This hidden Baldur's Gate 3 setting puts you at risk of taking 400% extra damage - but you can disable it

Baldur's Gate 3 has a hidden setting switched on by default, and it increases the damage players receive from enemies by up to 400%.

Ahead of Baldur's Gate 3's full release on August 3 (PC) and September 6 (PS5), one Reddit user has taken it upon themselves to alert newbies to the hidden setting. This is actually a group effort as although Reddit user Havelok was the one to bring it back to fans' attention, user akdavidxy was actually the one who discovered this trick in the first place.

According to the original player, having the 'Karmic Dice' setting turned on in Baldur's Gate 3, which it is by default, the damage you receive from enemies increases by up to 400%. If you're wondering how they possibly came to this conclusion, don't worry, they've also shown their findings with data and charts.

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As the post explains, akdavidxy did multiple solo playthroughs and when they wanted to "do an 'as defensive as possible' playthrough", they noticed it was quite the struggle. "Of course, the game is not intended to be played through with a single character," the Reddit user writes, "however, having completed the EA with multiple other builds, I noticed that this playthrough was significantly more difficult and I had to reload a lot."

To test this, akdavidxy did some research on their setup beforehand and achieved an armor class of 23, "which should have made me basically unhittable for most enemies." Despite this, even enemies that appear early on in the game still attacked them with around a 30-40% chance. The Baldur's Gate 3 player then recorded one encounter where they let the two goblins standing south of the Blighted Village hit them over and over again at least 100 times - both with Karmic Dice enabled and disabled.

You can head to the post linked above to get a full rundown of the experiment and the results of each method, but the general idea is that in the current version of Baldur's Gate 3, Karmic Dice imposes "a massive penalty" on the player, even more so if you try to run "tanky" (aka high AC) characters, according to the player. In conclusion, if you want to have a somewhat fair experience, akdavidxy suggests switching Karmic Dice off when you start with Baldur's Gate 3.

Preparing yourself for the game's full launch? Find out everything you need to know about the Baldur's Gate 3 difficulty options.

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.