Soon Baldur’s Gate 3 will be a new role-playing game in which you can create and design your own character. Developer Larian gives you a lot of freedom, but uses a rule that fans of Dungeons & Dragons find problematic.
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Why can this become a problem? Due to the race-specific characteristics, classic archetypes have emerged in the past. Dwarves were dedicated paladins or clerics, elves often mages or druids.
Appropriate bonuses to Intelligence, Charisma, or Willpower along with special abilities such as saves against effects, darkvision, or even spells bestowed by race, ensured a degree of harmony between class and race.
But now in Baldur’s Gate 3 you can freely decide which attribute you get a bonus for, as a screenshot reveals (via PCGamesN). You get +2 on one attribute, +1 on another. This suddenly makes classes like halfling barbarians or half-orc rogues “playable” with no downside.
In particular, the racial bonus Luck of the Halflings, through which you can hardly have critical failures, is enormously strong for classes such as barbarians. Previously, the stat bonuses and penalties meant that halfling barbarians weren’t really useful.
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The problem with this is that the bonuses of certain races are chosen in such a way that certain classes become unattractive to them because they would otherwise be too strong. One would have to give up strength in favor of other talents. That is no longer the case.
As YouTuber Old Man McLoyf explains with an example, there is a turtle race that has absurdly high levels of natural armor (via YouTube). This would be exciting for non-armoured mages. However, the people inherently have a bonus to strength and constitution – both of which magicians only need to a limited extent.
Now the people could easily be played with intelligence and wisdom, become the perfect mage and you have such a broken build. Something Baldur’s Gate 3 already gives you quite a few tools to do.
The rule is actually optional and comes from the additional volume “Tasha’s Cauldron with Everything”. In the meantime, however, the rule has been officially adopted, also by Larian, in order to grant maximum freedom.
The developers have already shown that this is the goal with the freely adjustable genitals and the many romance options. Here, however, the decision has an influence on the gameplay, since you can make many situations much easier for yourself.
The optional rule was already controversial among D&D fans at the time, simply because it can break the imagination and imagination that players have of races. For you this means at least: if you want to play a gnome warrior or an elven warlock, nothing stands in your way, except maybe the limited level:
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