The Absolute Best Beginner's Guide to Baldur's Gate 3 | Part 1

hey everybody your game master Pandora here 1.3 million players have beaten balers Gate 3 but just barely over 17% of steam players have beaten the game at the time of recording according to the steam achievement statistics so I figured now is as good as time as any for my absolute best beginner's guide to balers Gate 3 and you can trust me I'm an expert at the game what you really with all those bonuses I still miss death can't have me not yet what what in the Indiana fing Jones was that that's how digging Works don't question it you dig in front of you and what you dig up comes up behind you I don't know who too well hold it I swear oh but seriously I know a little bit about the game oh you know what I could do adios you're going for a real fun trip EXC all I can't oh I can yeah dude move man all right hi okay that was cool right you may have heard that balers Gate 3 is like a d and d game because it is is a Dungeons and Dragons game it was made in partnership with Wizards of the Coast and is based on the fifth edition rule set of Dungeons and Dragons which is a D20 system which to simplify basically means that all of the major roles and skill checks are decided by Rolling a 20-sided dice this guide will go all the way from character creation all through the first area of act one and obviously will contain some spoilers there in with all that having been said let's get started so for the purposes of this video we're just going to do a balanced difficulty um you can see there's a couple of different options here with your easiest being Explorer balance tactician honor and then you have a new custom difficulty which allows you to kind of make it closer to the tabletop experience where you are unable to see certain things like NPC health and difficulty but let's go in and we'll start a balanced game who are you now I have played the game before uh as you can can see it's not my first Adventure so it does have tutorials built in that are very handy and very well done uh but don't explain all the little nuances of the game rule set so here we have character creation and within here we can do a couple of things we can either create a custom character or you can play as one of what they call An Origin character which are the six companions that you can find throughout the game and there's a special one here at the end the dark urge which I I do think is probably the best uh origin character to play as however if you have not played any of the Ballers gate games beforehand I would not recommend playing the dark urge to begin with I'd recommend this for a second or third playthrough but that's up to you do what you want um and each of these also has a fun little introduction video that you can watch uh down here and it kind of explains their backstory from their point of view but we're going to do a custom character and I'm going to go ahead and edit the appearance and put it together and then I'll explain it in just a moment within character creation you have a few options for customization the first option that you have is your race you can see there's a handful of different races here and they have sub races as well and they have special features that are helpful but not necessary uh pick what you want nothing in this guide is going to show you the absolute best way to play the game or a meta build or a minmax build as we might call it uh it's simply just a guide to how to play this type of game and balers Gate 3 specifically so we can see here I am playing a half elf and my subrace is a Dr half elf so because of that I get this uh uh special spell called the canant trip which doesn't require any sort of spell slots or any sort of resources to cast I can cast this all the time anytime as much as I want and then I also have this uh civil militia feature uh which gives me weapon proficiency I have 30 ft per turn of movement most of the races have that same movement except for the smaller races like gnomes dwarves and halflings who have 25 ft of movement I have dark vision and I can see up to 40 ft in the dark and then I have this Fay ancestry feature which gives me advantage on saving herows against being Charmed and Magic can't put me to sleep and as an elf I also don't need to really sleep I go into a trance I am going to be playing aard there are 12 classes that you can pick and choose from and you can also as you level up as long as you are playing at balance difficulty or above you'll be able to multiclass which you can play multiple classes in one character so you could play a Bard and a warlock for example uh and some of the classes do have kind of better Synergy with each other because they share the same primary stats if you see over here on the right hand side of the screen we have my ability scores we see the star above my Charisma stat which means it's my primary ability as a Bard so that's the one I want to be the highest um the way you calculate your bonus modifier is you subtract 10 from the number and then divide the remainder by two so to get this plus three the way it works is subtract 10 which is seven and divide that by two which is 3.5 and in Dungeons and Dragons whenever you have a half score uh you round down there everything is whole numbers it's there are no partial scores you can't have a bonus of plus 3.5 or plus 7 or you know plus 7.75 it's always plus one plus 2 plus 3 plus 4 and so because of that having even numbers in your ability scores is the best for what you want um and you want your primary ability to be the highest generally speaking and we can see for example I mentioned warlock earlier you see warlock shares the same primary ability as a Bard with Charisma so it's easier for your character to multiclass into a Bard or a sorcerer um which also shares the Charisma ability as its primary ability uh the only thing that does not share any sort of primary ability with any other class is the wizard uh whose primary ability is intelligence and it is the only class that is intelligence but that does not mean that you can't multiclass or that it's a bad idea and it does not mean that you can only multiclass a Bard with a warlock you can multiclass it with whatever you like it's just that it works a little bit easier um and it won't feel as weak as if you were to put a Bard with a fighter for example who has by default here an eight Charisma uh and has more strength than anything but it doesn't mean that it can't be fun and that it can't work I will say having beaten this game as many times as I have with different builds each time the build is not what gets you the win usually the place style and understanding the mechanics and using that to your advantage as best as possible is what will get you the win so we're going to be aard for the purposes of this video