Baldur's Gate 3 player proves that fate is a skill issue, custom-orders a mod without 'a tiny bit of logic' behind it to turn all their rolls into 1s and beats the game anyway

Shadowheart looks very, very distraught in Baldur's Gate 3. — (Image credit: Larian Studios)

When you roll a one in Baldur's Gate 3—heck, in any TTRPG—it's easy to blame lady luck for your failures. I myself am guilty of a frustrated 'oh, come on' when my d20s betray me, and I'm not even the kind of guy to build a dice jail to punish their polyhedrons with.

And you know what? For shame, because it turns out we've all just been making excuses for ourselves. Challenge run wunderkind Proxy Gate Tactician (who also recently beat the game by casting the worst spell over 2,000 times) refuses to blame the dice for his failures. After all, only a poor workman blames his tools.

It doesn't take a rules lawyer to tell you that making every single attack roll, ability check (including initiative rolls) and damage roll a measly natural one makes the game extremely difficult. So difficult, in fact, that nobody's thought to mod that into the game before.

Proxy had to recruit modders to custom-make the accursed ruleset for him. "You do realise that such a mod would mean you never hit anyone, right" asks one baffled modder, like a renaissance artist who was just ordered by their noble patron to craft 100 paintings of the same apple. "It's 100% doable," they add, "I just can't see even a tiny bit of logic behind the request." A separate modder by the name of JuuM simply wrote "I'll get back to you in a bit" and had the thing cooked up a few hours later.

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In 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop ruleset that Baldur's Gate 3 is based on, missed attacks tend to do diddly squat. Guaranteed damage tends to come from spells, which often rely on dice entirely with nary a flat modifier in sight. Some late-game class features solve this, but for the most part Proxy is doomed to plink away with mighty one-damage attacks and spells in a game where enemy HP reaches into the hundreds.

Fortunately, Baldur's Gate 3 has a few key items to help them out. Several weapons carry the 'tenacity' trait, which lets wielders deal damage equal to their strength modifier on a miss. Proxy, uh, puts this on a character with a strength modifier of one for some reason. Which means he deals one damage with tenacity.

I thought this was an admirable commitment to the bit at first, but it turns out Proxy just had no idea, as he writes in a comment reply to a one @bemjanim138 under the video: "Well I wish I knew that before lmao. I should have realised that when I got to Act 2." Now that's some bad luck.

The main star of the show here is the spell Magic Missile. While it deals 1d4 (in Proxy's case, 1) force damage per dart with a minimum of 3 darts fired, there are a few items that help. Proxy doesn't list 'em all in the video, but they've likely got the Spellsparkler staff equipped—which allows him to generate lightning charges, using spells that add another all-important point of lightning damage while he's buffed by them. Nothing to sniff at when it applies to every dart, too.

Gale of Waterdeep, a wizard, smiling confidently in a tavern in Baldur's Gate 3. — (Image credit: Larian Studios)

He also mentions in a comment under the video that he's using "a ring near Balthazaar in Act 2", which should be the Callous Glow Ring. It adds a measly 2 radiant damage when you harm an illuminated enemy (a straightforward ask when combined with the Coruscation Ring), but that's a whopping 300% damage increase for the Sword Coast's unluckiest dude.

I'm honestly just impressed that Proxy went through with it at all. As he points out several times, rolling poorly on saving throws turns several enemies from nothing-burgers into fight-ending stunlockers—and Act 3's final boss is a literal DPS race against an unforgiving clock. "It took haste spores, speed potions, and 78 magic missiles straight to the dome," Proxy reveals—but hey, the brain dies.

After a long, arduous journey (and a little help from control spells like Spike Growth), Proxy finally achieved what no-one thought possible: beating Baldur's Gate 3 with the worst luck imaginable. Every dialogue check bungled, every attack missed, every damage roll muted—and still he came out on top.

You can't argue with the results, just the horribly self-defeating methods. So the next time you curse your dice for letting you down in Baldur's Gate 3, remember that it's entirely possible to beat the game with the worst luck imaginable. Fate, it turns out, is a skill issue.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.