point. If there were characters Larian were to pick as the Player Character, it'd be these three.
  • The former is similar to Gorion's Ward as they are a Bhaalspawn, if not far worse because of their bloody past from Blood in Baldur's Gate and is the only Origin character who can be customized. They also have dialogue that is explicitly unique to them as well as being previously involved with the Cult of the Absolute by being one of its former leaders alongside Gorlash. Also, their personal quest interacts with the main story when they confront Orin, and in the aftermath decide whether they will reject Bhaal or take up their old mantle as his champion.
  • As for Shadowheart, she's in possession of a very important Chekhov's Gun and is the only Origin character with ties to a character from the original Baldur's Gate games. Also, Shadowheart's personal quest involves killing or sparing the Nightsong, which is a major story decision in Act II.
  • Lae'zel is the only companion seen during the intro cinematic (and the only companion seen in a pre-rendered cinematic at all), seen even before you pick an Origin - which means that going into chargen she's the only one of the characters you'll have seen. The final decision of her personal quest line is also the final choice the player makes prior to beginning the final battle To free or kill Orpheus, which ties her into the main plot.
• Story-Driven Invulnerability: Orin will appear to you a few times through Act 3 to taunt you. During and right after these interactions, they are actually present as an NPC you can physically interact with. But any attempt you make of killing them there and then will fail. Hold Person spells will not work, paralyzing them (with the corresponding skill or poison) won't work either, and they will simply teleport away. It's only when you reach the climactic confrontation spot that you can actually kill them.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Anyone with the Speak With Animals spell, obviously. As with corpses, animals can range from redundant sources of info that you may have missed to additional fluff to useful and unique. Unlike the corpses, some of the animals are also extremely funny.
• Super Drowning Skills: All deep water is classified by the game as a "chasm", meaning anyone or anything that gets pushed into it dies instantly. This includes you, even if you're carrying little weight and have high Athletics.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Most cRPGs or action-adventures have your light source be exactly that, just a source of lighting. Here, any light sources that come from fire are also ignition sources. Walk through a storage room filled to the brim with smokepowder or flammable alcohol and they can easily detonate without you trying.
• Take That!:
  • One NPC you can bump into on your adventure is a long-haired, Deadpan Snarker monster hunter from a socially stigmatized culture who goes by the name of Gandrel. Gandrel is a stand-in for Geralt of Rivia, but with none of the same charm or competence, and usually winds up dead at the hands of the party.
  • The game also takes a few potshots at Drizzt Do'Urden.
    • During a part where you're asked various things about your love interest, if you're asked about the person Minthara admires most one of the options is Drizzt, which the properly evil Minthara rejects.
      Minthara: Please. I'd rather spend my nights with a drider than that do-gooder and his pussycat.
    • If you decide to employ the efforts of the Drow prostitutes, you can ask the male to roleplay as Drizzt. Evidently this is a very common request.
• Take Your Time: Zigzagged overall and a bit inconsistently handled.
  • It's mostly subverted—the passage of time will result in some events concluding without the player's intervention. However, some of the story "timers" don't begin until the player encounters them.
  • Critical, life-or-death situations (such as the missing shipment in Act 1 under attack from gnolls) are often being simulated and only give you minutes to act, while others (such as Nere being trapped in a noxious corridor) are tied to a finite number of Long Rests before they advance without you. However, in this latter case, "time passing" specifically means Long Rests, meaning you can potentially play for hours without the story marching on in your absence as long as you don't sleep in camp.
  • Act 3 narratively implies that The Emperor/Orpheus can't shield you from the Elder Brain forever, but it's not clear if there's an upper limit to how many Long Rests you can take or if there's another Non Standard Game Over for exceeding it.
• Taking You with Me:
  • Steel Watchers contain a self-destruct mechanism that they active either when near death or directly upon their destruction, dealing massive damage to everything in a considerable radius around them. They're also mostly melee-focused, meaning you're almost guaranteed to have at least one character in the blast zone when it triggers.
  • A handful of other monsters, most prominently the various flavors of mephits, also explode upon death.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Charismatic characters can resolve a lot of otherwise violent encounters without lifting a finger, up to and including major boss fights. Some particular examples:
  • You can meet a cursed toll collector, Gerrigothe Thorm, who keeps hunting for gold, to pay the toll to cross a river. If you point out to it that there's no one to collect the toll for (or claim the toll's been abolished), Thorm realizes they have no more purpose and explodes.