just because I find Bard to be very fun and entertaining and you do get some interesting dialogue options and things like that so we're going to pick our starting spells and everything I'm going to take off blade Ward and put on friends which will give me advantage on Charisma checks which are like speech checks just for fun and then vicious mockery because it's very fun to insult people to death uh and then here here we have healing word we're going to keep dissonant Whispers And Tasha's hideous laughter because again it's just a fun spell when it does work it is very funny to see somebody fall on the ground and laugh while you're killing them uh I'm actually going to take off healing word and use cure wounds cuz it heals more granted I do have to be within melee range to use it but it does heal more damage than healing word as we can see healing word does 1 D4 plus three whereas cure wound does 1d8 plus 3 um and if you ever want to see any sort of details on any description or anything like this you can just hover over it and press T and it'll kind of highlight it and bring it to the Forefront and you can hover over stuff and it'll give you the information so we can see here melee is 5 ft uh we can kind of look at this and we can look at the level one spell slots and how often we get them we get them once per long rest and how how much it cost in terms of action economy it takes one action we you can do it once per turn Etc so forth U I will also say I am doing this on a PC with mouse and keyboard I apologize I do not know what the bindings are for a controller or for console however the mechanics still work the same regardless of your platform and then here we have our background which is just what it sounds like it's where you come from it's what you did before you ended up in the events of the game uh and you get special skills based on your background I'm going to pick let's go with Entertainer why not um but you can pick anything that makes sense to you um if you do pick one of the origin characters like any of these including the dark urge you do not have a choice over this it's picked for you uh and you can't change the race or anything or how they look but you can change everything else you can change their uh uh you can't change their class but you can uh not yet anyway but you can change their abilities and everything else uh and then here we have our abilities and we can see that they're kind of they spread pretty fairly across the board for what I want as a character with Charisma being my highest and dexterity being slightly high as well because I can use Simple weapons and things like rapers uh which allow me to add my dexterity B uh bonus to the attack rather than my strength bonus um so that's what I want as my secondary ability so I can still do some melee damage um but it'll do more damage with my Charisma based attack and SP however we can see that there's three uneven stats here which means we're not getting any extra bonus from having those numbers there um but when we level up every now and again you get uh what is called a a feat and with the feat you can also choose to increase your ability scores and you can increase either one score by two points or two scores by one point so what I like to do generally speaking is when I'm creating this character here cuz you can see if we clear it we have 27 points to spread out um so we have an uneven number to begin with we're not going we're always going to have at least one number that's uneven or we're going to be missing a a free point somewhere because it won't let you bend it and have everything really high cuz if we can make charisma 18 that would be obviously the best but we can't do that but what I like to do is I like to make my primary 17 and then my secondary uh 15 so with that first feet that I get and my ability score increased I'll put one point into dexterity and one point into Charisma and then they'll both go up one so that way I get the modifier increase to both of those stats CU dexterity will become 16 which will be a plus three and Charisma will become 18 which will be plus 4 and then we can balance the rest of this out as we as we see fit so since I'm a Bard and since I'm going to be using finesse weapons as they're called like a Rapier or Dag small simple swords nothing like a great sword nothing huge right I'm going to be using my dexterity attacks for that I can keep my strength at eight that's fine Constitution is what your health is based off of your hit point and we can see right now it's at eight right but if I increase it to 10 um by default you get eight hit points if you're at an even 10 right so your hit points are eight plus your Constitution modifier which goes up as you level up and you can see on the on the right hand side here under the heart that's my hit point right I have eight because I have no modifier but if I make it 12 it goes to 9 then 14 it goes to 10 it's always better to have even numbers 14 is pretty good 10 is a nice healthy amount of hit points at level one and this is pretty pretty good I think you could also just even this out and make this 10 10 T across the board cuz it's also better to have scores that are above 10 and up right cuz as we can see strength we with an eight we'll have a negative -1 to our strength checks and anything that requires a strength ability because our our base score is eight cuz if you subtract 10 from 8 you get -2 / 2 is 1ga 1 so that's our modifier for strength um luckily we can't get any lower than an eight here uh and then we can change our skills if we want if I want to get rid of this negative one I can actually take something like intimidation off put it on Athletics so that way I at least get plus one and I'm not in the negative anymore and Athletics is what will keep you from getting shoved and help you shove others um whereas acrobatics just helped you resist being shoved um it also helped with uh how far you can jump and things like that will confirm and then we can proceed I've already edited my appearance this is what my Tav as they call it is going to look like kind of blue my favorite color half Dr elf B um and then we can proceed and that's why they call it your Tav because that's the default name we'll name him Pandora why not and then you can also create your guardian and you can customize them almost the same way you don't have any chance to alter their class or anything like that but you can change how they look you only get two options for the voice but I usually now just randomize it and then you know go go with it yeah sure all right here we go let's get out of here if we can wakey wakey okay so here we are um my head obviously we skipped the intros cinematics don't do that I don't even know if you can if it's your first time playing it explains a lot about the plot and what's