How Baldur’s Gate 3 Players Broke The Rules
Baldur’s Gate 3 might be over two years old and finished with major content updates, but its community is still tearing apart the game systems in the most unexpected ways. The latest discovery is both darkly comic and completely game breaking.
Players have figured out how to build an army of invincible child followers that can ignore the normal combat rules and unleash effectively unlimited attacks. It is an exploit that leans on Baldur’s Gate 3’s design choices around child characters and even ties back to how games are rated under German media law.
This idea surfaced in a YouTube short from creator Morgana Evelyn titled Child Labour is Unbeatable. The name alone makes it clear this is not exactly a wholesome role playing choice, but in terms of raw power it is one of the wildest exploits the community has found so far.
How The Child Army Exploit Works
To pull off this trick you need a level 7 companion with access to two key spells: Polymorph and Dominate Beast. You then follow a very specific sequence of steps to permanently attach a child character to that companion as a follower.
The basic process looks like this:
- Find any child NPC in the game world. They all work the same for this trick so it does not matter which one you choose.
- Use Polymorph on the child to turn them into a beast form such as a sheep.
- While they are transformed, cast Dominate Beast on the polymorphed child so that they are now under your control.
- Travel back to your camp with the companion who cast the spells and the newly dominated creature in tow.
- Enable turn based mode in camp so you can carefully control the timing of your actions.
- Dismiss the spellcasting companion from your active party inside camp and wait until you see the notification that their concentration on Polymorph and Dominate Beast has ended.
- Before the effects fully expire, quickly re recruit that same companion into your party, then immediately leave camp and perform a manual save.
- Reload that save. When the game comes back, the companion will now have a child follower permanently assigned to them.
From that point on the child tags along as a kind of unofficial summon. The shock is not that you have a kid following you around. It is what happens when combat starts.
Because of the way Baldur’s Gate 3 handles children, that follower is effectively unkillable and does not participate in combat initiative the way normal characters do. The result is a follower who can act outside the usual turn order and attack as often as you can command them to.
In practice that means a limitless stream of attacks from a target that cannot be killed. It completely shatters the normal balance of encounters and turns your party into a walking exploit.
Why Children Are So Powerful In Baldur’s Gate 3
The surprising part is not that an RPG has an odd exploit. It is where the power comes from. Baldur’s Gate 3, like many games, makes its child NPCs impossible to kill. That is partly an ethical choice but it is also influenced by legal requirements in countries like Germany.
Germany’s ratings body, the Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle, lays out rules for how games are classified for different ages. The German Youth Protection Act restricts content that shows serious physical or mental suffering in a way that violates human dignity or could seriously harm the development of children or adolescents.
In practice that often means developers avoid allowing players to kill child characters. Doing so can make it harder to distribute and advertise a game in specific regions and can create legal and PR trouble for publishers and retailers.
Baldur’s Gate 3 follows this pattern. Children in the game are built to be non killable and generally are not meant to participate directly in combat at all. Larian’s solution was to effectively remove them from the normal systems that determine who can be targeted and how combat turns work.
The child army exploit works because it forces one of those child NPCs into a combat role where the normal safeguards do not really apply. The game never expected a child to be a proper participant in initiative so that follower simply ignores the turn order. Combine that with their hard coded immunity to death and you have the strongest possible summon in the game, powered by rules that were originally designed to avoid violent content against minors.
Morgana Evelyn’s video even calls out German media law directly, connecting the exploit to this broader context. Earlier in 2024 there was a minor controversy when Steam began enforcing formal ratings for the German storefront, which put these legal rules back in the spotlight. Baldur’s Gate 3 now offers a prime example of how design decisions that satisfy rating boards can sometimes create unexpected side effects.
The result is a clever but extremely morally dubious strategy. On a pure mechanics level it is one of the most dominant builds in the game. On a role play level it is about as ethically cursed as it gets. Many players will probably try it once out of curiosity and then reload a save to pretend their child army never existed.
It also shows how flexible and complex Baldur’s Gate 3 really is. Years after release and long after the last major patch, players are still poking at the edges of its systems and finding completely new ways to bend the rules. Whether you decide to field test a legion of unkillable kids or just watch from the sidelines, this exploit is a reminder that even a finished game can still surprise you.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/baldurs-gate/child-labor-is-unbeatable-baldurs-gate-3-players-discover-how-to-build-an-army-of-unkillable-kids-through-the-power-of-polymorph-and-german-media-laws/
