Baldur's Gate Basic Gameplay Guide (no spoilers)

This is a guide explaining the very basics of the mechanics of Baldur's Gate, without providing any recommendations on classes or party builds, and absolutely no details of maps or the wider story. It is intended to be for wholly new players in lieu of a practical tutorial and will be of no worth whatsoever to a seasoned expert. Where possible the guide intends to simplify, rather than elaborate.

What is Baldur's Gate?

Baldur's Gate is a strategic and tactical rpg that blends old-school Dungeons and Dragons mechanics with real-time strategy games of the period.

Baldur's Gate is strategic in that you will need to arrange and equip your party for the dangers ahead before facing them. To fail to prepare is to prepare to fail.

Baldur's Gate is tactical in that once combat starts it is not - as may first appear - simply a case of putting everyone into the melee and waiting until the AI has resolved this.

This guide aims to cover, very simply, the basic mechanics you will need to know to give yourself a fighting chance in the Sword Coast.

1. Party AI

Baldur's Gate comes with a party AI system, which in their infinite wisdom Beamdog have chosen to expand. Party AI means that your computer will make decision on your behalf, based on some very simple coding algorithms.

I would be clear on this. No matter how badly you have died, no matter how unfamiliar you are with the systems, no matter how much the obtuse mechanics confuse you - you are better than the AI, and we need to reduce its input. I believe in your capability so much, that even as a person accessing a guide for a new players I have made giving you control the very first thing on the tutorial list.

There are two ways to take control.

1. You can click on the button marked "party AI" in the bottom right of the main screen when you are moving around the map. This is a toggle, and can be turned on and off.

2. If you go to your "Character" page (by clicking on the icon on the left of the screen) you can then go to "Customize" and then "Scripts." You will then be able to select from the scripts you want your characters to use when party AI is on. If you do want to use AI then you would choose this here. I would encourage players to bear in mind the KISS rule - "Keep it Simple, Stupid." Party AI should only be used for trash fights. For anything more challenging, turn it off.

The scripts mentioned in point two have to be reviewed whenever a new character joins the party.

If things aren't going to plan, or if your controls at any point seem unresponsive, or if at any point you find yourself saying "What are you doing!? I told you to..." then party AI is on.


The next two sections are going to deal with the two most basic numbers you will deal with in Baldur's Gate: Your chance to hit, and your chance to be hit.

2. Hitting Things

2a. THAC0.

Previously accessible only from the character screen, one of the few benefits of the enhanced editions is that you can now see this in full view on your inventory screen.

Thac0 is your chance to hit with the equipped weapon (or the highlighted weapon if you read the "New" column). It literally stands for;

To Hit Armour Class 0.

The purpose of this guide is to simplify these mechanics, so let me be very clear;

The lower your THAC0 the better.

Failing to take any action available that lowers THAC0 is a choice of serious consequence in Baldur's Gate 1 (and much of Baldur's Gate 2).

So how do we get it low?

2b. Proficiencies

Lets get to basics:

1. In Baldur's Gate we focus on individual types of weapon. E.g. Short swords, quarterstaves, hammers.
2. Classes more inclined towards hitting things with weapons are better at hitting things with weapons. A fighter has much more capacity to be good at hitting something with his chosen weapon than a mage.

With this in mind, the rule is that you should be equipping your characters with weapons that they hold proficiency points in, and that the more proficiency points, the better they are at hitting with that weapon.

You can check proficiency points by selecting a character and then going to the "Character" screen from the tabs on the left of the screen. In the window that starts with their level and their experience you can scroll down and eventually (after a lot of obtuse information) you will reach their proficiency points. Don't worry about what each star next to a weapon means at this stage, just that the more stars, the better they are with the weapon. You can then choose the weapons a character should be using based on this.

You should be doing this each time you gain a new party member, and if you gain a nice new magical weapon.

When it comes to those proficiency points, fighters can get up to five (!!!), some combat specialists and multi-classes can get up to two, and most others get one. If a character is not proficient with a weapon, broadly speaking, don't use it. There are few exceptions to this rule.

3. Not Getting Hit by Stuff

3a, Armour Class

Armour class (henceforth AC) is a measure of how hard it is for the opponent to inflict a wounding blow on you.

AC is better, the lower it is (and it falls below zero).

You may well at this stage be querying why AC and THAC0 are both better when lower, and that certainly things would be more logical if these numbers were greater. All I can say is that the 1980s (from which Baldur's Gate takes many D&D mechanics) were a complicated decade, and that things like THAC0 and percentage calculations in combat seemed like a good idea at the time. But I digress....

