Baldur's Gate 3 Character Creation Guide (Ability Points)

welcome back in today's video we're going to go over assigning ability points for your character and character creation this is perhaps one of the most interesting things to learn and understand in order to have a successful play through first i want to give a quick shout out to two recent channel patrons bugsy and caleb thank you guys so much everybody else who became a channel member or a patron recently i've got you all written down i just have to get my bearings there's a lot going on right now without further ado let's get right into it assigning ability points in baldur's gate 3 is a very important step in character creation and will determine your successes and failures over your entire playthrough so let's make sure everyone has a basic understanding of what's going on here after you have created your character and chosen your class the last tab is abilities as you can see there are six abilities each of which represents a creature's mental and physical characteristics and the reason i say creature and not character is because many things that you come across in your playthrough will also have their own ability scores that vary from creature to creature and it will affect how they fight and interact with the world just like it does with your character the higher your score in a particular ability the higher your ability modifier will be and your modifier is the really important factor here for it is the number that's added to a variety of dice rolls in baldur's gate 3. if we look at strength you can see that i have the minimum of 8 points set which equates to a minus 1 modifier if i keep this at 8 with the minus 1 modifier all things that deal with the strength modifier in the game which can be attack rolls damage rolls skill checks and more a minus one is going to be added to those roles which ultimately hurts my chances of success however in this case i'm not going to be playing a character that uses strength too often as we go up in increments of two with the ability scores the modifier will go up by one so if we increase our strength to nine the modifier is still at minus one but when we get to ten the modifier changes to zero if we go to twelve it goes to plus one fourteen it goes to plus two and the max that you can manually make an ability score when not including racial bonuses is fifteen which gives you the same modifier as fourteen does so for the most part you're going to want to leave your ability scores on even numbers so that extra point is not wasted however it is okay to leave some of them on odd numbers if you have a plan in the future for increasing those numbers to an even number such as when you reach level four and get two more ability score points to invest i hope it's not too confusing so far now let's get into each ability individually and then we'll talk about assigning them to your specific character the primary ability that you want to invest into is going to depend on what type of class you play as well as what weapons you're going to go with for example if you want to play a fighter with a great sword you're going to want a good strength modifier or if you want to play a stealthy rogue with a hand crossbow the dexterity modifier is going to be very important for you or as a wizard you want a high intelligence modifier for intelligence influences your wizard spells let's break them down starting with the strength as it says strength influences your chance to land a hit which is your attack roll and it also influences your damage with strength based weapons on your damage roll most melee weapons use strength however some weapons do have the finesse property which allows you to use strength or dexterity if you're playing a great sword wielding fighter your strength modifier will be added to your attack rolls and your damage rolls attack rolls for those who are not familiar determine if you hit or miss your strike and your damage rolls determine the actual damage that you deal all of this is done instantly behind the scenes when in combat so focus on strength if you plan on dishing out most of your attacks with strength based melee weapons otherwise you will fail a lot another thing we have to keep in mind is that our ability modifiers will also influence skill checks in the game so when you choose the skills that you want to be proficient in you want to see what ability that particular skill is associated with and choose the ones that your character is going to be at least decent with the athletic skill is the skill that deals with strength it's a great skill choice for strength based characters the last thing we have to mention with strength is that it also affects the distance that you can jump and the weight that you can carry next up is dexterity which influences your chance to land a hit in your damage with dexterity based weapons attacks with ranged weapons use your dexterity modifier as well as weapons with the finesse or throne property which you can use strength or dexterity for such as rapiers scimitars short swords and more so for example if you plan on playing a ranger with any type of bow you want a good dexterity modifier dexterity also influences your chance of going first in combat with your initiative role and who doesn't enjoy getting the first turn or at least being earlier in the order of turns also if you're not going to be using heavy armor dexterity will influence your armor class number and the higher that your armor class number is the harder it is for enemies to land their strikes on you so dexterity can be important for many classes even spell casters which don't use dexterity for spell casting for example my warlock right here is going to be using light armor so therefore i want a decent dexterity modifier to help keep me alive skills that will benefit from dexterity include acrobatics sleight of hand and stealth up next is constitution and like dexterity it can be important for many classes regardless of what you're playing because it affects your hp as the game says constitution influences your max number of hit points which is the amount of damage that you can take everyone will likely want a decent if not great constitution score and those of you who like tanky characters constitution is your friend each class has a class specific base hp that you start off with and your constitution modifier will be added to that each level constitution can also play an important role with many spellcasters for some spells require concentration in order to hold your concentration you have to succeed on constitution saving throws when an enemy