Baldur's Gate 3 Difficulties and Honour Mode Explained

Baldur's Gate 3 has four preset difficulties, Explorer, Balanced, Tactician and Honour, plus a Custom mode that lets you tune individual rules. Explorer is the story-focused setting, Balanced is the intended baseline, Tactician raises enemy health and accuracy, and Honour Mode adds legendary boss actions and a single save file that cannot be reloaded. Here is exactly what changes on each setting as of November 2026, and how to choose.

The numbers below come from the bg3.wiki Difficulty, Grym and Patch 5 notes pages and Steam's global achievement statistics, all checked in November 2026.

The Difficulty Settings at a Glance

You pick a difficulty when you start a campaign. The wiki's worked example shows how far apart the presets are: a level 4 named enemy in Act One has 46 hit points with a +4 proficiency bonus on Explorer, 67 hit points with +2 on Balanced, and 87 hit points with +2 plus an extra +2 Tactician attack bonus on Tactician.

BG3 difficulty presets compared (bg3.wiki, November 2026)

Setting	Main changes	Reward
Explorer	Enemy max HP 30% lower, party HP bonus, 20% off merchants, +2 proficiency for everyone, no multiclassing	None
Balanced	Baseline rules, 40 camp supplies per long rest	None beyond the standard list
Tactician	Enemy HP usually up 20 to 30%, +2 enemy attack and spell DC, smarter targeting, 80 camp supplies	Critical Hit
Honour	Tactician-style challenge, 30 boss changes with Legendary Actions, single save, stricter action economy	Foehammer and Shining Honour dice
Custom	Pick individual rules, including the Honour ruleset	Depends on settings

All four presets tell the same story with the same quests, companions and endings. What changes is how much room you have for mistakes, and how much preparation fights demand.

Explorer and Balanced: Learning the Game

Explorer is for players who care more about the story than the combat. Enemy maximum hit points drop by 30 percent, your party gets a large hit point bonus, merchants sell for 20 percent less, and every combatant gets +2 to proficiency. Enemies are also described as less ruthless in combat. The trade-off is that multiclassing is disabled, so if you want a hybrid build you need Balanced or higher.

Balanced is the baseline every other mode is measured against. A long rest costs 40 camp supplies, trade prices use the standard 2.5 multiplier, and enemies use their normal abilities without the Tactician boosts. For a first campaign, Balanced is the setting we recommend: fights are tactical enough to teach you the systems, but a bad roll rarely ends the run.

One small detail shows the scale of the gap: in the Iron Throne sequence in Act Three, Explorer gives you 8 turns, Balanced 6 and Tactician 5. Timed encounters are where the difficulty difference is most obvious.

Tactician: Smarter, Tougher Enemies

Tactician is where Baldur's Gate 3 starts to feel like a real tactics game. Enemy maximum hit points usually rise by 20 to 30 percent, with larger increases for many bosses. Non-party characters get +2 to attack rolls and +2 to the DC of their spells and abilities, and enemies focus spellcasters more often and try to finish off downed characters.

Some enemies gain entirely new tricks. The wiki's examples: Intellect Devourers get a ranged psychic attack, Cambions can cast Fire Bolt, and Commander Zhalk on the nautiloid can attack twice. Long rests cost 80 camp supplies instead of 40, and the merchant discount from good attitude is smaller, so items cost more and sell for less.

The reward is the Critical Hit achievement for finishing the game, which only 6.4 percent of Steam players have as of November 2026. If you want to prepare, our best class breakdown and feat guide focus on the builds that hold up when enemies hit harder.

Honour Mode: One Save, No Do-Overs

Honour Mode arrived with Patch 5 in November 2023 and is the hardest way to play. It builds on Tactician-level challenge and adds 30 boss changes, many of them Legendary Actions: abilities a boss can use at the end of another creature's turn. Grym, the golem guarding the Adamantine Forge, is a good example. In Honour Mode it gains Adamantine Reverberation, 10 temporary hit points and doubled movement, and breaking those hit points releases a 4d8 thunder shockwave. Our Adamantine Forge guide covers how to handle that fight.

The defining rule is the save system. You get one save file for the whole campaign, and it can only be loaded from the main menu. The save is overwritten whenever you return to the main menu, quit, force-close the game, quicksave or autosave, so there is no way to reload a bad decision. If your entire party dies, you choose between continuing in Custom mode, which ends the Honour run, or ending the campaign, which deletes the save. Restoration pods can only be used once.

