Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General How do I start? New to the game.

I received a copy of BG3 on Steam as a Christmas present. Finally installed it, was impressed to see a built-in mod manager on the main menu.

Do you have any advice on what character I should create for my first playthrough? The choices are bewildering (but not as bewildering as WOTR) and I'm paralyzed by the sheer choices available. Should I take one o the origin characters instead?

For info, I've played Pathfinder WOTR (I liked the game but I found it difficult to learn to play), Larian's Divinity Original Sin and DOS2; the fallout games 1, 2, 3, NV, 4, 76; Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077. And the OG BG & BG2 back in the day.

Thank you.

Hey, welcome and have fun.
You can play anything you want. What did you like in the old BG games - which class or race? Maybe try that for first playthrough.
I would also recommend to not rush things or get yourself spoiled. No matter what you do, you can always end the game, so don't be worried to get stuck.
My personal race/class combo is halfling bard, but really everything is a good choice, just make sure, you have fun.

And I would recommend to play without mods for your first playthrough. ANd maybe start with a custom character and not an origin, especially not Dark Urge on first playthrough.

The only advice I could give to a beginner, is to start with a custom character. I would not take an origin for the first run. Firstly, because the origins all have some weird quirk in their backstory which you might not like, whereas for a custom character you make up your own backstory entirely. Secondly, when I played an origin (Karlach) it was much less satisfying than having Karlacjh around as companion, as you miss out all her preset responses and banter. So, my experience is that the origin you play youself comes out poorer than as a companion.

Apart from this, I don't think it is very useful to give you "my" preference. I think you should consider some obvious personal preferences : Would you want to lead in battle and use priomarily melee attacks ? Or are you a magic enthusiast ? Or do you want to be able to use both in a supporting role for the frontline tank ? As for races. Same, take the one you feel most comfortable with.

Then go out and see if it works out as you expected or not. With all you leanred on the way you can restart a campaign with a different race/class combo. I expect that to be the way it went for the majority of new players.

With what's already been said the only further advice I would give is to avoid looking into any guides and just jump into the game blind and get surprised, do not worry about making mistakes.

The game is packed with so much content that some portions of it can only be experienced with mistakes in mind and there is no way you can experience everything in your first playthrough, just have fun with it.

The game is designed so you can do whatever you want. It is not like Pathfinder games that will kill you if you didn't optimise your build well enough. Pick whatever race and class seems most cool to you. You can also pretty freely respec later on if you want to change your class later.

Like others I would recommend Custom first - perhaps, Dark Urge, as from what I played I found his bits less effective, knowing the vanilla run.

Playing as Dark Urge you kill pretty girls and cute fluffy animals - be warned.

I agree with the good advice above, including starting with a custom character, though if you enjoy a darker, bloodier tale the Dark Urge may be for you. I think the origins are best experienced as companions, especially to begin with, and a custom character or Durge gives you a lot more freedom to create a character that’s yours.

The only thing you’re really stuck with is your race, as you can change class for a bit of gold and appearance at will from relatively early in the game. There are some synergies with some races’ special features and specific classes, but the game is forgiving enough especially on balanced difficulty that any race can succeed with any class. So you can just pick whatever race and class combo you think is cool. But if there’s a particular sort of class you’ve liked playing in other RPGs you might want to start with that. (Personally, pretty much every cRPG I play, my first run is as a magic user with a flavouring of rogue, then I try other options if I like the game enough to play more than once!)

But others have already said, don’t sweat it too much, give yourself permission to respec or restart, play around, experiment with tactics and have fun!

Thank you for all the replies.

Are you the sort of person that can play a game for multiple play throughs? If you are, go for something you are familiar with, [melee is laezel, blasting is gale, sneaking is astarion and blasty, bashy supporty is Shadowheart]

Play through, have a ball, after a few levels, restart with something you want to do.

Save frequently.

Once you have Withers, you can rebuild all characters, so you can change things about, at the drop of a hat.

Character personality is important, I leave Gale & Wyll in camp, as I think they are dicks

Dogmeat is called Scratch!

Enjoy yourself and please come back for tips or questions, we are always happy to give a wide variety of replies

I think this is the best guide

https://bg3.wiki/

I agree with most of the other people. You've clearly played a lot of party-based RPGs before so I'm sure you can build a character. You can change quite a bit of your custom character once the game gets properly started (after the prologue), but once I've started a character it just didn't feel right to change them much.

Don't worry too much about exactly what to build because the game is quite forgiving in the easier modes. Don't look at too many guides unless you're actually stuck because it's much more fun to see the story fresh, at least the first time. Do use quicksave, because I think the autosaves are a bit too infrequent. Combat can be slow, and it's really annoying if everyone dies and you have to start again. Yes, you can save in combat or in conversation. Don't try too hard to avoid failure, because this game sometimes gives you interesting consequences for failing a roll.

Oh, and when you start picking up magic items, use them. If you've played D&D 5e you'll know about how you can only use 3 attuned magic items at once. BG3... doesn't really have that limit so you can have powerful magic items on any part of the body you can fit clothing or accessories on. I've got a really fun combo going on now with a lightning-based sorcerer with loads of different magic items to boost his lightning powers.