Baldur's Gate 3 modders are straight-up breaking D&D because "puny rules are meant to be broken"

Baldur's Gate 3 is all about recreating the D&D experience, and there's nothing truer to tabletop roleplaying than breaking the rules and replacing them with your own. That's exactly what most of the game's early mods are already doing.

Take mods like Cleric Unleashed, Fighter Unleashed, and Gnome Unleashed by modder Mharius for example. These mods make characters far more powerful at the early levels, adding things like additional spell slots, more bonus feats, and additional racial abilities. As the description for Warlock Unleashed puts it, "puny rules are meant to be broken."

Not every option over on Nexus Mods is about breaking the rules or making the game easier, but the majority of the most popular are. You can kill off the encumbrance mechanic, get your abilities back after every combat encounter, or get a feat at every single level. It's the equivalent of having the sort of kind DM who'll ask "why don't you make an insight check real quick first" before you make the kind of decision that'll get your character killed.

Are these mods cheating? I mean, yeah, probably. But D&D and single-player PC gaming have this great thing in common: nobody cares when you break the rules. Baldur's Gate 3 is often a punishing game, particularly if you're not familiar with the D&D rules it's based on. But the most important D&D lesson for tabletop neophytes to learn is that it's okay to fudge a few dice rolls now and then.

Baldur's Gate 3 characters are capped at level 12 because late-game D&D spells are too OP, according to the game's developers. But, of course, there's already a mod that lets you (sort of) ignore the level cap.

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.