In general, the lower the AC the better. In the cases of certain fighter characters who specialise in two handed swords, spears, quarterstaves, halberds, bows or crossbows, there is the shield trade-off. A two-handed sword does more damage than a longsword and a medium shield, but a medium shield gives a boost to AC that prevents a person getting hit.

You are free to select any party you want, and this guide is not here to replace experimentation and finding what works for you. However, I would suggest that for most beginners to the series if no-one in the party has a shield then you're probably on course for a rough ride. Many parties will run with two shield users, a few three and some people even more! But tanking without a shield is generally tough, so at least one person should be the shield guy.

3b. Formation and Party Arrangement

On the right-hand side of the screen you will have the portraits of your party members.

When you have more than one party member selected, the quick actions bar at the bottom of the screen will display the formations you can select for your party to move in.

Unless you are in a situation that specifically requires a different approach, you want the most armoured characters to be at the front, and the least armoured characters to be at the back.

In the main screen you can right-click-and-drag portraits so that the party members are arranged in this fashion.

The "face" of the group (this doesn't have to be the character you created - you can choose anyone else and will usually want the person with the most Charisma) should be in the first slot. If that person happens to be decked out in heavy armour with a shield - great! If on the other hand your charismatic hero is made of paper and wears a big target with "stab here" written in the middle, there are still options. Firstly, you can manually put them to the front when you are back in civilization, or you can choose a formation that does not place the face at the front of the formation. The face is represented by the slightly larger circle. Check the formations at the bottom of the screen.

4. Real-time Combat 1: Tanking

In the post-mmo world, or in tabletop where the DM may have various different ways of calculating who hits whom, the aggro system in Baldur's Gate can seem ludicrously simple. So here it is - the keys to the Lamborghini...

Monsters will predominantly aggro and attack the creature closest to them.

What this means in the first instance, is that if the first thing those five bandit archers see is your mage, your mage is going to have a split second to consider whether or not they took out an appropriate funeral plan. This is why formation matters. You want the first party member the enemy sees to be the party member who is most defensible.

However, we can also use this to our advantage in other ways.

If a party member receives enemy attention and we do not want this, we can move that party member away from the enemies and bring a more tanky character between them. Initially the enemies will continue to chase the first party member, but if we run away for long enough and keep the second party member moving so that they are closer, then eventually the aggro will shift to the second party member.

With this in mind, for most combat you will want to be zoomed in. Beamdog, again in their infinite wisdom, increased the scroll capacity so that we can watch combat unfold from the international space station. Characters in Baldur's gate will cast their attack animations in the direction that the enemy in question is in. So if that Gnoll is swinging his halberd towards your mage rather than your fighter, you don't have to wait until you're reading the mage's obituary for you to remove them from combat and try to get aggro with someone else.

5. Combat Controls and Pausing

Let me introduce our penultimate rule for success in Baldur's Gate.

The spacebar has been naughty and deserves to be punished.

Hitting the spacebar pauses the game. Every time the game is paused you can contemplate the situation, assign actions, and take a breather. When the game is paused you have an advantage. Use it.

When you assign an action - and this is particularly important when paused - attack is considered a continuous action. This means that you don't have to keep clicking. Just click an enemy once and the character will continue to wail on that enemy until;

1. The enemy dies
2. Your character dies
3. You tell your character to do something else

That something else will almost always be a single action. Let's take a standard situation. A fighter is toe-to-toe with a Hobgoblin, but has taken a few hits and needs to swig a potion. This looks something like this:

1. We notice the fighter is low on health, so we spank the spacebar to pause the game.
2. With the game paused, we can either go into the inventory, right click on the potion and select "drink potion" or if we have the potion in our quick bar slot, we can simply click on this.
3. Once we have done so, we can check the character portrait in the main battle screen. We should now be able to see a picture of the potion in the bottom right of that character's portrait. This signifies that their next action will be to drink the potion - but they have not done so yet.
4. We can now unpause the game and wait for the fighter to drink the potion. There are three notifications of this. The potion picture will disappear from the character's portrait, the battle log will display "[Name]: Gulp!" and a brief visual effect will display over our fighter's body on the map.
5. We now give the spacebar another willing slap.
6. With the potion drunk, we can click again on the Hobgoblin to attack it. This causes a picture of the fighter's weapon to appear in the corner of his portrait, signifying that he is now attacking as his ongoing action.
7. We unpause, and prepare to smote the Hobgoblin's ruin down on the mountain side. Or roll badly and spend some quality time with the main menu.

6. Feedback, Thievery and the Battle Log

6a. Thievery

When you have your thief selected, the quick bar will have a few icons on it that are unavailable for extra characters.

Find traps (passive) - whilst active searches for traps in the area. Traps do not appear immediately even if the character's skill is high enough, so tread lightly taskmaster.

