Baldur’s Gate 3 Understands One Tabletop Element Better Than Most D&D Games

Highlights

• Baldur’s Gate 3 faithfully adapts D&D mechanics, while breaking conventions to enhance gameplay experience.
• The visible d20 rolls in BG3 capture the essence of tabletop dice rolling, adding excitement and immersion.
• Offering various dice skins, Baldur’s Gate 3 appeals to dice enthusiasts, suggesting future D&D games can explore similar concepts.

Though Baldur’s Gate 3 brings a lot of its own ideas to the table, the game still borrows its broad system and many of its mechanics from D&D 5e. However, there’s one aspect of D&D in particular that Baldur’s Gate 3 does better than other videogame adaptations of the tabletop system.

Baldur’s Gate 3 captures the spirit of D&D not only with an epic story interwoven with some left-field hijinks, but with its mechanics. The game adapts the ruleset of D&D 5e in a way that’s faithful but willing to break with convention. It makes some sweeping changes to spellcasting, rest mechanics, and potion rules. Its gameplay is a testament to how a beloved TTRPG should be adapted into a videogame, taking what works and changing what doesn’t work for the medium.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Gets The Magic Of Dice Right

Where the game does a lot of justice to D&D is in its skill checks—where visible d20 rolls can be seen. Baldur’s Gate 3‘s dice rolls do a lot to adapt a D&D base into a video game, bringing one of the TTRPG medium’s hallmarks to the forefront. Making these dice rolls visible to the player presents them as more than just an RNG calculation, and rightfully so; dice are so pivotal to TTRPG systems that they envelop multiple sub-hobbies into themselves. The math, jargon, and mechanics surrounding them are at the bedrock of D&D and its sister games.

The Tangibility Of Dice In Baldur’s Gate 3 Is A Huge Asset

The sound of rolling a d20 in Baldur’s Gate 3 is almost resonant of a slot machine, and it’s linked to a prolonged animation that adds proficiency/ability bonuses with a flourish. It’s a bit more fantastical in presentation than something like the dice roller on D&DBeyond, but it nonetheless captures the fun of rolling dice in a TTRPG. Its sound design and presentation really invoke the anticipation of crowding around a die roll to see the result, as well as the satisfaction of hearing the d20 tumble about. The extended animation is well suited to the format of skill checks, giving them an air of importance when compared to other rolls that are handled automatically.

Making skill checks a visible dice roll also comes with the advantage of letting players visualize the degree to which they’ve failed or succeeded a task. This can be done with automatic rolls too, but the immediacy of the die roll in BG3 provokes far more satisfaction (or schadenfreude, if a roll is failed). It also gives the players a chance to more eagerly witness critical successes and fails, which Baldur’s Gate 3 makes use of in its skill checks. This more readily recreates the excitement a Nat 20 or Nat 1 produces at the table.

Dice Skins Are Perfect For Dice Goblins

The different dice skins of Baldur’s Gate 3 are another way the game captures the fun of dice. The many different dice available, from simple plastic sets to elaborate metal polyhedra, are a favorite obsession of many players and DMs. Sprawling cottage industries have formed not only over different dice, but accessories like dice trays, dice boxes, dice towers, dice jails, and more. Having an assortment of dice skins in Baldur’s Gate 3 is a fun way to appeal to dice fanatics everywhere.

Future D&D Games Can Go Further

The formatting of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s skill checks would make doing every die roll manually slow the game down. However, it would be great to see future D&D games delve more into this concept. Many players would love to see the fun of rolling a handful of d6s for Fireball damage translated into a video game.