going on it also looks incredible they're great so please watch them um so first things first uh I am using a couple of mods however they don't affect the gam play they mostly affect the user interface and a couple of the visual things that I can see the biggest most obvious thing right now that you'll see is down here at the bottom of the screen is my hot bar it's a little bit wider and there's a little bit more to it um I also have a lot of dyes like clothing dieses uh and I have a mod that you will see that I can when I hold my left alt button uh I can see more of the interactable things on the floor uh that works by default but this just shows me more um so first things first is the movement so balers gate is a point and click adventure uh where you can just move your cursor and then click on the ground ready and you'll see a white little circle and your character will run towards it and when you have a party they'll follow you you can also click and hold it and it will follow your cursor around um the other thing that you can do is it has camera movement so you can do this around your character uh and then you can use the W ASD keys to kind of move the camera and Survey the area around you uh and just take a look at your your surroundings and see what's going on I do recommend remapping uh some of these Keys uh for instance I have all of the camera keys on my mouse so I have um so this is just the cursor but if I hold one of my mouse buttons I can move the camera with my mouse and then I have the reenter button on my mouse as well uh by default I believe it's home and then uh so that way when I can when I I prefer to move like this by click and holding and I can just kind of hold the buttons in my mouse just onehanded and move around kind of like if I'm using a controller uh that's just a personal preference uh the other thing uh that I want to talk about is the hot bar so this is where all of your actions as your character and every character that you're going to play will be it's down here and it is customizable you can adjust it uh you can add more rows by default just that two but you can add up to four um and if you hit this little lock here uh you can drag and drop all of these icons in different ways and put them in whatever order however you want um you know do whatever you want with these and then lock it back so you don't lose track of it uh or accidentally you know like once it's locked it's not going to move if you accidentally click and drag down there you can also click these tabs and it'll sort them by what they're called there's this tab down here called passives which is very uh key in certain encounters and situations this is where you can toggle uh certain special types of attacks and especially the non-lethal attack this allows you to knock somebody out rather than killing them outright so if there's like a an NPC that you want to save or let's say you accidentally made somebody angry and you can see that they are temporarily hostile underneath their uh um their uh their health bar uh you can just knock them out instead of killing them and leave and then come back and they will most likely be up and they may not like you but they'll be alive and then over here we have the custom bar where we can drag stuff and I will also explain that some of these have corresponding hot keys so like if we put our our potions here we can see this little one and then if we put our our scroll over here we can see it's five so it's every other Square let's unlock it let's not cast that so every other square is a hotkey for your number Keys up at the top of your keyboard so we have one and then we'll skip two and then we have three four five six and so on and so forth and so and it works just how you would assume so if I hit one I'll drink a potion if I hit five I'll start to to cast the revivify spell from that scroll um this is very good for when you are using multiple items or different types of weapons and things like that like you want to switch them out um or if you do want like just a quick way to get to a a healing potion or a certain scroll things that you use a lot uh you can just program them up there through there very handy and again it's all customizable the the mod that I'm using adds this specific section of where it puts the passives on my front main page of my hot bar if you are interested in any of the mods that I'm using they will be listed in the description below with a link to the Nexus page they're all from Nexus mods and as well as a link to a simple little tutorial on how to use those mods uh the other thing we're going to go over while we're here um is we're going to go over the journal which you can can access either by clicking here on the map the bottom of the map or hitting the J key so we have one Quest right now uh find a way off of an nooid and we have a map um and we have inspiration now inspiration just like it says here when you do something that's true to your background or uh whatever you will gain experience and you receive inspiration and you can use that to roll certain ability checks that you failed um you can only store up to four of them at any time like if you know that you have four and you fail a roll go ahead and use it chances are you'll be able to get it again and each background has different different events that trigger inspiration and you will get uh a little bit of uh experience points as well um and then you have a dialogue for if you've talked to some NPCs and then over on the right hand side here we have tutorials which is ESS essentially the rules of the of the game and how fifth edition has been incorporated into balers gate um so we can see like camp supplies resting being down versus stabilized versus dying inspiration there's a there's a few things that are missing from here um but we'll I'll account for that in this video so that you can see it and I'm going to warn you that if you scroll too far down it does one of the mechanics does give you a little bit of a spoiler um so don't go all the way to the bottom until you're at least a little bit partially through act one and the last tip that I'm going to give you is we're going to look at this Nursery this is the pool that thing came from the parasite now writhing behind your eye we can see here we can roll and when you hover over the part in the parentheses um for the type of roll sometimes you'll see multiple options uh it's going to tell you what your bonuses are if you have any so since this is an intelligence-based role and my character's intelligence is 10 I have no bonus so it's just a straight as you can see 1 D20 so I'm just going to roll a 20-sided die once and I have to roll above a 10 and I have no bonus um so it's essentially a 50/50 uh the other thing I wanted to mention is down here in the bottom left hand corner