Advantage and disadvantage in Baldur's Gate 3 explained

Advantage and disadvantage in Baldur's Gate 3 both add a second dice to your ability and attack rolls, then force you to take the lower or higher of the two results, depending on which one you have. Advantage and Disadvantage both do a lot to change the way the game is played, and BG3 will be brutal if you can't get to grips with them quickly. With that in mind, I'll explain advantage and disadvantage in Baldur's Gate 3 below, and how you can understand this system to your adva- er, benefit.

What are advantage and disadvantage in Baldur's Gate 3?

Advantage and disadvantage in Baldur's Gate 3 are special modifiers to dice rolls, both in and out of combat. Here's what they actually do:

• Advantage: Your character rolls the D20 dice twice and takes the higher of the two results.
• Disadvantage: Your character rolls the D20 dice twice and takes the lower of the two results.

Obviously this is a very big factor that can drastically increase or lower your chances, though it doesn't guarantee success or failure either way. Rolling two high numbers means you can still succeed on a disadvantaged check, and rolling two very low numbers means you can still fail even with advantage (and that never feels good). 

Aside from that, both rolls have all the usual penalties, modifiers and bonuses they would normally have. It's also important to know that advantage and disadvantage don't stack, but they do cancel each other out. You also can't get advantage or disadvantage on healing or damage rolls, but you can get them on the attacks themselves. So you can get advantage on the roll to hit the enemy, but not on the amount of damage you do when the hit lands.

How do you get advantage and disadvantage in Baldur's Gate 3?

Advantage and disadvantage are gained in all manner of ways in Baldur's Gate 3, usually representing some temporary or situational circumstance that heavily modifies what you're doing. Here are some examples of things that can grant advantage and disadvantage:

• You get advantage on…
  • Attacks made while hidden or unseen.
  • Attacks made on enemies who are prone.
  • Persuasion checks made on characters under the effect of the Friends or Charm Person spell (though you risk Baldur's Gate 3 hostile NPCs attacking afterwards)
  • Perception checks while playing as an Elf.
  • Animal Handling checks after casting the Animal Friendship spell.
• You get disadvantage on…
  • Attacks made in darkness when your character doesn't have Darkvision.
  • Melee attacks using Heavy weapons when you play as one of the small Baldur's Gate 3 races.
  • All checks except saving throws while afflicted by the Frightened condition.
  • Ranged attacks made on enemies while you are in an enemy's melee range.

Of course, these are just a few examples of a lot of occurrences of things that can alter the rolls you make. However, you'll be able to see if you have advantage or disadvantage on the check before you commit to making it, so use that to help decide what you do!

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