is attempting to attack you so a higher constitution modifier increases your chances for being able to hold a spell up longer now on to the spellcaster's abilities starting with intelligence the only class in the game that uses intelligence as their spell casting ability is the wizard however some subclasses that dip into the wizard's spell list will use intelligence as well such as the arcane trickster rogue or an eldritch knight so if you're playing one of these or playing a wizard a higher intelligence modifier will increase your chances of landing your spells and also increase the damage for some of those spells as well skills that fall under the intelligence ability include arcana history investigation nature and religion there's many great skills in there so depending on how you want your character to be in situations outside of combat if you're not a wizard you might actually still want to invest some into intelligence to go along with your skills now onto one of my favorites the wisdom ability druids rangers and clerics use wisdom as their spell casting ability obviously druids are not a choice right now in early access a higher wisdom modifier will increase your chances of your wisdom-based spells hitting their target and also increase the damage that many of them do as well skills associated with wisdom include animal handling insight medicine perception and survival like the intelligence ability even if you're not one of the wisdom spell casters if you want some of these skills you might want to invest some points into wisdom to increase your effectiveness with those skills having someone with a perception skill proficiency in a decent wisdom modifier is a good choice for every party and the last ability in the game is charisma many classes use charisma for spell casting but only one in early access does which is the warlock bards paladins and sorcerers will be the other classes like we said with the other abilities charisma based spells will benefit from a higher charisma modifier increasing your chances to hit and damage for some spells as well skills that deal with charisma are deception intimidation performance and persuasion if you want someone who is good at dialogue or a character that is the face of your party charisma is the ability now that we have an understanding as to what each ability is let's talk about actually assigning them to your character first note that there is a use recommended option which is going to give you a good general idea for what you might want to do if you're playing your specific class in the traditional way nothing wrong with using this preset it ensures that you don't ruin your character but by now most of you should have a decent understanding and be able to distribute points on your own on the top you can see that it says 0 out of 27 points that's because i'm on the use recommended settings right now so if we take all of our points and drop them to the minimum we can then distribute the points where we want eight is the minimum ability score which is a minus one modifier but you'll notice that some of my abilities are higher than eight the reason for this is that your racial choice gives you a boost to certain abilities as a drow i get a plus two to dexterity and a plus one to charisma so you can see that those points have been automatically added into my base scores so now we have to use the point by system and i'll have this handy chart pop up while we're talking about it in character creation the max that you can make an ability score is 15. you can go higher if your racial bonus boosts it and giving yourself a 15 and an ability is going to cost you 9 points from your 27. if you leave a score at the minimum of 8 it costs 0 points from the 27. playing as a warlock with my spell casting ability being charisma i want to focus on this ability first i'm going to max it out costing me 9 points from the 27. since i'm playing as a drow i also get the plus one to charisma so when i max it out it goes to 16 instead of 15 giving me the modifier of plus three as a warlock strength will likely be my dump stat so i'm going to leave it at 8 with a minus 1 modifier i don't plan on doing much involving strength with this character i'll leave that for another party member the next two important ability scores for the warlock for most will be constitution and dexterity constitution to boost my hp and help with spells that require concentration and dexterity to boost my armor class number making it harder for enemies to hit me so let's boost both of these abilities to 14 with a plus two modifier for the time being and see how many points we have left so we now have seven points left to spend and i'm starting to think more about role playing aspects for my character and the skills that i chose many of the skills that i chose deal with the intelligence ability so i'm going to up my intelligence to 10 getting rid of that negative modifier that i had when it was at 8. now i could up my wisdom to 10 as well to help with wisdom saving throws in the game but i'm going to leave it at 8 and instead boost my other more important abilities up even more i can get my dexterity to 16 with the draw ratio boost upping that modifier to plus 3 but unfortunately i can't get my constitution higher than 15 which is the same modifier as 14 so i'm going to go ahead and leave it at 14. i see now that i have two remaining points so i'm going to boost my intelligence up even more to help with those skills of mine and make it a 12 with a plus one modifier skills are a lot of fun and very useful in the game so don't take them lightly overall there's many different ways that you can handle this just remember to show some love to the two or three primary abilities that are essential for the type of character that you are playing thanks so much for watching guys if you guys enjoyed this video please like comment and subscribe i really appreciate it it's a huge help to my videos i do all sorts of content on this channel ranging from live streams to class guides to lore videos to comedy videos and much more i'd love to see some of you guys in a future video until next time

Channel: WolfheartFPS

Views: 66,851

Keywords: Baldur's Gate 3, baldur's gate 3 character creation, character, creation, character creation guide, bg3, bg3 ea, early, access, early access, beginner's guide, tips, ability points, baldur's gate 3 classes, races, sub-races, gameplay, creating a character, wolfheartfps, larian studios, balder's gate 3, baulder's gate 3, stadia, ability scores, ability modifier

Id: 2FQR-asiH1M

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020