Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Build Discussion YOU DON'T NEED HIGH CHARISMA!

okay fine, I'll try

If you're worried about your party composition you probably need charisma because you will have good aligned and evil aligned origin companions and every word you say will offend someone. Some may try to kill you or leave you and you probably need charisma to stop that from happening and potentially forcing you to alter your party composition. Some romance partners can also try to sacrifice or stab you.

Any idea how much charisma to pass most check???

Technically you dont need a high score in any of the skills, you could play with 8 in each stat if the game lets you not allocate all your points.

Having said that, I get the feeling someone will mod in the cape from the the first two games that sets your CHA to 18.

You can think of every +1 as +5% chance of success. So if you need to roll a 20 and you have bonuses amounting to 0 then your chance of success is 5%. If you are playing a charisma driven class and you have 18 in charisma then that's +3 raising the chance of success to 20%, proficiency at the start of the game is +2, raises to +3 at level 5, and +4 at level 9 so that's another +10-20% right there. Then there are cantrips like guidance that give you +1d4. So really the more the better.

alright, we get it, you're simping for Lae and Minthara, not everyone is trying to get in on that action.

Those were just examples, really. I like Minthara but don't really plan to romance Lae'zel. But even romances aside having high charisma modifiers will probably save you A LOT of trouble just with your party members regardless of who you bring and allows you to exert a lot more influence in A LOT dialogues with NPCs and could even alter the course of the story.

There is a satisfying liberation when you decide you don’t need everything to go right to have the “perfect” play through.

I've played the same scenes with high and low Charisma characters and had fun with both approaches. It really depends on what you want to play.

No matter how much you stack Charisma there's always going to be an appreciable chance of failure. To take chance (almost) entirely off the table you'll want to invest in spells that improve your chances by granting bonuses and things like advantage.

Honestly, the best thing to do is just make sure one of your companions has Guidance. Shadowheart already comes with it. It's an easy +1 to +4 to a check, depending on the roll. Which can be huge. Look for spells like Enhance Ability too. Friends and other Charm effects can come in clutch, but it has a drawback that once it wears off the NPC will get mad, so only use those on NPCs you never intend to meet again. These spells can be on your companions too, you don't need to build around them. They just need to be nearby to cast them on you.

If you have a decent spread of magical bonuses and proficiency in Persuasion you should be fine even with Charisma as low as 10. Just pick and choose where to use your social spells, since you might not have the slots for it on every check.

I agree and well..im playing the game the way I want with the MC and companions I want..at least for the first playthrough. Based on what I've seen and heard, this is a game I will play multiple times for many years.

It was fun because the stakes weren't that high or that serious...yet. But stuff gets VERY real later where the difference between success and failure in a roll can be rather drastic.

I'm pretty sure my Warlock needs a lot of Charisma...

And not only for spells.
Even in the EA were a couple of extremely important roll checks with a difficulty of 20.
I refuse to fail in my attempt to sexually dominate Minthara during her romance !!!

We have no idea how difficult the rolls can be in the second or third act.

BG3 doesn't have a system that quite works like that. Skill checks are always a set difficulty number, generally between 5 and 20. Then you get to roll a die that can be 1-20 and see if you can tie the difficulty number.

Then you get to add different kinds of bonuses to you die result if you need it. Charisma adds 1 point to your roll for every 2 points above base ten. So you can get up to +3 from charisma at the start of the game.

Next you can add in 2 points if you are proficient in the type of skill you are using (persuasion, deception, etc). Some characters can even get expertise on a skill wich lets them get double points so +4 starting off.

Then you can add in some spell and special ability bonuses. There are two basic types:

Things that let you add extra points with dice: like the guidance spell (+1 to 4) and bardic inspiration(+1 to 6).

Things that give you advantage (which lets you roll twice and if either die ties the difficulty you win): Spells like Friends, Thaumaturgy, and Enhance Ability. The general philosphy is that advantage averages out to about +4 on your rolls

Your party can also get Inspiration points from doing things that are important to them, like Gale reading an important book. Using an inspiration point lets you try the whole roll again if you fail.

Plus if you ever roll a 1 you fail automatically and a 20 automatically succedes.

So the math isn't more than just "Is my charisma high enough?"


Note: the math above is based on first through third levels. As you level up, some bonuses get bigger.

We haven't yet seen any rolls that require higher than 20 in the public footage of BG3 so far and don't think any were present in early access but they do exist in D&D and generally speaking if a success requires higher than 20 you still have to meet that value even if you roll a nat 20, so rolling nat 20 and failing a roll is possible in D&D when attempting particularly difficult challenges. I wonder if Larian have implemented this in the game...maybe they didn't but it could be something that comes up later in the game where you might start finding roll difficulties of 25 or even 30 if they want to be like "ok, you can try, good luck with that though".

They have the house rule that nat 1s and 20s work on skill checks, too.

I actually failed an illithid wisdom check 0 one time because I rolled a 1.

Yeah, nat1 is auto-failure no matter what, that's the same as in D&D, not a house rule...generally if a task is deemed to need a roll in the first place a nat1 will fail it. A difficulty of 0 generally means it's super easy but will still require a dice roll if the DM still wants you to have a chance to fail it as it might be a minimal challenge but still a challenge. But I don't know about nat20s...if that is consistent with D&D then in the event that difficulties higher than 20 exist in the game(which we don't know if they do), a nat20 may not succeed...depending on what bonuses you have.

I'd argue that anyone using karmic dice will often find the rolls easier than not.

did they ever clarify the weirdness with those? I read a post that said they were basically always a disadvantage, but Larian said that was a bug and that it should essentially be an advantage?

From what I heard there was a bug in the early days of early access that could cause dice rolls to repeat so you could have like five nat1s in a row and the sorts but that was fixed a long time ago so I don't know why it's still there...but it might not be in the full game. I don't know why they'd put it in the full game unless they want to give the player options for weighted dice that are more likely to higher or more likely to roll lower, etc. as a means of altering difficulty...but they should clarify their purpose if they exist in the final game.