  • The same area also hosts her brother, a former barkeep who has turned into a morbidly obese undead with a belly that's close to bursting. He keeps asking you for stories while he keeps pouring, and if you keep talking long enough, he'll eventually drink himself to death.
  • The final Thorm sibling can be convinced to let his own nurses cut him to pieces instead of his intended victim by reminding him that Shar's doctrine requires a willing participant. Alternatively, you can make him make his nurses kill each other, and then convince him to kill himself, Moe Greene Special style. This is also the only way to (nominally) save his victim.
  • One of the four gems you need to progress through the Gauntlet of Shar is held by a powerful demon that's bound to Raphael, the cambion that keeps pestering you. You can battle it out with the fiend and his bodyguard, but a sufficiently charming character can actually talk him into killing his guards, then his pet displacer beast, and finally himself. Pulling this one off gets you a lot of funny comments from your party, as well as a close-up of your avatar looking incredibly pleased with themselves.
• Take Up My Sword: In the launch day trailer, Jaheira refers to this trope, expressing that heroes like her hope that someone else will pick up where they left off when their time comes.
• Test of Pain: Inside the abandoned temple of Selûne, you can stumble upon a worshiper of Loviatar, the goddess of pain. Upon meeting him, he would soon encourage you to alleviate your suffering by undergoing the Rite of Loviatar, which involves enduring a lot of beating. Should you perform this rite correctly by reveling in the pain that is being inflicted upon you, the man will be impressed by your fortitude and grant you Loviatar's blessing in the form of a permanent status buff.
• Timed Mission:
  • Right in the final stretch of the tutorial mission, the game gives you a hard limit of 12 turns to reach the nautiloid's helm before the ship crashes. After three turns, two powerful cambions spawn behind you, giving you even more of an incentive to leg it as quickly as possible.
  • Once you reach Grymforge, you have to rescue True Soul Nere and his captive slaves within 2 long rests. Take too long and Nere will die, as will the slaves. The duergars will leave with the rest of the svirfneblin slaves, preventing their rescue. Annoyingly the game does not make it clear that there's an actual time limit on this one (as opposed to the rest of the game where stuff is narratively described as urgent but you have all the time in the world) until you're about to take your 2nd long rest.
  • When assaulting the Iron Throne, you have 8 turns to get everyone back in the submarine. There's infinitely respawning enemies, and you have multiple targets to rescue including several captive gnomes, Wyll's father, and Omeluum. It takes the prisoners 2 to 3 turns at full dash to reach the sub once freed (Except Omeluum who can teleport himself and a passenger there). Meaning you realistically have 4-5 turns to reach each hostage, and then make your escape with them, all the while stopping the guards from killing them. If Wyll accepted to renew his pact with Mizora, she will provide help. But if he turned her down she will try to ambush his father as he leaves his cell, adding further time pressure. Spells, scrolls and potions of haste, invisibility, misty steps and dimension door are a huge help.
  • The rescue mission at Waukeen's Rest doesn't have an on-screen timer, but the fire will steadily spread throughout the building, killing the characters you're supposed to save if you take too long figuring out how to reach them.
  • Once you arrive at the Baldur's Gate Lower City in Act 3, you'll be informed that Counsellor Florick will be executed in five dawns (long rests), provided that you rescued her from the fire at Waukeen's Rest in Act 1. On the fourth dawn, another notification will pop up to remind you of the deadline should you wish to rescue her. The timer starts when you read one of the execution notices however so if you do not do so and trigger the quest, you basically have as long as you'd want.
• Tragic Monster: Numerous, especially in Act 2.
  • All the shadow enemies seen in the Shadow-Cursed Lands were once normal people, whose memories you can see by interacting with their remains.
  • Malus Thorm's nurses used to run a normal and compassionate hospital/asylum before being turned undead; some, like Sister Lidwin, are still trying and failing to help patients.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The pre-release reveal of the Dark Urge origin depicted them standing inside of a symbol of Bhaal. Sure enough, the Dark Urge is an amnesiac Bhaalspawn.
  • That Minsc and Jaheira are recurring characters was explicitly revealed in the official launch trailer.
• Turn-Based Combat: The game adopts such a system, a first for the series, though not unfamiliar for Larian Studios, who used turn-based combat for Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel. It's also closer to the tabletop D&D experience than the Real-Time with Pause gameplay seen in previous Baldur's Gate games.
