The popular Dungeons & Dragons video game from Larian Studios, Baldur’s Gate 3, has undoubtedly been very successful. The game has made nearly one billion dollars and won multiple awards from The Game Awards, Steam, and more (in fact, it’s the first game to win Game Of The Year at every major gaming industry awards). And after 3 years, the game is still creating new products for fans such as Funko Pops, a new tv series in the works, and they recently announced new books to be published later this year. (Disclaimer – I’m a huge Baldur’s Gate 3 fan so I may be biased here).

Naturally, if Baldur’s Gate 3 is someone’s first introduction into Dungeons & Dragons, then they may be enticed to play the tabletop version of the game as well. Personally, I think that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great starting point for many people new to the game. It’s allows the freedom to learn the basics of the game at your own pacing and schedule without relying on a group of people to play. It gives a safe space to learn the mechanics, to make choices to see the consequences, and get a general sense of how the game works without the fear of being embarrassed in front of other people. Plus, this is where you can learn how other classes work that may end up driving you to create other characters outside of your usual go-to class (for me, Barbarian is always my go-to class).

BUT…

It’s only a good starting point. It shouldn’t be seen as a 100% translation of the game. The best way to describe Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it is a homebrewed game. If you’re not familiar with what homebrew is in Dungeons & Dragons, essentially it’s the idea that someone made their own stuff for their home game, like a setting or a class, that’s not in a published book. So if you’re someone who is making the lead from Baldur’s Gate 3 into Dungeons & Dragons (or maybe vice versa), then here are the most important changes you should know.

(You may be asking yourself here: The game has been out for almost 3 years now. Is this article coming out too late? Maybe. Is it still relevant? I think so. I’m still seeing new players joining the table who said Baldur’s Gate 3 is what got them interested in playing Dungeons & Dragons.)

Special Thanks

I do want to thank the people who have helped me to come up with this list. Special thank you to close friends I call “The Group Chat” as well as those who responded to my post on Threads about this subject.

What This Article Won’t Cover

I’m focusing on rules that is more general and applicable to most situations or characters. I won’t go into specific differences such as class or subclass options, feats, specific spells, etc. This will cover what’s different in the game that is a major change from either 5.0 (2014) and 5.5 (2024) rules. Baldur’s Gate 3 came out between these two versions of the rules – it was built on the 5.0 rules but you can also find many changes in Baldur’s Gate 3 from 5.0 made it into the 5.5 edition. However, if you do want me to cover more specifics, maybe about the differences in the Barbarian class and subclasses, let me know and I can definitely cover that for you. There’s also a good wiki page that goes over a lot of the rules changes from 5.0 Edition of Dungeons & Dragons to Baldur’s Gate 3. It doesn’t capture everything but it is a good start. But I also recommend that you read the rules, which you can read for free by downloading and reading the System Reference Document (SRD). There are two SRDs – one for the 5.0 Edition (which is called the SRD 5.1) and one for the 5.5 Edition (called the SRD 5.2).

Movement, Climbing, And Jumping

In Baldur’s Gate 3, you are able to move around the environment as well as climb on objects around you and being able to jump, which uses a Bonus Action. However, in Dungeons & Dragons, you can still do these things but they work very differently. First of all, Jumping is not a Bonus Action in Dungeons & Dragons – it is part of your movement, so this frees you up to use your Bonus Action for something else. But in order to jump, there are certain rules in place for it that’s based on your Strength score and there may be situations where the Dungeon Master will ask for you to make an ability check to see if you succeed.

Another core difference is that Climbing in Dungeons & Dragons is also part of your movement, but it is treated as Difficult Terrain. This means when you climb, it costs you 2 feet of movement for every 1 foot of movement you make (unless you have what’s called a “Climb Speed” which ignores this rule). In other words, if you are wanting to climb up a ladder that has a movement of 5 feet, it’s going to cost you 10 feet to climb up.

Casting Spells

Casting spells is probably the biggest difference between the video game and the tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG). In Baldur’s Gate 3, the game allows you to use a spell slot to cast a spell during your turn. If you want to cast a leveled spell as an Action and a Bonus Action and you have the spell slots to do it, then the game allows you to do so.

In Dungeons & Dragons, however, this is not the case. 5th Edition and 5.5 have different rules for casting spells but essentially neither one doesn’t allow you to use a spell slot more than once during your turn (and this is oversimplifying it – there are exceptions).

In addition, Baldur’s Gate 3 by and large do not strictly enforce spell components requirements. In Dungeons & Dragons, every spell has at least one spell component: Verbal, Somatic (gesturing of hands) and Material. Some spells may require 2 or 3 of these components. Why does this make a difference? If you are not able to access these components, you may not be able to cast that spell. For example, if you are trying to cast a spell that requires Material and Somatic components, you wouldn’t be able to cast that spell if you are strapped with a shield and holding a weapon since you need a free hand to cast a Somatic component (exception being if you have the War Caster feat). Now, a lot of tables do ignore these rules a lot of time so you may not need to worry about it, but again check with your Dungeon Master on this.