this is how you can change your dice skin um I believe these two are from DLC and you get this one uh the scuffed metal uh the beir blue and uh by default and you get The Shining honor die if you beat the game in honor mode um so so we're going to roll we didn't make it cuz we the nature of of Randomness you noticed nothing more than meets the eye right and then we can reach towards it cuz we're a dumb Dum and don't know what's going to happen ouchies luckily it flung us right towards this which is the restoration pod which will act as taking a long rest when we interact with it so we'll get healed if we had used any spell slots they would have been refreshed and it works as if it was a long rest uh but let's loot this place dry and move on and see if we can find any friends or Allies to see if we can find a way off of this crashing ship but one of the great things about balers Gate 3 in this type of game is that is the game where your choices matter and your actions have consequences even if it not not an immediate thing um so here we have a really really good example of that with what we are about to do release us so by rescuing this little guy us his name um this guy is not having a great time all right but by rescuing us this will actually have implications later on in the game I'm not going to give away what it is but it does have implications later that you may even forget about until you it comes up again uh and now we're going to go meet our first companion right up ahead and now we have our first fight with our first uh new friend here that we've met lelle uh who is a fighter uh and we have us helping us out too so this is something that you may not be familiar with if you have never played one of these games before which is turn based comat combat pardon me um and so we can see up here we have our turn order or our initiative order um and it will go like this in this order every round till we get to this last imp and then it'll cycle back around to us um during your turn you have three things that you can do you have your action which is represented by this little green circle on your hot bar if you click it it'll just show you your action you have a bonus action which again if you click it it will show you what you can do and you have your movement and so we can see us has 30 ft of movement cuz when we go beyond it it'll say not enough movement um and he has an action and he has a bonus action every creature has that um they have all of that and you can take that in any order that you want you can move then attack or you can can attack and then move or you can jump as a bonus action right and then attack and completely wreck this imp uh and then we still have a little bit of movement if we want left over so we can move again you can break that up however you want and as you go and level up and get further along in the game you may actually end up getting more actions and more bonus actions but the basic idea of it is is still the same uh that you have those every turn and you can take them in any order that makes sense and work best for you and you'll see myself here as a Bard I have a couple of extra options right so as a bonus action I can Swig a potion I can shove them I can dip my weapon in something like the fire or if there's like acid or something on the ground I can dip my weapon in that and possibly do more damage with it I can also give Bic inspiration as a bonus action which we can see here we press T will inspire an ally to add a 1d6 bonus to their attack R ability check or savings and as long as they're within 60 ft we can Inspire them uh through our our our wonderful music um and beautiful words we can do that three times we only we have three uses of it right now um and I can also cast a spell casting a spell will take an action as we can see so if I click this this will show me all my level one spells and if I click my action it'll show me everything I can do including my spells so let's go ahead and use this uh disso whisper CU it's fun and we're going to use it on this one that's far away from us perfect and then I see I still have my movement cuz I didn't move yet so I can actually go forward um 30 ft have to keep going and then I can end my turn Victory awaits now the other thing that you may or may not have noticed is up in the initiative bar all three of us lazel myself and us are portraits are intertwined might be kind of hard to tell but you can see that they're weaved together which means we all act at the same time so I can I can act in any order that I want I could have had laelle go first then us then me I won give in and let's say I didn't mean to end my turn like I didn't mean to there was something else I wanted to do I could cancel the end of my turn and go back and I still have like a bonus action or I can give LEL Bic inspiration let's do that because I forgot to do it now I can end my turn fully and then I can let's go ahead and charge at this imp well before I do that before I attack this imp um one thing I want to show you is that you can look up an enemy's character sheet um and look up some outpull information before you make your attack and decide your strategy by pressing t or you can rightclick when you hover over them or their portrait and you can right click and uh select examine and this will bring up their character sheet we can see here they have an AC or an armor class of seven which just means we have to roll higher than a seven on our attack to hit them they have six hit points they don't have any special resistances or special attacks they do have this but it's not really important in terms of fighting them and we can look up all this stuff we can see that they're a fiend so if we had something like a weapon that did extra damage to fiends or something that gave us extra defense against fiends it would come in very handy here um and you can look up that on any NPC and it's very helpful in certain fights to know what kind of attack might be more beneficial to you let's go and that was our first fight done you provve surprisingly adequate in I am so glad I'm adequate all right now we are nearing the helm and we have a new friend shadowart we are nearing the helm once inside do as I say so in here we have a fairly big fight we need to get out of there other thing I will mention is that balers Gate 3 and Dungeons and Dragons really rewards you as a player for taking advantage of the mechanics and the environment around you so when you get into a fight that's like this where there's multiple layers to the fight there's multiple enemies and You' got this big area and to play around in take a look around before you make your first point of action just kind of survey the area and so there's already three things that are standing out to me here that I think I can use to my advantage alongside