Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Challenge Run Ideas (Baldur’s Gate III)

As BG3 continues to be popular for challenge runs, I thought I’d share a few that came to my mind that I haven’t seen on YouTube yet. Some of these actively incentivise you to use a full party — which I think is worth highlighting, as the interactions with the companions contribute a major party to the game’s appeal. It’s been proven to the Nine Hells and back that you can beat the game solo on Honour Mode, but that isn’t necessarily interesting to watch, among others because it often relies on the same well-known exploits at this point.


So, can you beat Baldur’s Gate III…

• in reverse (from Act III to I)
• using only reactions (e.g. Hellish Rebuke, Commander’s Strike, Riposte, Opportunity Attacks etc.)
• using only surfaces
• using only food (Aspect of the Chimpanzee? Poisoning water myrmidons by eating rotten food? Pizza chef monk?)
• using only words (i.e., Vicious Mockery and Dissonant Whispers, Cutting Words, plus dialogue checks)
• using only concentration spells / abilities
• using only Acid damage
• using only Necrotic damage
• using only familiars (no stronger summons; each companion can have one)
• using four paladins with the four different oaths, without any of them ever breaking their oath even once
• using nothing at all from the vanilla game, only modded races, classes, spells, feats, weapons etc. (I guess this would include the companions and food, i.e. be a solo run without resting…)
• as a Lemming (from the eponymous 90s game, green-haired gnome / halfling, being restricted to the skills lemmings could perform in those games, and the tools / weapons they could use)

Feel free to add your own ideas for challenge runs you have no time to do yourself. I searched first whether a thread like this already exists, but to my surprise, couldn’t find anything. So I thought it would be useful to gather them all in one place.

Yes there are a lot of them but I dont know about popular.

The only one I really enjoyed is this one:

as a Lemming


Someone did a challenge run by "only walking". They got surprisingly powerful, and ultimately, infinitely powerful thanks to a clever trick that kept adding more distance, until they could 1-round-shot, from an RP perspective, everything. Since 1 round is 6 seconds in theory, he'd do a hilarious instant replay accelerated to be 6 seconds long, moving like a demon.

Well, the Walker as a dedicated skill is indeed one of the most powerful ones in Lemmings (especially the fan remake “NeoLemmix”), in particular for cancelling other skills and turning lemmings around.

Applied to BG3, this skill-cancelling would include things like kidnapping characters by picking them up and cancelling the throw / improvised melee attack action — and we all know how broken that gets.

The main thing that would make a Lemming playthrough of
BG3 even possible is the game Lemmings 2: The Tribes, which added a bunch of new (and oftentimes redundant) skills, including the Fencer, which would allow a lemming in BG3 to use swords and rapiers.

In vanilla Lemmings, the most powerful skill is the Builder, which creates a staircase — or, in BG3, a box tower.

A particularly fun, if not very difficult, one is the "All Wizards" party. With the interesting thing being that you can still get a fairly diverse party thanks to Abjuration Tank and MDPS Spellblade builds (You can even have the remaining 2 Wizards split between Summoner/Support and offensive caster). It's a little trickier if you go PURE Wizard rather than allowing multiclass dips (1 level as Fighter on Abjuration Tank for Heavy Armour proficiency, 2 levels as Sorcerer on Summoner for Twinned Haste)

A more challenging run would be to use ONLY enemies as weapons. Meaning throwing and improvised weapon attacks using enemies. You can make it more tricky by banning use of Strength Elixirs meaning that you have to hit 20+ Strength naturally to be able to deal with human-sized enemies (Which means trying to get to Grymforge ASAP for the masks).

Barrels only. While yes, they're OP for cheesing singular encounters. Having to sort out inventory management after the nerfs and manage them tactically to get through all encounters in the game would offer some challenge.