Spell Scrolls

Spell scrolls are a lot of fun in Baldur’s Gate 3 because they can give your characters fun ways to cast spells that they normally don’t have access to or to cast it without using a spell slot. And any character can cast with a spell scroll no matter their class. In Dungeons & Dragons, however, casting with a spell scroll is a little more strict. If the spell on the spell scroll isn’t on your spell list, you can’t cast it. Furthermore, if it is a spell that is on their spell list but is at a higher level than they can currently cast, then they need to make an Intelligence (Arcana) check to see if they are able to cast it – otherwise, the spell disappears from the scroll (along with the action you used to try to cast it).

So your Barbarian cannot cast spells from a spell scroll. Sad day.

Magical Items

We all love magic items for our characters! Baldur’s Gate 3 has some fantastic items that are from Dungeons & Dragons as well as their own magic items they’ve created. By and large, magic items work the same in Baldur’s Gate 3 as well as Dungeons & Dragons, with a couple of slight differences. First, some magic items in Dungeons & Dragons have attunement requirements, which means that you need to meet certain prerequisites to use it. A lot of the requirements are more fun than anything else, but some are specified by class or species. You can also only have a total of 3 attuned magic items. Now, Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have attunement requirements, but they do limit how many items you can have active. For example, the video game will only allow you to have 2 rings, whereas for Dungeons & Dragons, since you have 10 fingers, you could have 10 rings. Same can also be said of a necklace or amulet as well.

Short & Long Rests

Resting in Baldur’s Gate 3 is really interesting but makes sense for a video game. Although they follow the same rules for resource management (e.g. you can only gain spell slots back after taking a Long Rest), the way they work is still different than in Dungeons & Dragons. For example, the video game has a hard cap of two Short Rests per Long Rest, whereas the tabletop game does not have a limit on how many short rests you can take in a day. On the flip side, in Dungeons & Dragons, each Short Rest takes 1 hour to complete (so there’s still kind of a limit on how many Short Rests you can take – just not a hard cap), whereas in Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s just a thing that happens when you click a button.

Long rests are also different. In Dungeons & Dragons, you don’t need a minimum of food supplies to gain the benefits of a full rest (although you do need to have food), and you can’t always Long Rest whenever/wherever you like. If you’re in danger, it’s not a one way ticket out of it.

Throwing Healing Potions

One of our favorite things to do in Baldur’s Gate 3 is to throw things. Some people like throwing weapons, I like throwing goblins at other goblins with my Barbarian. But we all love that we can throw Healing Potions at other members of our party to heal them.

In Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a thing. You can be within 5 feet of a player character and administer it to them, but you can’t throw a healing potion at them and magically heal them (rules as written, anyways).

Now for my home game, sometimes I do allow my table to attempt this but they do have to make a d20 test (roll a d20 to try to succeed) to see if they are able to reach and hit the person with the Potion of Healing. If it succeeds, it goes through as normal but if they fail, then the potion misses, breaks, and is now gone.

Recovering from 0 Hit Points In Combat

Speaking of throwing Healing Potions at party members, you probably know that you can get up on your turn after this happens, or if someone gives you the Help Action to essentially help you back up with 1 Hit Point. Then on your next turn, you can only take a Bonus Action until your next turn.

This is very different in Dungeons & Dragons. First, the Help Action is different. Help only allows you to spend an action to go to an enemy within 5 feet and give Advantage to the next person that makes an attack roll against that enemy (you can also give the Help Action to give a party member Advantage on an ability check that you’re proficient in). But what happens in Dungeons & Dragons if you are down to 0 Hit Points? If someone heals you, you just get back up and you have your full range of actions. Granted you are Prone so you have to spend half your movement getting up, but you still get your full Action back at the start of your turn. But you can’t give the Help Action to have someone get back up with 1 Hit Point – you have to be able to heal them with a potion, a spell, or some other means.

Leveling Up

By the time you finish your Baldur’s Gate 3 campaign (assuming you made it out of spending hundreds of hours out of character creation), you finish your campaign as a Level 12 character. However, in Dungeons & Dragons, your character can go as high up as level 20. The reason for this change in the video game, according to Larian Studios, is because some of the abilities you get at level 13 and higher is much more difficult to program in a video game, particularly the spells.

Additionally, in Dungeons & Dragons, the Dungeon Master can use Experience Points (XP) system to decide when your characters level up (just like in Baldur’s Gate 3) or they can use the Milestone system, which uses specific achievements in the campaign to decide when the character/party will level up.

Conclusion

Although there’s a longer list of differences between the video game and the tabletop roleplaying game, these are among the key, probably most critical, differences between them. Much of the differences also depends on the system as well (for example, drinking a potion as a Bonus Action is a hard rule in 5.5 but not in 5.0). So as long as you are familiar with these changes and you speak to your Dungeon Master about your play experience, you should have a great time transitioning into Dungeons & Dragons.