some other things we have already found on the ship and we can see he actually does have some resistances right and he's got quite High stats and a hard AC to beat for us especially at level one and 150 hit point um but he's resistant to fire he's resistant to pretty much everything that we're going to be able to do we are good to go we're going to be level two when we hit the ground um we're going to hit the ground running get out of here the Helm's alien transponder You' made it in time right and as you can see down here at the bottom we have leveled up um so I'm going to go get Shadow heart and then we'll level up um and we'll go through this first little uh ravaged Beach area and I'll give you some tips for the beach all right so we have Shadow heart now and we can uh I'm going to level up show the level up screen uh second level we don't get a whole lot uh you can see that we get this feature which is called Jack of all trades which is going to allow us to add half of our proficiency bonus again rounded down the ability checks uh that we are not proficient in we get another spell slot we get this special action called the song of rest we'll go over rest in just a moment uh we get another spell and we can replace a spell if we'd like so we get to pick a new spell here I'm going to pick uh speak with animals comes in very handy and it's nice to have it early on in the game when you level up uh with your party uh it will automat atically cycle through your current party and level them up and your companions that are in Camp will also gain experience points as you play you'll see on the right hand side it says the party gained so much experience the party gained 75 experience points um that means everybody in your group not just in your current traveling party so when you go and you pick up a new companion or you swap out companions uh if they were let's say level one when you sent them to campus we were to go get them now they would now be level two most likely um there are some things that make certain characters level up just a little bit ahead of time um through like inspiration or uh character specific moments where they get a little bit extra uh experience points more over everybody else but for the most part everybody else will level up at the same time uh here we don't have a whole lot we can swap out some spells again also going to talk about uh spell flopping and spell so if you hit tab you can pull up your entire party's inventory character sheets and we can go to the spell book or we can hit K or click the tab and you'll see here that shadow heart is able to kind of hop swap her spells and she can change them out as she wants or as you want as playing as her um do why not actually off BL no we'll keep BL we'll take off but my Bard is not able to do that so only on leveling up am I able to swap these out um so you have to kind of pick the spells that you think you're going to be using for a while or that are going to have the most benefit for you and be really strategic about what you pick when you were playing a Bard but Shadow heart gaale uh they can all swap out their Spells at any time that they're not in a fight in battle again left alt will be your friend when you're exploring and the game does reward exploration um and you might find like hidden things special little things um special Treasures things like that if you try to find the edges of the map shall we say oh we got a fun hat I'm going to put that on look at us fancy as hell all right we got our first Waypoint here these way points are like fast travel points um and you'll find them in various locations all over the map uh we have only explored this tiny area this is a much bigger area I promise you and there are multiple waypoints and you can also get to your Camp from here you do not need to go to this and click it um you can can just pull up your map by hitting M and there will be a list on the right that you can click or you can just click it on the map and you'll fast travel to it like that uh and it'll take your whole party that's grouped together if you're not grouped together it won't more of those wretched things we see there that more of the intellect Dev hours are inside this little crash site uh if you want uh you can actually avoid this um you can jump around and jump up here and you can follow this path up here and kind of go around it and you can get some more companions and allies to help you in this fight if you would like or if you're feeling brave enough you can go and do it with just you and Shadow heart there's a chest up here I'm going to grab that and then I'm going to go back down here and fight these guys um one thing I will tell you about the outdoor big open area fight one thing that you can do that will help you um is you can kind of what I like to say is get the jump on them so what we're going to do is we're actually going to hide and you can hide as the group by hitting shift see um we can sneak forward here and now that we're hiding we can see their line of sight in Red so that's where they're looking right now they're not looking towards us though they don't have eyes we don't need to talk about that but we're going to come up this way right and try to avoid this little red zone and then what we can do is we can get the jump on them and see since we're hiding we have Advantage let's see what you're hiding and now they are surprised so they don't get to take any actions or anything yet um however that did take our actions all we have is our bonus action um can I reach you not enough enough not quite can't slow down Shadow heart's not in it ready Shadow heart's still hiding they didn't see Shadow heart so that's what happened uh but we can come up here with her and we'll use a Firebolt and get her in there and you see now that we're not on the ship I uh if my character tries to move ever easy you'll see these little glowing red arrows these pulsing red arrows daggers and now you see on the pointer it says provoke attack of opportunity so if I move this way these two intellect devourers will get a free swing on me and they might possibly hit me hit me for those last two hit points um so we're going to swap over to shadow heart here and let her heal us so we don't end up dying as a bonus action we can do that my feet um and I can actually do this Thunder Wave and possibly push them away that's what those blue arrows are so he saved so what that means is um Thunder Wave has a saving throw component to it um which means that they have the opponent has the uh ability to roll Constitution against my spell save difficulty which is 12 so if they roll higher than 12 they don't get pushed away and they only take half of the damage so this guy this one failed it and this guy didn't uh but he still took one damage cuz he took two um the other thing