Baldur’s Gate 3 resolves a turn with four separate pools, not one: an Action, a Bonus action, a Reaction and a Movement allowance. The on-screen bar reads like a single budget, but each pool recharges independently and each has its own list of things that can spend it. This page is the tabular version — what each resource costs, how spell level changes what a turn can hold, and which reactions fire during someone else’s turn and decide who acts next.
What this covers: The Action, Bonus action, Movement and Reaction costs behind a Baldur’s Gate 3 turn, plus the spell-slot scaling and reaction-timing rules that decide turn order. Why it matters: Most turn-order mistakes are not damage mistakes. They are a misread reaction window, an extra Action that cannot use Extra Attack, or an upcast that silently raised a Counterspell difficulty. Who should use it: Anyone planning Honour Mode runs or multiclass dips who needs the numbers rather than the summary.
The turn’s four pools
The wiki’s action page states that taking an action “usually requires the acting creature to expend one of three resources” — Action, Bonus action or Reaction — and that “all creatures have 1 charge of each of the three resources that recharges at the beginning of each turn.” Movement is tracked separately: “Movement speed determines how far a creature can move on its turn, on a 1:1 ratio.”
| Pool | Charge | Recharges | Typical spend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Action | 1 | Start of the creature’s own turn | Main Hand Attack, Ranged Attack, Throw, Dash, Disengage, Help, most spells |
| Bonus action | 1 | Start of the creature’s own turn | Dip, Jump, Shove, Off-Hand Attack, Cunning Action, quickened and class actions |
| Reaction | 1 | Start of the creature’s own turn | Opportunity Attack, Shield, Counterspell, Hellish Rebuke |
| Movement | race-based allowance | Start of the creature’s own turn | Walking and jumping; Dash doubles it for the turn |
| Spell slots | per caster table | Long rest (short rest for Warlock slots) | Casting, and the level a spell counts as |
Two details in that table are the ones players miss. First, “a few actions require both an Action and a Bonus action to be expended when they are taken” — the wiki names the smite-family spells, which represent “making a physical attack while casting a spell to enhance it.” Second, a Reaction is not strictly one per round: it is one charge that refreshes at the start of your own turn, so a Reaction spent on an enemy’s turn is back when your turn begins.
What each common action costs
The wiki sorts actions into common, class, racial, situational, weapon and spell actions. The common list is the floor that every build shares:
| Common action | Costs |
|---|---|
| Main Hand Attack, Ranged Attack, Throw, Unarmed Strike | Action |
| Dash, Disengage, Help, Improvised Melee Weapon, Perform | Action |
| Dip, Jump, Shove | Bonus action |
| Off-Hand Attack (Melee), Off-Hand Attack (Ranged) | Bonus action |
Class features move entries between those rows. The clearest example the wiki gives is the Rogue’s Cunning Action, which “allows a character to Dash, Disengage or Hide as a bonus action” — two common Actions relocated into the Bonus action pool, which is why a Rogue can move, hide and still attack in one turn.
Extra attacks are free attacks, not extra Actions
This is the most misread line in the frame data. The exceptions list says classes with Extra Attack “may take one additional Free Attack action on their turn after taking an Attack action, without expending an Action resource,” and that level 11 fighters with Improved Extra Attack “can take two additional Free Attack actions.” The Action bar still shows one pip; a level 5 martial simply resolves two attack rolls with it.
That distinction matters because not every additional Action inherits the Extra Attack sequence:
| Source of the Action | Extra Attack applies? | Result for a level 5 martial |
|---|---|---|
| Your normal Action | Yes | 2 attacks |
| Action Surge (Fighter 2) | Yes — a full Action | 2 + 2 = 4 |
| Haste’s extra Action (standard mode) | Yes | 2 + 2 = 4 |
| Haste’s extra Action (Honour Mode) | No — one weapon attack | 2 + 1 = 3 |
| Elixir of Bloodlust’s post-kill Action (Honour Mode) | No | one extra attack |
| Extra Attack feature itself | n/a — it is the sequence | — |
The Honour Mode column is where BG3 parts company with the tabletop, and Larian’s own notes confirm both the rule and its enforcement. The wiki’s Haste page states the design intent: “The granted extra Action is significantly stronger than the one given by the D&D 5e version of the spell; in the tabletop game, that Action can instead only be used to take the Dash, Disengage, or Use an Object actions, or to make a single weapon attack,” and that “Honour mode largely returns the granted extra Action to tabletop functionality.” Patch 6 then records the fix that made the restriction behave: Larian fixed “an issue in Honour Mode where a character with Haste condition could sometimes lose their Extra Attacks on the next turn after executing an Attack of Opportunity,” and separately that “the additional attack granted by Haste no longer grants Extra Attack to the Slayer Form.” Honour Mode itself arrived with Patch 5, whose highlights list “Two new play modes: Honour Mode and Custom Mode.”
One secondary reference — the Gamers.Wiki guide “Honour Mode: Extra Actions and Extra Attack” — collects the whole Honour Mode list in a single table and calls Action Surge “the important Action-based exception” while noting that Pact of the Blade’s Deepened Pact “grants an Extra Attack feature instead of an Action.” Treat it as a guide rather than a primary source; its Honour Mode rows match the behaviour Larian’s notes describe.
