How to Help a Downed Teammate in Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 by Larian Studios brings all the DnD style risk and reward mechanics to life in this epic RPG. The combat has layers of complexity, and things like positioning, skill management, and pacing really matter in combat, especially on the higher difficulties. It’s not always easy to balance ,and more often than you’d probably like, you’ll run into the issue of having one of your characters knocked down by a vicious enemy attack. Let’s go over how to help a downed teammate in Baldur’s Gate 3, and what options you have  salvage the situation and get your them back on their feet during a battle.

How to Get Downed Characters Back in the Fight in Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3)

Each time a character on your team gets downed in Baldur’s Gate 3, they will have three death saving throw checks. If all of these are successful, the downed character will be able to pick themselves up and continue with the battle without any assistance being needed from other characters. While this is a neat mechanic, the odds are they won’t make enough successful death savings throws most of the time because you need three consecutive death saving rolls above 10. So it’s wise not to rely on this mechanic and still actively attempt to revive them as quickly as possible otherwise they probably will die. Even if they do manage to revive themselves, chances are they will still be in a precarious position, and if you don’t help secure the area around them, they will probably just go back down again very quickly as they won’t get back up with much HP.

The best thing to do is to cast a healing spell on a downed character. Doing so will allow them get back up from their downed state without your other characters having to get too close to them. If you don’t have a healing spell on hand to use, you can still get over to a downed character and use the ‘Help’ action which you’ll find in your bonus actions tab as the symbol with hands clasped together. Using this action will allow a character to help a downed character get back up and back into the fight.

I highly recommend prioritizing using a healing potion or spell on the team member you just helped and then having them use the ‘Disengage’ action to allow them to back away and reposition without being attacked. This will let you effectively reassess the situation and continue on with the battle.

If you can’t get to a downed character in time to help them and a character does die from failing their death saving roll checks, you will need to have a Scroll of Revivify on hand to use on them to revive them. Unfortunately you are unlikely to have many of these scrolls, so it’s best to try and prevent a character actually dying as much as possible.

That covers how to help downed and dead teammates in Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s something you will need to manage throughout your play-through so do your best to help your teammates when they get downed or you could run into some really rough situations.

For more on Baldur’s Gate 3, check out our guides on skills and proficiency, as well as our explainer on character backgrounds.