about spells like that that take a save for example the one that we were using with shadow heart um sacred flame you see it takes a dexterity save but her DC is only an 11 because um that's just what her spell save DC is right now we aren't we weren't able to set her stats um what is her wisdom by default so she has a plus three um but anyway so making a sacred flame attack even from close melee range even though it has a 60t range we can make it in melee and it doesn't have disadvantage like a ranged attack would because they have to make a save against it rather than just us making an attack roll um so for instance I'll show you on the next round of combat okay so if I move Shadow heart up here so she's now in melee range of this intellect of hour if I use guiding bolt which also has a 60ft range but not a save as you can see it's an attack roll right so we roll like we would if we were making a melee attack or something you can see I have disadvantage because the target is too close anytime you have advantage or disadvantage it will list it under theit Point bar of the enemy and it'll also show on your pointer that you have disadvantage but the reason is right underneath there it says Target is too close because it's a ranged attack being made in melee range but if we switch to sacred flame which is a save attack I don't have disadvantage I only have a 50% chance of hitting whereas this I have a 90% chance even though I'm at disadvantage um because it's more likely that this thing will roll over that 11 DC that DC will go up as we level up but right now since we're only level two it's fairly low but let's try it anyway just to prove a point see he saved so he took no damage um but we did not have disadvantage on the and the same thing with this so if I try to make a ranged attack here see Target is too close and I'm threatened um so what I can do is I can just make a normal melee attack you can see I don't have disadvantage now I can just swing and I can Swig a potion as a bonus action so I can heal myself a little bit and then let's try this again again go perhaps our survival isn't such a distant Prospect yeah any spell that has a save component you can make at close range without it having disadvantage whereas if um like wisdom save see um Constitution save save um save these all can be made within CL range without having disadvantage but Shadow heart something like fire Fireball um this uh this inflict wounds guiding bolt Firebolt these are all attack roll which you roll like a a regular melee attack um those will have disadvantage at close rate so uh before we actually go meet another companion what we're going to do we're going to take our first short rest um so every long rest you get two short rests that you can take per day um and just as it says there twice a day you can restore 50% of your hit points uh and warlocks specifically only warlocks are able to restore their spell slots on a short rest every other spellcasting class has to take a long rest to get any of their spell slots back U but a warlock will get them back on a short rest and so we're going to do this and I'll get most of my hit points back um so I can live to fight another day uh let's go meet our next companion all right so we have gotten uh another companion we have Gail here who is a wizard U and you see we can change his subass here um at level two uh the different sub classes have different features um that you can see down here so um Gale as a wizard can learn SP from Scrolls that we can find as loot all throughout um the game and through vendors as well uh it normally costs 50 gold uh to learn a level one spell it's 50 gold per level and however each class will make it half price when you learn those bels so the enchantment world would be 25 gold per level rather than 50 um but we also get this uh for evocation uh where we can create pockets of safety within our spells and allies automatically succeed their saving throws against these spells and take no damage against um like I say the there's eight different sub classes here that you can pick from and they all have their own different features um pick whichever you want and whichever sounds most fun to you this one is very helpful uh evocation for when you use things like Fireball uh which are an area effect spell uh and requires a saving throw case you target your your allies uh they'll be fairly safe um and then we can pick some spells here I'm going to pick magic Missile because magic Missile is a spell that never misses um they always hit their target and so they always at least do some damage um so that's very helpful to have guaranteed damage and then but we'll do we'll do burning burning here and then we can swap again we can swap out some spells not there's nothing wrong with these spells I just want to use the new ones I got these two and then you can have some fun with grease why not because there actually is a purpose for grease uh did not know so grease does two things uh it has being slippery as a property uh so we can see there we put grease on the ground and people can slip on it and fall prone which would then give us advantage against them uh but grease is also highly flammable and a very good uh lubricant for things that might be stuck or hard to move uh so it has more than one use and it's very it can come in really really handy especially later in the game uh you can do some fun things with grief so we'll keep that in keep that around then we also have our new friend aarion who is a rogue close who this is what I was talking about before where certain classes are able to Dash as a bonus action so when we Dash as a bonus action we can move double our movement speed and still have an action like an attack um and then we'll go over how to use a rogue uh cuz I know a lot of people really like aarion I've made a Tik Tok and stuff about this before but um I still see people getting frustrated or thinking that Rogues are not good um so Rogues have this thing called the sneak attack and we'll go over how to how that works and you can see when we do a sneak attack we get this extra 1d6 piercing and that will level up as you level up your road uh and here is a table that shows how the sneak attack levels up so you can see here when you get higher level that sneak attack can end up doing a huge amount of damage especially when using certain weapons and bonuses and things like that that you can get later in game uh you as a rogue or as a Starion can take out a lot of hit points and even take out things in one sneak attack hit uh if you use the Rogue correctly so let's go look for a fight and see how we can use this sneak attack to our advantage one other little tip I can give you is uh all over this first area you'll see that there are these twisting vines on the ground where you can get caught and