Baldur's Gate 3
- Justin Matheson
- Mar 3
- 5 min read
You can love Baldur’s Gate 3 and still hate what it does to your team’s decision-making.
That is not a contradiction. It is the point.
BG3 is a turn-based RPG built on Dungeons and Dragons style rules, but the real magic is not the combat system. It is the constant trade-offs. You are always choosing between speed and safety, between “perfect information” and “good enough,” between short-term wins and the long-term consequences you will absolutely forget about until they explode in your face.
If you work with teams, that should sound uncomfortably familiar.
In this post, I want to treat Baldur’s Gate 3 like a low-stakes practice field for a handful of skills most workplaces claim to care about, but rarely give people a safe place to rehearse. Things like shared decision-making, role clarity, and making calls when the data is incomplete.
I am not saying BG3 is a plug-and-play team building game. It is long, complex, and it contains mature content. But if you use it deliberately, it is a surprisingly honest mirror.
The multiplayer version of Baldur’s Gate 3 creates repeated, consequence-heavy decision points that expose how teams communicate, coordinate, and commit.
Baldur’s Gate 3 gameplay and mechanics (the quick overview)
Developer and publisher: Larian Studios.
Where to buy: Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox Store, GOG (verify current storefront availability before publishing).
Core loop in plain English: explore, talk, decide, fight, loot, level up, repeat.
BG3 is turn-based, party-based, and dialogue heavy. You move through a world full of ambiguous problems, you gather partial information through exploration and conversation, and then you commit to decisions that can close doors for the rest of the playthrough.
Workplace analogy: It is like running a project where every stakeholder meeting is also a branching decision tree, and you cannot “roll back” the consequences without losing credibility (or reloading a save).
Why Baldur’s Gate 3 works for soft skills
1) Shared decision-making under uncertainty
BG3 constantly forces teams to decide with imperfect information.
You rarely know the “right” move.
You do know that the team needs to commit to something.
You also know that people will argue for different risks based on values, not facts.
What to watch for in teams:
Who pushes for more information, and how long do they delay?
Who defaults to action, even when the plan is thin?
Does the team run a quick options scan, or does it jump to the loudest opinion?
Workplace parallel:
This is sprint planning, incident response, and stakeholder triage, all wearing fantasy armour.
In my own playthrough of this game, I can think of a certain point in one of the “in-between” times where I completed a major mission and was collecting the rewards and basking in the praise from the NPC’s, when I was confronted with a question and I think I sat there for a 45 minutes trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Did I make the decision as Justin? As my character? Did it matter? Did I navigate towards my values? Or towards what I thought would be a better reward in-game? In the end, I made the wrong choice, but then was able to remember that the next time I was faced with a similar decision. One of the few times in my life I learned from my mistakes!
2) Role clarity and “who owns the call”
In BG3, the party has roles, but the team still has to decide how those roles work:
Who initiates conversations?
Who speaks for the group?
Who does the scouting?
Who manages resources?
You can play with four characters and still have zero clarity, which is exactly what happens in real teams.
What to watch for:
People stepping on each other’s toes.
“Someone should…” language that never becomes an owner.
Unspoken assumptions about who leads.
Workplace parallel:
Project teams with unclear decision rights, unclear handoffs, and unclear escalation rules.
Try this (trainer note):
Before play, assign roles explicitly for one session.
Next session, remove roles and watch what emerges.
Debrief the difference.
3) Values, conflict, and long-term consequences
BG3 is a values engine. Choices have consequences, and not all consequences are immediate.
That creates two useful learning conditions:
Teams have to surface what they value.
Teams have to live with the side effects of those values.
What to watch for:
Does the team avoid conflict, or can it argue well?
Can people disagree without going personal?
When consequences show up later, does the team learn, or does it blame?
Workplace parallel:
Culture is the sum of repeated decisions. BG3 makes that visible.
Implementation tips for trainers (and a couple hard truths)
Baldur’s Gate 3 is an expertise-heavy game. If you are using it for training, that is not a problem, it is the constraint you have to design around.
For BG3 to work in a learning session, you need at least a couple people in the room who are comfortable driving the game, moving the party, managing menus, and keeping the pace moving. Ideally that means gamers. It does not have to mean “power gamers,” but it does mean people who can hold the controller without the whole session turning into a tech support clinic.
This is also a game where observer learning is not just acceptable, it is often the smartest move. The controller can be the “hands,” and everyone else can be the “brain.” You want the group debating options, calling out risks, and owning decisions, not quietly watching one person play a 60-hour RPG.
Here is the upside, once the game is rolling, the skills show up immediately. You do not need to wait for endgame raids, or perfect builds, or a deep system mastery arc. Within the first few decisions, you are already practicing:
shared decision-making with incomplete information,
role clarity and ownership,
conflict and values-based trade-offs,
communication under pressure.
If you want a simple facilitation framing, treat BG3 like a decision simulator, not a content experience. You are not training people to be better at Baldur’s Gate. You are training the conversation that happens when the team has to commit.
To make that conversation visible, give observers a job that matters. Keep it dead simple. Ask them to track:
the decision moment,
what the group decided,
how the group decided,
which pattern showed up (delay, steamroll, consensus, delegated call, etc.).
And when the group inevitably wants to reload a save, do not treat that like failure. Treat it like data. Ask why. Did the team realise the decision process was sloppy? Did someone feel unheard? Did the group avoid the consequence because it felt unfair, or because it felt uncomfortable? That is the real lesson.
A final note on fit, if you have Dungeons and Dragons fans or fantasy RPG players in the room, you have an instant engagement advantage. They will understand the tone, the logic, and the “your choices matter” vibe without much convincing. But even for non-fans, the training value is still there, as long as you build a structure that lets non-gamers contribute through analysis and decision-making, not controller competence.
Accessibility and inclusion note: assume mixed gaming backgrounds. Make controller use optional, rotate roles so nobody is forced into performing gamer competence, and keep psychological safety tight.
Content warning note: BG3 includes mature themes. If you are using this in a workplace setting, you need a clear content policy, and a safer alternative game ready.
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