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • A lighthearted and humorous example. If you destroy the goblin leadership all of the tieflings are extremely grateful... except for one kid who says he hates you because now it means he doesn't have to train in swordfighting anymore.
  • Played more seriously with Mayrina after killing Auntie Ethel, where she reveals that she made a deal with the hag to bring her dead husband back to life in exchange for giving Ethel her unborn child. Only when you persuaded her of the hag's true intentions (which you can learn by casting speak with dead on Ethel) would she come to regret her decision and thank you kindly for rescuing her.
  • Rescuing the drow petrified by the spectator in the Underdark results in them backstabbing the party which might be unsurprising given the habits of Lolth-sworn. That is, unless you converse with them as a female drow and convince them to stand down and hand over their memory shard to you. Or if their leader (The wizard among the group) dies during the battle with the spectator (which as a Wizard he's likely to do, as the Spectator can one shot him). At which point the rest of the Drow are just happy to be both freed and be rid of their hated leader.
• Unique Enemy: Although not strictly unique, there are quite a few enemy types that are only encountered in a single small area in limited numbers. Examples include a flock of harpies in Act I, meenlocks in Act II, a few minotaurs and Bladed Horrors in the Underdark, or a group of dinosaurs in Act III.
• Unusual User Interface: Much of the more complex workings of the mind flayer ship are seemingly psionic, but the ship's Interdimensional Travel Device is a nest of writhing tentacles; connecting any two of them seems to set a course, and 'strumming' them activates the shift between planes.
• Unwinnable by Mistake:
  • Some quests require you to read a note to progress. If you destroyed that note with a stray fireball or a similar AoE attack, continuing the quest may be possible by stumbling upon the next step accidentally, but it may also lock you out completely.
  • Some characters are tied to specific events or other characters/monsters for no discernible reason and missing those events or a random monster might lock you out of certain events. A rather unusual example is the Strange Ox in Act 1. Killing it in Act 1 will lock you out of any events or dialogue with it later which is an expected outcome of that decision. But what you won't expect is that it will also make Dammon not appear at Last Light in Act 2. Dammon has no connection to the Strange Ox and won't even have anything to do with it in Act 3 if they both survive until then, but if you kill the Ox in Act 1 then you can kiss your romance with Karlach goodbye since you can now not advance her sidequest before Act 3 and she will dump you thinking you "lost interest".
• Vampire Procreation Limit: Astarion explains that being non-fatally bitten by a vampire turns you into a "vampire spawn"; they have some of the abilities and traits of a full vampire, but are nowhere near as powerful and are under the thrall of their creator. If they were to drink the blood of their creator they would become a full vampire themselves, but as Astarion points out, most vampires are competitive and power-hungry, so there's not much motive for them to willingly elevate a thrall into a potential rival.
• Video Game Caring Potential: You can recruit a dog to your camp, and not only can you pet it, you can even play fetch with it!
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Boy howdy, can you be a monster of a Villain Protagonist in this game.
  • If you save Auntie Ethel from the two men accosting her during your first encounter with her, you can later tell the little girl she's 'babysitting' to her face that nobody is coming to save her, because you killed the only people who knew where she was.
  • It's entirely possible to kill Halsin in the Goblin Camp, for no other reason than because you thought it would be funny to show goblin children the right kinds of stones to throw at the poor, caged bear.
  • Wanna help goblins slaughter a camp full of refugees, including children? You can do that.
  • Instead of helping a bard write a song for her late teacher, you can smash her lute instead.
  • Wanna engage in some good, old-fashioned Cold-Blooded Torture of a prisoner at that same Goblin Camp? You can do that.
  • Wanna egg a somewhat power-mad de facto Druid leader into horribly murdering a Tiefling child whose biggest sin was thievery after a misguided attempt to help her mother? You can do that.
  • Wanna stand by and do nothing, or even help, as a bunch of gnomes who were all Made a Slave are slaughtered by an Ungrateful Bastard for digging him out of a cave-in too slowly? You can do that, too.
  • Every companion has one or more points where you can leave them to be Killed Off for Real, some of them involving particularly soul crushing betrayals of their trust in you. Their Relationship Values being high or even being your romanced partner doesn't remove these options either, if you really want to kick the dog.