entangled uh to avoid them you can actually just burn them [Music] away got ourselves competition already that's our ship right one tip I can give you is if you know you're going to be in a fight but you are in dialogue what you can do is go down to the bottom uh to the second icon and we can select a character that's not in dialogues can hit G or this little toggle group button and we can move people around and position them in more advant advantageous spot and then we'll go back to my character who's in dialogue well uh in that case come on you lot no point in getting killed second worm gets the cheese and all um second mouse gets the cheese no nobody's getting any damn cheese now move it okay so we ended up not having to fight that that's another good uh lesson is that some fights and some encounters you can get out of non-violently you can talk your way out you don't have to be a B to do it uh that wasn't a bar specific thing that was something that we were able to do just because we had Proficiency in those specific skills but sometimes you can just talk your way out only a five there we go that's the guidance if you have Shadow heart or items that give you guidance or anybody else who can cast guidance as a can trip giv you an extra 1 D4 on your rolls uh it's free it's a can trip it doesn't cost anything and you'll have it for 10 turns um and it's just add it it's always add your bonuses if you can uh as long as it's not going to take too many resources from you um like baring inspiration will take a resource it's a it will be a bonus option on certain roles but it does take your aaric Inspiration Point uh but you get to keep that until you long around you sound a bit shaken boss hang on while I find the key let's head in you're dead Okay and now we can see how a sneak attack works so there's two ways that you can get a sneak attack by default um one way and the easiest way to get it I think is I'm going to move aarion up here into melee range and then we can see my character and aarion both go at the same time right CU they're inter they're interweaved I'm going to click on myself and I'm going to move myself up into to melee range as well I'm going to go ahead and make a melee attack and then I'm going to go back to aarion BL and because my character is within melee range I will have Advantage so it's going to let me go for the sneak attack if I wasn't able to do it it would say you don't have Advantage you can't you can't do this and there we go and that's why sneak attacks are powerful and then we can keep exploring these ruins um if you listen carefully at this door you can hear voices mumbling and talking on the other side you're not first in Magic are you bother me another time nerd um but we know that there's somebody over there so we're going to kind of position ourselves to be a little safe here I'm going to move her back here so she can kind of keep us healthy as the cleric let me work my magic Gail we're going to put over here I'm going like where I am and then a staran we're going to go here and uh with levers and certain interactables like this you can actually use ranged attacks or just attacks on them in general to activate them and then we can see that there's all these people in there but if I hold my shift button again I can see their line of sight and where they're looking so what I can do with a Starion is I can actually hide as a bonus action now it took my action to open this but on my next turn since I'm hiding come on can't stay idle we'll be able to sneak attack with a star I'm going to come in here wonder if the gods are watching me uh I don't have like a flaming arrow do I this is another very good example of kind of surveying the room and looking around before you make your first plan of action so there's something in here that can help this fight uh and be very fun and cool uh and we can also get some usage out of Grease um what I'm actually going to use is a Starion has on him he has a grease bottle so I'm going to take one of them for myself and you can do this at any point by the way if you want to trade between your characters you can pull up their inventory and you can like swap between them if you run out of healing potions or you know that one of your characters has an item you want to use use you can pull up their inventory and just swap it for free it doesn't take an action and so what I'm actually going to do is we see this right this is an oil barrel we know that oil is flammable and between the oil barrel and these two I'm going to try to throw this grease uh we're going to climb it down here now they didn't fall which is okay I don't I'm not really worried about that all right and now with Gail what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull him up into the doorway that plenty of range and I'm going to use this Firebolt and we're going to hit this oil barrel and it lights it's the grease on fire so they all burned they were all in the grease and these guys got hit from the explosion um that's how you can kind of use the environment and the mechanics to your advantage I'm going to move him back too because Gail is a wizard so he is fairly easy to hit he only has 11 Armor class right now um but he has very powerful spells so we want to keep him safe so we're going to put him behind this wall so that they can't as easily get to him I'm going to move her up um and we're going to use f flame we're going to kind of look at our odds here so this is our best option so we're going to do that because I want to try to save my spell slot factly on her okay and now so we're still hidden as you can see but I would I would have advantage on this guy anyway because my character is right next to him but what we can do is we can come here and you see I have Advantage I have an 88% chance of hitting him 96 on them and 88 on them cuz I'm hiding uh feel some blood step quick I'm I'm going to come in here where do I go from here I'm going to take a potion and let's see if we can insult this person to death that's always fun which up you okay I I was just going to say that actually my in I'm going to move over here so that I can give Aion advantage against them because they still have all their hit points see what I mean about Gail being squishy um I'm actually going to switch to Shadow heart because she's right here she can heal him the most better than a healing potion um I'm going to move her back and heal her f i don't fancy that ches and the other fun thing that we're going to see about magic Missile is you do not need line of sight with it so you can see we can just kind of kind of come around here and we can hit this and then we can hit this person and hopefully do take them out too perfect I'm going to take this potion as a bonus action so that I'm not near death now because my character is dazed I