Customizing a Baldur’s Gate 3 character at the start of the game can be a daunting task, but this initial round is only the first foray into a world of rich choices and extensive freedom to tweak and retool. Some of the later ways to edit characters are obvious, like selecting new spells and feats when leveling up, but others can be a little easier to miss. Most importantly, it isn’t only a custom Tav protagonist that can be the recipient of major overhauls, as Baldur’s Gate 3 offers opportunities to overhaul the whole party according to personal preferences.
Fundamental changes to characters in Baldur’s Gate 3‘s inspiration, Dungeons & Dragons, can vary between groups. How much freedom players should have to go back to the drawing board is ultimately up to the dungeon master in some regards. Multi-classing is officially supported, as is rolling a new character after one dies, but retconning a character’s unique attributes is often best determined on a case-by-case basis. For Baldur’s Gate 3, of course, there has to be one universal set of rules, and developer Larian Studios has chosen to err on the side of more liberal possibilities.
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Withers Can Respec Characters In Baldur’s Gate 3
Withers is a particularly mysterious presence in any Baldur’s Gate 3 camp, with a dried-up undead appearance and a refusal to answer too many questions that can gesture toward an unknown backstory that begs to be told. Even for those who find him unwelcome, however, his utility is what really makes him hard to ignore. Although he’s happy to criticize the protagonist or scorn certain ideas, Withers is also willing to provide some extraordinary help, and he can be a saving grace for any campaign that’s going poorly.
Resurrecting party members and recruiting hirelings from Withers are particularly memorable possibilities, which can respectively boost fighting power going into a battle and recover tragic situations coming out of one. His most transformative skill, however, is the ability to change the class of a character and reset them to Level 1 for customization purposes while maintaining their XP. The service costs only 100 gold, which seems like a nominal fee considering just how transformative it is, and comes in at half the cost of one of his resurrections.
Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t exactly hide Withers’s respeccing prowess, but it does make it fairly easy to ignore or forget about. In dialogue with Withers, it’s listed beneath other options, and the description merely mentions changing class in a way that could just as easily refer to general multi-classing. Anyone who doesn’t much care for hirelings might also end up leaving Withers alone by the time they might want to respec and change classes in Baldur’s Gate 3, and the undead figure isn’t the sort of character to seek the protagonist out to complain about general neglect.
Respeccing Party Members Can Completely Change BG3
Respeccing a Tav character is a good way to patch up character creation or leveling regrets, but assigning new classes to other party members is even more of a game-changer. One major benefit of this feature is the ability to build a party around personalities, as a group of four that might not synergize well in combat by default can be customized to work as an effective unit. It also makes it possible to assign a Tav to an Origin character’s class without running into any redundancies, as the duplicate could then be offloaded to one of the classes that aren’t featured among the group.
At the same time, it’s easy to introduce some major discrepancies by tinkering with pre-ordained classes. Gale’s relationship with Mystra doesn’t make much sense if he lacks any spells in combat, and Wyll’s pact with Mizora is completely narratively incompatible if he isn’t a Warlock. Baldur’s Gate 3 handles these issues in the simplest way possible — the story stays the same, and the mechanical disconnect simply has to be accepted — so whether it’s a sacrifice worth making ultimately depends on individual preferences regarding immersion and ludonarrative dissonance.
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Some Baldur’s Gate 3 Spellcasters Get Extra Flexibility
It’s still better to make character creation and leveling choices carefully in Baldur’s Gate 3, as the ease of access to respeccing doesn’t make the process any simpler overall. Interestingly, some magical classes do get more general freedom to conveniently respec certain attributes than they do in DnD. Clerics, Druids, and Paladins can all swap spells at will outside of combat, and Wizards can choose between any that are already in their spellbook — actions that have to be taken specifically at rests in the tabletop game.
Options like this aren’t always clearly explained in Baldur’s Gate 3, as tutorializing all the ins and outs of the DnD rulebook would bog down the early parts of the game to an unreasonable degree. Newcomers who are unsure about whether certain things are possible should generally consider turning to a search engine whenever they have a question. Assuming that the game doesn’t allow something because it’s not immediately obvious can often lead to missing out on major features, making the journey harder than it has to be.
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It’s fully possible to play through Baldur’s Gate 3 comfortably without turning to Withers to respec characters, but it’s always good to keep the option in mind should the situation call for it. It’s also one of the many features that increase the replay value of a long and involved game, as shifting around the gameplay options for party members can make revisited battles feel fresh again. Withers has a lot to offer in Baldur’s Gate 3, and respeccing custom characters and party members might just be the most exciting thing he puts on the table.
Baldur’s Gate 3
- Franchise
- Baldur’s Gate
- Platform(s)
- macOS , Microsoft Windows , PlayStation 5
- Released
- August 31, 2023
- Developer(s)
- Larian Studios
- Publisher(s)
- Larian Studios
- Genre(s)
- RPG
- ESRB
- M