  • One of the most heinous options in the game in a lot of players' eyes is to adopt Scratch and later return him to his abusive owner, who promptly locks him in a cage.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: There is absolutely nothing stopping you from turning nudity on in the settings, stripping yourself and all of your party members down, and cavorting about the Sword Coast as a band of nudist murderhobos. It's even mechanically encouraged to a certain degree if your gameplay tastes lean this direction; since every party member has two sets of clothes, one for adventuring and one for casual wear at camp, that you can toggle between being visible as their active set, you can go streaking throughout the entire game without tanking your Armor Class into the dirt or losing out on any of the abilities and bonuses from your enchanted gear.
• Villain Song: "Raphael's Final Act".
• Visual Title Drop: When the nautiloid shifts into the middle of a Blood War battle in the introductory cutscene, it's greeted by three floating towers/ships, the same sharp, sweeping shape as the III in Baldur's Gate III. They're apparently a kind of troop carrier for the devils, as swarms of imps pour out and attack the new arrival.
• Vocal Dissonance:
  • In Early Access, you can equip a traditionally male voice on a female character or vice versa when customizing the protagonist. The full release takes this even further, as the gender, voice, and genitals options are all entirely disconnected from each other.
  • Disturbingly, a hidden conversation you can potentially have with a Giant Spider (you need the Speak with Animals spell) gives the hideous and chittering creature the sultry voice of a Scottish woman.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • The encounter with the "Paladins of Tyr" as part of Karlach's recruitment tends to be the first major combat hurdle players tend to hit. The lead "paladin", Anders, in particular tends to be a huge pain in the ass. He has decent AC due to his armor and can cast Shield of Faith to add to that. He also hits like a freight train at this level and he's level 5, which means he gets two attacks and most players at this point of the game will still be level 3 or 4. It's easy for him to quickly mow down a party member at least once per turn. Also he has back up and they aren't slouches either. Time to learn how to best use your spells and the environment to your advantage or else you'll get smote again and again.
  • Drog Ragzlin is one of the three goblin bosses that you have to kill as part of the "Save the Grove" questline and he's easily the hardest. He's surrounded by goblins and Absolute cultists which means the action economy is in his favor. Also, similar to Anders above, he's level 5 which means he has an extra attack as part of his action, as well as tadpole powers such as Repulsor which can knock you and your allies down into the spider pit directly in front of him or the Bottomless Pit in the back corner of his room which will lead to an instant death. Finally there aren't many dialogue options that will make the encounter much easier, you're likely just going to have to kill him. Once again, learning how to best use your spells, abilities and terrain are your best hope of winning as trying to brute force your way through is very difficult.
• We Buy Anything: All non-hostile NPCs will buy literally anything not flagged as story progression (an orange border), including rotten produce, personal letters with no utility beyond the material they're printed on, and brains in a jar, though merchants are usually the only ones with enough gold to pay for it.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: If the companions die in battle, it's only a minor problem that can be solved usually with a Scroll of Resurrection or coughing up some gold for Withers. If the protagonist dies in battle, you get a Game Over screen regardless of the state of the rest of your party.
• We Need a Distraction: Many emergent gameplay examples per Larian's Immersive Sim tendencies:
  • The entire premise of Minor Illusion is that people will investigate it, drawing them from their usual routines.
  • Cat familiars, and cat-shifted Druids, can draw attention with a "Meow!" ability.
  • NPCs will gather around a performing character, provided the character is proficient in the instrument (otherwise they just swear at and threaten you).
  • You can swap control to another character while in a dialogue, meaning one character can keep an NPC busy through conversation while another gets up to hijinks.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: A cross-media example. The Legends of Baldur's Gate comics, which Minsc more-or-less states are canon to the game, have Minsc joining a group of True Companions with whom he has numerous adventures with. Come this game, however, they're nowhere to be found and Minsc makes no mention of any old friends outside of Jaheira.
• What the Hell, Hero?: If you sided with Minthara and her goblin army during the raid on Silvanus' Grove, even some of your more evil companions won't be overjoyed, to say nothing of the more righteous ones. Wyll will cut ties with you no matter what (if he didn't already turn on you by being in your party when you made the decision), and so will Karlach, and Gale will also deliver a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to you for taking part in the massacre of refugees and druids and you have to clear a skill check to convince him to stay. Shadowheart is also noticeably torn up about it, causing her to drown her sorrows, and if you free Minthara from the Absolute's influence and properly recruit her in Act 2, even she will call you out by noting that her actions at the time were influenced by the Absolute, while yours were not.