didn't get a chance to do an opportunity attack uh normally that's what would happen and now just to Pro a point what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to come back here just beyond this line of sight here and I'm going to bonus action hide then I can sneak attack on them there we go my days is going to wear off so you'll see certain things that last for a a number of turns one turn is 6 seconds um so 10 turns is a minute uh you want to know how long something is going to to last uh now we can loot these guys and continue investigating these ruins all right uh in this room in the ruins we have our first real puzzle of the game uh and you can see we see all sorts of traps where we're going to uh I'm not going to show you how to do this puzzle uh but I wanted to demonstrate one thing is let's say I want to just I'm going to select a cross all the way over here and I see all the traps if I want to stop my party from accidentally running over one of these traps when I've selected to Auto move like this what you can do is just right click and they will immediately stop and you can avoid setting off a lot of traps that you might find so if you start hearing that noise and you start seeing these glowing orange things cuz you're perceiving these trap um you can stop your your party from running over it and then so we're going to solve this puzzle very quickly uh and then we'll get back into it okay so we solved the puzzle and we found a key that's hopefully to this locked door then here we're going to get something else that balers Gate 3 does very well among everything else is we're going to get an example of kind of environmental storytelling as it said we're going to walk in here arm scribes but no sign of a struggle and we get that little line of dialogue which so subersive about their words that they commanded protection we get these little lines of dialogue that kind of give you a hint um what you might be able to do here and then in one of these Believe get this chest back here in the corner is we get this we get some Scrolls of protection from evil and good which gives us protection against the attacks and powers of aberration celestials Elementals Fay fiends and Undead uh that is a hint about what might happen here um oh this is also a very good demonstration of how dark vision worked so my character has dark vision and you can see I can look around and see fairly easily here um but if we go to Gail up ready Gail is a human so he does not have dark and can't really see any uh unless you were to light these candles not a problem this dumb human eyes uh uh another tip for keyboard uh for switching characters is instead of just clicking on people individually which you can do you can also use F1 2 3 and four to cycle through your companion right so let's figure out what these scribes are about and uh see what's going on here all right wasn't that something uh so we cleared out the ruins and we did the little fight and did what we had to do uh so let's go ahead and take a rest so what I want to mention is in your inventory you'll see that a lot of times you'll end up with a bunch of stuff here right I you got all sorts of things here you got potions you've got all these weapons I'm walking one thing that I would suggest doing is as you're wandering around you'll find a bunch of little pouches and backpacks and other bags that you can pick up and use those to help organize and what you can also do is use them to sell things so you can add that to your wees that bag and then you can select multiple items at least on keyboard by holding shift and then clicking and you see It'll highlight all of that you can drag it all in there or you can do control and collect individual things and just click around the stuff that you want you can click it again if you want to take it out instead of sitting here and adding every individual thing to wears you can just add the bag and then just drag and drop everything in there and it'll automatically sell it and if you're overloaded or something like that you can also just send the bag to your Camp uh you can send things to your Camp immediately as soon as your toes hit the sand on the beach you can start sending things to your camp and then we're going to go rest anyway so we'll be at Camp um CU we need to take a long rest we're out of short rest it'll tell you that you have enough supplies if you're carrying enough but one thing that you can also do to save time on your or save weight is you can say you can send your supplies to Camp however when you do that the game will think that you don't have any supplies cuz you're not technically carrying any um but if you know that you have enough in your Camp you'll have enough it'll still take them and when you send things to Camp you'll see it pings and it shows you to your chest up here and this is where everything will go and if you have gotten the twitch drops um this is where they will go this is these are the twitch drops and they have little kind of twitch related names it's kind of fun and you can see the other things I've sent to Camp here and it'll just stay here and it'll stay here forever um and then you can see the supplies I just sent to camp and you can organize this to however you like so and then we see Gail wants to talk to us so let's find out what Gail wants and all that stuff and do our little chit C chatty cuz chitchatting because uh these guys are a bunch of Chatty Cassies and they will love to talk to you and I do recommend talking to them and learning about them and following their stories they're they're all very well written a lot of fun and really cool and awesome story so actually do go talk to your companions I'm not going to show you everything here again I'm not trying to spoil everything I'm just trying to give you tips don't always talk to them either just when they have their little Sims uh exclamation point talk to them whenever you want you know you'll find companions that you like more than others um that you really like talking to and or you really like their story always talk to them then and try to get more out of them because they will have unique things to say even if they don't have this this just means they have something like pressing that they really want to talk to you about um but like I can go talk to aarion so we're resting here see he wants to talk he wants to say something so we can have some options here and see what he has to say um so we're going to go through the rest uh I'll get to that and then we'll head out and see if we can find some more people and find some help turn towards the wall wonderful just wonderful

Channel: GM Pandora

Views: 460

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Id: NhS3Tx8G72U

Length: 65min 58sec (3958 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2023