During Character Creation you’ll get to assign points to your various Ability Scores, the traditional six stats of Dungeons and Dragons: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. These Ability Scores affect nearly every aspect of gameplay, determining, along with Proficiency Bonuses, how likely you are to succeed at Skill Checks, how effective your spells are, whether you hit enemies when you attack in combat, and if you do, how much damage you deal. While their influence varies, any time a d20 is rolled, one of your Ability Scores is probably modifying it in some way. This page will discuss how your starting stats are calculated in Baldur’s Gate 3, including each races’ max stat modifiers and details on the game’s point-buy system for Ability Scores.

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The minimum you can drop an Ability Score is 8, and the maximum is 15 - racial modifiers will raise the floor and ceiling of these stats.

Ability Score Caps and the Point Buy System in Baldur’s Gate 3¶

The classic “player character” range of Ability Scores is 3-18, as determined by rolling 3d6, for an average of 10.5. The higher an Ability Score, the greater bonus it’ll give to related checks - melee weapons tend to add either Strength or Dexterity to Attack Rolls and Damage Rolls, ranged weapons use Dexterity for the same rolls, the Saving Throws for spells cast scale off either Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma, depending on your class, and all Ability Scores have their own related Skill Checks and Saving Throws. The table below lists all Ability Check modifiers based on your Ability Scores:

Unfortunately, Baldur’s Gate 3 is taking a more balanced (read: frugal) approach to Ability Score distribution than the first two games did - gone are the days of rolling digital dice for hours to get an almighty 95+ overall to assign as you see fit. Also gone is the ability to sack an entire stat to its lowest possible value so you can scrounge up extra points for other, more build-friendly stats. In Baldur’s Gate 3 you’ve got a standard point-buy system, with each character getting 27 points to distribute between their six Ability Scores.

If you’re running the math and finding that 27 divided by 6 yields absurdly low results, don’t worry - you can only drop a stat down to 8, at a minimum, and those first eight points in each stat aren’t counted towards your total. It’s not all good news, however, as those 27 points you have to spend on your Ability Scores don’t necessarily equal 27 stat increases - going from 13 points in a stat to 14 costs 2 Ability Points, as does every point thereafter. Furthermore, you can’t increase any stat above 15 during character creation.

In the Early Access version of the game different races had different Ability Score bonuses, with some races being inherently better at certain things than others. Needless to say, this influenced which classes some races were best suited for. In the launch version of the game, however, bland homogeneity is the order of the day, and now every race gets to assign a +2 bonus to a single Ability Sore, and a +1 bonus to another. These bonuses cannot be applied to the same Ability Score.