Baldur's Gate 3: Is It Like Dungeons & Dragons?

With Baldur's Gate 3 slowly creeping around the corner and launching this week, gamers are wondering how similar the title is to Dungeons & Dragons, one of the most popular Table-Top Role Playing Games of all time. We're here to explain the link between the two. 

Is Baldur's Gate 3 anything like Dungeons & Dragons?

Baldur's Gate 3 is based on Dungeons & Dragons, with the entirety of the explorable world being known as the 'Forgotten Lands', which are the various pieces of land that the DND books are set within. Larian Studios have licensed the contents of Dungeons & Dragons and the various worlds within the source books and adventure books. It's not just that in which Baldur's Gate 3 is linked to Dungeons & Dragons, however, as it takes another important element from Dungeons & Dragons.

Baldur's Gate 3 is based on the fifth edition ruleset for Dungeons & Dragons, which has been hailed as one of the better systems that DnD has ever run on. It simplified a lot of the game, removing a lot of unnecessary elements and putting the emphasis back on roleplaying rather than making it so that you had to stop playing the game every five minutes in order to pull out your calculator and do maths. As part of this, the game also uses the lore and races from Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, meaning that any already existing Dungeons & Dragons players can just simply jump in and give it a shot.

You're going to want to familiarise yourself with how stats work in Dungeons & Dragons, how Initiative works, and how the entire world works. If you don't do this then you'll rapidly find yourself extremely quickly out of your depth, but luckily you can find a lot of resources online that delve deep into how everything works and how every system works together.