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Remember how it felt the first time you played Dungeons & Dragons? The first time you felt that creative spark of being part of a collective storytelling experience? You and your friends were each equal parts author and reader of a living, breathing story that existed only at that table, and only in those moments. It’s magic. There’s no other word that quite does that feeling justice.
Watching people play D&D in shows like Dimension 20 is definitely fun, but you’re always part of the audience, not a participant. Some role-playing video games can also elicit those magical moments, but it often feels different—more constrained, since they usually offer more limited choices. Once you see past the illusion of a game's structure, you can’t un-see it. That’s what I was expecting when I first fired up Baldur’s Gate 3—and it’s what I got for the first few hours. But then I saw a glimmer of that deeper magic I’d been craving. So I chased it.
Hitting the (Source) Books
Photograph: Amazon
Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook$50 $43 at Amazon$46 at Bookshop.org
But I needed help. The more I played, the more I found myself feeling like the magic was there but just out of reach. It had been years since I played anything with D&D rules. I started playing D&D with the 3rd edition, and then later the 4th edition, but it’s been almost a decade since I read a rule book. Baldur’s Gate 3 is largely based on D&D 5th edition, which was mostly a mystery to me, so I ordered the D&D 5th Edition Player’s Handbook.
With the Handbook in tow, I got up to speed both on new 5th-edition rules for all the classes, combat, spells, skills, and proficiency bonuses. Confusing aspects of combat and skill checks began to make more sense, and within hours of having it in my lap that book was filled with Post-It notes and dog-eared pages.
In the process of answering my rules-based questions though, the Player’s Handbook also brought the world back to life for me, refreshing my memory about the Forgotten Realms (the setting Baldur’s Gate 3 takes place in) and its lore. As I read, I started to see the game in a different light and felt a flicker of that D&D magic. The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide ($23) and Xanathar's Guide to Everything ($24) are also amazing resources.
Pencils and Snacks Not Included
The experience of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with the D&D reference books really feels more like the tabletop experience. Flipping through pages, wondering if you should try being a Shield Dwarf or a Duergar Dwarf, or choose a Ranger or Sorcerer class, feels exciting. Knowing that your companions and the game world will react to those decisions in unique ways feels a lot like the excitement of coming up with an interesting character to debut at the D&D table.
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This isn’t something video games are typically very good at. Games like Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 acknowledge your character’s dialog choices and certain decisions you’ve made, but beyond a handful of lines here or there about how you grew up on the streets or used to be a corporate shill, your character’s origin and development are static. It’s rare for the dialog and narrative in a game to react to your behavior all that much.
Baldur’s Gate 3 makes the effort to conceptualize a character with thoughtfulness and curiosity (like you would at a D&D table) worthwhile, because the game rewards that extra effort. It feels vibrant and alive in a way that no other RPG has before it, also thanks to some incredible motion-capture and vocal performances.
Whether you’re on your first character or your 100th, no two playthroughs are the same, because no two characters and no two players are the same. The world reacts to your smallest decisions and character choices. It’s a feat of artistic and technical craftsmanship that leaves me in awe every time I play it. There’s a reactivity and reciprocity you get from the characters and world that makes it feel like you’re playing off of one another.
Baldur’s Gate 3 evokes the magic of playing Dungeons & Dragons in a way that I never thought possible, especially in a video game, and it felt even closer to a real tabletop experience with the D&D sourcebooks on hand. The lore that fills those books helps to illustrate just how much this game is both a love letter to Faerun and a timeless contribution to the setting that inspired it.