Thievery (active) - If your thief needs to do something thiefy this is how. This active icon is contextual and is responsible for;

1. When on a person - pick pockets
2. When on a locked door/container - pick lock
3. When on a trap - disarm the trap.

Hide in the Shadows (passive) - click here and your thief will attempt to stealth around the enemies and go unnoticed. Can be useful for scouting, provided that your thief is good enough at it. A hidden thief will have their character model go translucent and grey. If the log at any point says "Hide in the Shadows failed" then you have a very short period of time to get out of there!

6b. Auto-pause

If you go into the gameplay settings, you can choose to activate the auto-pause system. This basically means that the game pauses whenever a set event happens. It's really up to the individual, but the more helpful ones would be;

1. Enemy sighted - the game will automatically pause whenever your party spots an enemy. Helpful if you're checking a message on your phone while an Ankheg spawns next to your thief.
2. Target defeated - the game pauses whenever a character kills something, so you can direct them to attack something else and not stand around with their finger up their arse whilst battle rages around them.
3. Weapon unusable - With the iron shortage, sometimes basic melee weapons in Baldur's Gate break, and ranged weapons run out of ammo. This pauses when this happens. Although we established earlier that we do not wish to be using weapons we are not proficient in, unless you are a monk you definitely don't want to be punching creatures. If any of your character portraits have a fist in the corner, get a weapon equipped asap!

6c. The Combat Log

The combat log gives you the description of what happens damage-wise, can be expanded by the button on its right-hand side, and in the settings menu can be included to show you every dice roll. Definitely a tool of the skilled player, and as you progress you should be tying up what is happening on the screen with what is happening in the log.

7. Save often!!!

Baldur's gate was part of the silver age of rpg games in the later nineties and early 2000's, but in keeping with those games it can be a harsh mistress. A lot rests on dice-rolls and while RNGsus giveth he also taketh away.

A relatively standard battle could involve the enemy cleric casting "Hold Person." In a normal case, this might incapacitate a party member, leading to a much harder fight as you stuggle to keep this defenseless person alive. However it can happen that due to positioning the spell also effects the four party members around the target, who all fail their saves. That's almost certainly a full-party wipe.

Save often and you will not be discouraged by death, it will simply be a part of the learning process. Save infrequently and it is easy to be disheartened when all the progress of the last hour is lost in a single arrow.

I would also encourage you to rotate a main save (I personally rotate over 3) just so you can revert back to an earlier point if something really awkward happens.

Above all, have fun and good luck!

Kjaa

[vyrdalak_90]

Good afternoon. There was a question about improved AI and spells. If improved AI is enabled, the mage will automatically cast some protective spells after resting. But what’s strange is that each companion-magician reads something different. So Xan, who only reads stone skin, and for example Edwin, likes to hang himself with shields, or Nira casts armor on herself. Are there any guides on this topic (even if they are in English) and a list of spells that can be automatically cast after rest for improved AI?

[><=-- = =]

Beamdog, again in their infinite wisdom, increased the scroll capacity so that we can watch combat unfold from the international space station.

lmao -- and thank you for the guide

[[GWJ] Hrdina]

Thanks, I've only just started into BG1 and found this useful.

[Wayward Polaris]

Thank you for taking to time to make this guide much appreciated!

[brickviking]

Nice work, and hopefully a good summary for a total BG:EE beginner. I haven't ever played BG, and I've only just picked it up - twenty years or more after it was released initially. Weirdly enough, I had received NWN quite a long time ago, the spiritual successor to BG. Again, I haven't played much of that, though I do like games like Skyrim, Morrowind and KOA:R.

[Lvl39MagicUser]

Great guide! I used to it to reacquaint myself with the rules. I know a lot of you wondering "Why is AC and Thac0 suppose to be lower?" The reason the rules are so complicated is because it made you by the books. If anyone could use the rules the books would be pointless. Take 3rd/3.5/pathfinder for example. That rule set basically uses a D20 to decide everything. Thats also why all those editions were open licensed (or similar to) because they knew that anyone could use those rules for anything. Thats what pathfinder did and it keeps the spirit of 3rd edition (my favorite) alive today.

[Bobliobongolongogle]

Thank you for the guide. I loved Dragon Age: Origins and wanted to try something similar. Can't wait to put it to use!

[Itharus]

Good basic run down.

[OnceUponATime]

A strategy I often use to break up mobs is hit and run. Have an archer attack someone at the edge of the mob and then retreat behind your line of melee fighters. Usually only one or two of the enemies will follow and they'll often try to attack the archer, even though your fighters are in the way.

Definitely agree with saving regularly. There's no shame in reloading if things go south. This is especially true when fight enemy spell casters, since there's more luck in magically battles.

[Karandras]

I am in same situation of comment below, I will try with this in mind.