If the door is locked, it means you need a key, right? Yes, but what if there is no key?
Baldur’s Gate 3 might be a new game, but it feels and plays very much like an old-school cRPG.
Answers are not always obvious, and many situations might feel like puzzles even when not designed that way.
Here are a few things you can do to open locked doors:
Lockpick the Door
If you have Thieves’ Tools in your inventory, you can try to open the door without a key. You will have to roll for it, though.
Since the difficulty you must achieve may vary quite a lot, make sure to have the best character for the situation doing the lockpicking.
If you are not playing a Rogue, have Asterion do it. He already starts with a +3 Dexterity bonus.
Add that to his Sleight of Hand Proficiency and Expertise, and you have someone with at least a +7 on his D20 rolls.
Remember to Use Divine Guidance
If you have a cleric in your party, like Shadowheart, you can use her Guidance Cantrip to add a 1d4 bonus to your D20 roll.
So, in the case of opening the door with level 2 Asterion in the early game, you will roll a D20, add +7, and the +1d4.
It might seem overwhelming at first if you are not familiar with D&D rules, but as soon as you understand how d20 rolls (or tests) work, everything will click, and you’ll do it intuitively.
Break the Door
This is a bit harder since you might need a lot of damage to make this work, but it is an option.
Depending on the material of the door, you will need a huge source of damage to be dealt with at once. A high-level spell, for instance, or a barrel explosion.
Either way, breaking doors is an option in this game.
Trick an NPC to Open It
This way of opening the door is a delightful nod to fans of old-school cRPGs. Sometimes you can convince an NPC to open a door and then force your way in.
At times, you can also just make enough noise to make NPCs hunt you. If they are behind a locked door and you want to get in, making enough noise might be enough to get that door opened.
The cRPG Design Philosophy
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a hardcore old-school RPG. It comes from the time when the acronym cRPG (computer roleplaying game) was needed.
However, the spirit of old cRPG remains in this new release, and it rewards creativity and initiative significantly more than most RPG or RPG-like games out there.
Once tabletop RPGs became less popular than video games, we started using RPGs and TTRPGs to differentiate them.
However, some video games based on TTRPGs kept their design philosophy and are referred to as cRPGs to differentiate them from mainstream games with RPG elements.
In cRPGs, many situations are designed as if you were playing with your friends at a table. The challenges force you to think outside the box in every instance of the game, be it combat, exploration, or social encounters.
You might want to try and be creative when situations do not seem to have a solution. Check for items, buttons on walls, weird ways to use traps in your favor, and more.
If nothing works, you can always check one of our guides.