Spell level changes what a turn can hold
A spell costs a slot of its level or higher, and the slot level is part of the frame data even when the effect does not change. The wiki’s spell page is blunt about it: “Even if it gains no other benefit, a spell always counts as the level of the slot used to cast it (for effects such as Counterspell).”
| Spell | Native level | What upcasting actually does |
|---|---|---|
| Haste | 3 | “Casting this spell at a higher level grants no additional benefit.” |
| Shield | 1 | “Casting this spell at a higher level grants no additional benefit.” |
| Counterspell | 3 | “can be upcast to counter spells of higher levels without requiring a check.” |
| Cantrips | 0 | Cast at will; “do not expend spell slots” |
Where a caster’s slots come from changes how often a turn can be built around them. Full casters follow this table; the wiki defines effective spellcaster level (ESL) as class level for full casters, and as the summed fractional level of every spellcasting class “rounded down” for multiclass characters.
| ESL | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2 | 3 | — | — | — | — | — |
| 3 | 4 | 2 | — | — | — | — |
| 4 | 4 | 3 | — | — | — | — |
| 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | — | — | — |
| 6 | 4 | 3 | 3 | — | — | — |
| 7 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 1 | — | — |
| 8 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | — | — |
| 9 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | — |
| 10 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | — |
| 11 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 12 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
Warlocks sit outside that table: “Spell slots granted by Pact Magic are always of the highest level the warlock can cast, and are replenished on a short rest. Spells cast using Pact Magic are always upcast at the highest possible level,” and “levels taken in warlock are ignored when calculating ESL.”
Reaction windows
Reactions are the part of the turn that happens when it is not your turn. The wiki defines them as “actions taken in response to a trigger, and can be taken even if triggered on another creature’s turn,” and splits them into those that “require the acting creature to expend a Reaction resource” and those that do not — the second group “are generally class features which use the reaction system, such as Divine Smite, Reckless Attack, or Sneak Attack.”
| Reaction | Cost | Trigger window |
|---|---|---|
| Opportunity Attack | 1 Reaction | “an enemy moving out of your reach” |
| Shield | 1 Reaction + level 1 slot | “When you are about to be hit by an enemy” |
| Counterspell | 1 Reaction + level 3 slot | a spell being cast; “Stop a spell from being cast” |
| Divine Smite, Sneak Attack, Reckless Attack | no Reaction charge | class-feature triggers |
| Legendary Actions (Honour Mode bosses) | a separate resource | triggered like reactions, off-turn |
The Opportunity Attack row carries the most conditions, and they decide whether a retreat is actually safe. Disengage is the counter — “The Disengage Action allows creatures to avoid provoking opportunity attacks.” The wiki also lists what switches the window off: wielding ranged weapons; conditions that prevent Reactions such as Prone, Incapacitated or Sleeping; and being “unable to see the target for any reason.” Polearm Master inverts the trigger, allowing “an opportunity attack when creatures move into reach if using polearms.”
A second list is the one that decides Honour Mode fights. These conditions “prevent creatures from spending Reaction resources”: Arms of Hadar, Dazed, Shocking Grasp, Slowed and Surprised. Crucially, that list “does not prevent affected creatures from taking reactions which do not consume the Reaction resource” — and “Legendary actions performed by bosses in Honour mode … are triggered like reactions but use a different resource making them unaffected by these conditions.”
Counterspell is the reaction with actual arithmetic. Its check “difficulty is equal to 10 plus the level of the spell you are trying to counter,” it can be upcast “to counter spells of higher levels without requiring a check,” “Cantrips can also be counterspelled,” and “Counterspell cannot be counterspelled.” The wiki also logs a bug: when countering a higher-level spell, “the Counterspell caster’s Intelligence modifier is used instead of their spellcasting ability modifier as the tooltip states.”
Shield is the cheapest reaction in the game: one level 1 slot for “+5 Armour Class,” immunity to Magic Missile and a one-turn duration. It is also a trap for upcasters — a higher slot changes nothing, and the wiki notes that item-granted Shield “does not provide any beneficial effects which would otherwise normally last until the start of the caster’s next turn.”
The reaction queue is locked before it resolves
One rule above all of these decides contested turns. The wiki states that “the set of reactions triggered by an event are determined before any of them take effect,” and that “a character cannot apply more than one reaction to the same event if any of them prompt for confirmation.” Its worked examples: a character with both Counterspell and Psionic Backlash set to prompt “cannot use Counterspell to negate the spell and Psionic Backlash to deal damage for the same event,” and an ally whose save initially succeeds locks out a reaction that assists failed saves even if a later reaction lowers the roll into failure.
Reactions also ignore damage that originates from conditions and surfaces, from grenade and barrel explosions, and “Concentration saves and death saves.” The wiki’s summary: reactions that “trigger on damage or saving throws generally only trigger on the immediate, built-in effects of an action.”
Reading the tables in play
The frame data produces four habits. Count the source before you count the attacks, because one Action pip is two attacks at level 5 and three at level 11, while a Haste Action in Honour Mode is one attack no matter what. Budget the Bonus action separately from the Action, since off-hand attacks, Jump, Shove and Dip all live there and a few smites want both pools at once. Track the slot level you spend rather than only the spell you cast, because that number is what a Counterspell has to beat. And read the reaction window rather than the reaction’s damage: Disengage before you step out of reach, hold the Reaction charge for a Shield or a Counterspell, and remember that a boss’s Legendary Action is not spending the resource your Slowed or Surprised condition is meant to block.
For the party-level version of the same accounting — who generates actions, who denies them, and why Honour Mode punishes a wasted turn hardest — see Baldur’s Gate 3 Honour Mode: Party and Action Economy.