• Wizards from Outer Space: The war between the githyanki and the illithids is essentially two warring alien factions (from other planes rather than space) in a high-fantasy setting, with the appropriate technology. While the mind flayers have Organic Technology starships and stasis pods and abduct people, the githyanki have datapad-like communicators and holographic projectors ("planecasters"). Both use psychic powers.
• Womb Level: Any illithid lair looks like one due to their copious use of Organic Technology.
• Wooden Stake: Following the reveal that Astarion is a vampire, you immediately pick up a stick and break it in two to form a stake. Astarion will initially knock it out of your hands, but you have several opportunities during the conversation to use the stake, killing him if you do.
• The Worf Barrage: Much is made of Ketheric's invincibility. When the player finally meets him, his introductory cutscene has him taking a spear to the chest and an axe to the neck, and nonchalantly shrugging them off.
• Would Hurt a Child: Children are not safe in this game.
  • The archdruid Kagha can become responsible for the death of the tiefling child Arabella, as Kagha's pet snake bites Arabella's leg when she tries to flee. The child dies (almost) instantly.
  • While the druid Halsin is held in a goblin prison in his bear form, two goblin children torture him by throwing rocks at him through the bars. When you try to rescue him, in addition to the goblin guards, the children are also marked as hostile. Yes, you can kill them. And if you don't, Halsin probably will. (If you don't kill them and Halsin doesn't get them, they run for reinforcements.)
  • Auntie Ethel straight up eats a child in Act 3 and you need to take specific steps to save her. If you don't and kill Ethel anyway, the child will die.
  • In Act 3 an orphan named Yenna can join your camp. Since the murderous shapeshifter, Orin, is on the loose then Lae'zel will claim she saw Orin change into Yenna and then hold her at knife point. If you don't talk Lae'zel down or even give the order yourself, Lae'zel will cut her throat and then realize that Yenna wasn't Orin.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One:
  • You can't get rid of the parasite during Act 1, despite meeting several people who should be able to fix you. Instead, you discover that your parasite has been altered by powerful magic, which is why you haven't turned, but also why nobody can get it out.
  • While you do succeed in taking out Ketheric and potentially reversing the Shadow curse in Act 2, you cannot stop the Absolute armies from launching their invasion, or from Duke Ravengard getting brainwashed into working for Gortash. By the time you make it to Baldur's Gate, Gortash is already putting the finishing touches on his coronation, and if you try to put a stop to it the way Gorion's Ward did for Sarevok in the first game, it will end very poorly for you.
• Your Days Are Numbered:
  • The player character and their companions have been infected with illithid tadpoles, meaning that they are on the road to becoming mind flayers themselves unless something is done to stop the process. However, after the illithid ship and its mind flayer masters were destroyed, the tadpoles seem to have gone dormant. It's implied that some outside force is slowing the process, possibly in the form of a new god calling itself the Absolute.
  • Karlach's heart was replaced with an infernal engine which is too hot to function in the Material Plane; it's slowly melting and the only way it can properly function is to return to Avernus. Karlach is perfectly fine with leaving it to melt as it means she dies free.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • If you help the mind flayer defeat the cambion commander in the tutorial level, it'll declare that you're no longer needed and turn hostile. Depending on how much health it has left after its fight against the cambion, this might well end poorly for your party.
  • The goblins and Minthara have no intention of letting you live if you help them in raiding Silvanus's grove. While Minthara herself can be reasoned with by clearing a skill check (made easier if you romanced her) the rest of the goblin camp will become hostile no matter what.
  • A combination of this and They Know Too Much results in Queen Vlaakith ordering your party's death the moment they return from the Astral Prism at the tail-end of Act I.
• You Have Researched Breathing: In 5e, one of the main actions available to all characters is "Dodge," which confers disadvantage on enemy attack rolls until your next turn. In the game, the only characters who can dodge are the ones who take a feat to do so, or who have a specific class ability that enables it.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: When one of the githyanki's dragon rips off the nautiloid's tentacle, the mind flayer at the helm grasps his arm, suggesting that it felt the attack. The psionic illithids presumably control the ship mostly through their Psychic Powers.

---

It's party time.