Game Guides
Baldur's Gate 3 · Beginner Guides. Character creation, combat, resting, spells and other core systems. Browse Baldur’s Gate 3 Difficulty Guide: Explorer, Balanced, Tactician, Honour and Custom, Baldur’s Gate 3 Long Rest Guide: Short Rests, Camp Supplies and Time-Sensitive Quests, Baldur’s Gate 3 Combat Guide: Actions, Reactions, Advantage and Positioning, with requirements, routes and walkthrough steps.
Pick Balanced for a first run, Explorer if combat is blocking the story, Tactician for a harder fight, and Honour only when you want a different ruleset with a single save and boss Legendary Actions. BG3 ships with Explorer, Balanced, Tactician, Honour and Custom. Explorer through Tactician share the standard ruleset with different tuning.
Rest whenever the party is out of spell slots and Short Rests — there is no universal tadpole countdown punishing you for resting. BG3 is built around resource cycles: Fighters want Action Surge back, Warlocks want pact slots, Clerics and Druids want class resources, full casters want spell slots, and the party wants hit points. Long Rest is the reset that starts the next cycle; Short Rest is the cheaper recovery inside that cycle.
The short version: most characters begin a turn with one Action, one Bonus Action, movement and one Reaction resource. Advantage means rolling two d20s and keeping the higher; high ground is +2 to the attack roll, not Advantage; concentration holds one spell and breaks on a failed Constitution save (DC 10 or half the damage taken, whichever is higher). The fight is decided by how efficiently both sides turn those resources into useful effects.
Every character has 12 total class levels. Multiclassing simply lets those 12 levels belong to more than one class. A 10/2 character did not gain two extra levels — it gave up levels 11 and 12 of the first class to buy levels 1 and 2 of the second.
Take Alert first if you want one feat that helps almost every build; take Great Weapon Master or Sharpshooter only when your build can offset the -5 attack penalty; take Tavern Brawler only for unarmed, improvised-weapon and throw attacks. BG3 feats are powerful because you get very few of them: most classes earn a feat at class levels 4, 8 and 12, Fighter adds one at Fighter 6 and Rogue adds one at Rogue 10.
BG3 is not a game where one class dominates every problem. Bard can own dialogue and skills while still controlling fights. Fighter turns weapon combat into a reliable machine. Sorcerer can compress an absurd amount of spell impact into one turn. Cleric can keep a messy party alive while still dealing real damage.
Start with the picks, not the catalogue: Wood Elf, Githyanki, Half-Orc, Halfling, Duergar and Gnome are the strongest problem-solvers, each for a different job — Wood Elf is the fastest at 10.5 m, while the short races move at 7.5 m. Every race assigns +2 to one ability and +1 to another, so you are not choosing a race to unlock the correct Strength or Charisma bonus.
The character creator throws race, class, background, abilities, skills and Origin identity at you before you have played a single real combat round. The important trick is separating story decisions from mechanical decisions.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is generous with solutions but ruthless about habits. New players often blame their class when the real problem is simpler: they end turns with resources unused, split damage across four enemies, refuse to rest, or walk into a fight from the worst possible angle.
Baldur’s Gate 3 still has 12 playable classes and a total level cap of 12. Patch 8 added one subclass to each class, which is why pre-2025 class lists are now structurally incomplete even when the old advice is still good.