The ruleset also tightens action economy and damage stacking. According to the Patch 5 notes, extra actions from Haste and Elixir of Bloodlust no longer benefit from Extra Attack (Action Surge still does), Pact of the Blade no longer stacks with Extra Attack, and most bonus damage riders stop combining, with Tavern Brawler and several items adjusted to match. About 100 items had price changes and some changed rarity.

Finishing earns the Foehammer achievement and the golden Shining Honour D20 dice skin. On Steam just 3.2 percent of players have Foehammer as of November 2026, which makes it one of the rarest achievements in the game.

Custom Mode: Build Your Own Challenge

Custom mode lets you set individual rules instead of a preset. The options include:

• Ruleset: Standard or Honour, locked once the campaign starts. You can choose the Honour ruleset without the single save, which is a good way to practice.
• Enemy aggression, character power, enemy loadouts and combat mechanics: each set to Explorer, Balanced or Tactician behavior.
• Proficiency bonus: from -1 to +4.
• Camp cost multiplier: 0.5x to 3x, which means 20 to 120 supplies per long rest.
• Trade price modifier: 1x to 4x, with 2.5x as the default.
• Toggles for enemy critical hits, death saving throws, free first strikes, short rest full heals, multiclassing and always prompting reactions, plus options to hide NPC health or dialogue check difficulty.

Custom mode is also where an Honour run lands if your party wipes and you decide to continue. That keeps the story alive, but the Honour run itself is over. Custom is equally useful in the other direction: players who find Balanced too easy but Tactician too punishing on supplies can keep Tactician enemies while lowering the camp cost multiplier, or raise the proficiency bonus for a gentler start without touching enemy behavior.

Habits That Keep an Honour Run Alive

Most Honour runs do not end in the final battle. They end in an ordinary fight in Act One or Two where one bad round snowballs into a party wipe. A few habits make a big difference.

• Treat every death as recoverable, not every wipe. A single fallen companion can still be brought back: Withers resurrects dead companions at camp for 200 gold, so keep that gold in reserve at all times. A full party wipe is the only thing that ends the run.
• Scout before you start fights. Many encounters can be opened on your terms with careful positioning, high ground and ranged characters ready. Since Tactician-level enemies target casters and finish downed characters, keep fragile party members out of the first wave.
• Budget for long rests. Tactician already doubles the long rest cost to 80 supplies, and Honour is no gentler, so pick up food everywhere and do not skip rests before known boss fights.
• Respect the save rules. Quitting, returning to the menu and autosaves all overwrite your single file, so there is no taking back a choice by closing the game.
• Plan builds that do not rely on stacking riders. Since Patch 5 the Honour ruleset stops most bonus damage sources from combining, so builds that depend on several riders at once lose more value than straightforward high-attack builds.

Finally, learn the bosses before you face them. The 30 boss changes are what separate Honour from Tactician, and reading a boss page before the fight costs nothing in a mode where you cannot reload.

Which Difficulty Should You Pick?

For a first playthrough, pick Balanced unless you are new to turn-based games or mostly want the story, in which case Explorer is fine. Players who know Dungeons and Dragons rules or have finished another Larian game usually enjoy Tactician from the start.

Save Honour Mode for a later run. It rewards knowing which fights are coming, which items matter and where the save will overwrite. A Custom game with the Honour ruleset but without the single save is an excellent rehearsal: you learn the legendary actions and the tighter damage rules without risking a 100-hour campaign on a single bad turn. Our achievement roadmap shows how to fit Tactician and Honour into a broader completion plan.

Whatever you choose, remember that Honour Mode is the one setting you cannot treat casually: the moment its single save is created, every decision is permanent. The other presets forgive experimentation, so they are the right place to learn a new class or try a risky story choice.

If Honour Mode Is the Last Trophy Standing

Foehammer and Critical Hit are the two achievements that stop most completion attempts. PS5 players who would rather not grind them can look at the Platinum Trophy service for Baldur's Gate 3, which covers the full trophy list on your account, with optional realistic time-stamps that spread unlocks across separate dates. It is PS5 only. Other services for the game are listed on the Baldur's Gate 3 hub.

Frequently Asked Questions