I gotta talk about the Inspiration system in Baldur’s Gate 3.

I’ve watched tons of streams where people blow an Inspiration point on some difficult check, sigh a breath of relief when they pass, and then move on. Everyone gets that the main gig is the reroll. But what about the actual event that gives you the point? You get that little pop-up that says, “Inspiration Gained,” and there’s always a tiny XP blip with it.

The question that stuck in my craw was: Does that tiny, almost negligible XP pop-up actually add up? Is there some hidden meta-level where, if you religiously hit every Inspiration event for your background, you end up a level higher than someone who doesn’t? Are they just there to be completionist checks, or do they actually impact your character’s progression in a meaningful, numeric way?

I wasn’t going to let that slide. I decided to do a deep dive, and when I say deep dive, I mean I sacrificed three weekends and my sanity to figure this out.

The Setup: Urchin, Act 1, Three Ways

I couldn’t just play one run. That wouldn’t prove anything. I needed to isolate the variable.

I picked the Urchin background. Why Urchin? Because those events trigger constantly in Act 1, often for simple stuff like finding a secret stash of gold or sneaking past a group of guards. It’s easy to rack them up, making the difference clearer. My character was a Half-Orc Rogue because I hate myself and love failing skill checks when I could have passed them, which actually made the ‘Denial Run’ even harder.

My method was simple in concept, brutal in execution: I would play Act 1 right up to the point of entering the Mountain Pass or the Underdark (whichever came first, just a fixed checkpoint) and log the final experience points for three separate playthroughs.

• Run 1: The Control Playthrough. I played normally. I took the easy path, the path that felt right. If an Urchin trigger happened, great. If not, whatever. I tracked my XP honestly. This was the baseline.
• Run 2: The Denial Run. This was the hardest. My mission was to actively avoid any Inspiration trigger possible. If a dialogue option offered an Urchin point, I clicked the opposite, even if it was a terrible roleplaying choice or meant I failed an important check. I plowed through the game trying to keep my Inspiration points at zero, but still killed the same major enemies and did the same main quests as the Control. The goal was to see the minimum XP total.
• Run 3: The Completionist Run. Oh boy. I opened up a massive spreadsheet (which I won’t share because it’s embarrassing) and used three different online guides. I checked off every single Urchin Inspiration trigger known to man in Act 1. I spent about five hours just on the Emerald Grove because I had to sneak into every single locked box and talk to every rodent. My focus was purely on getting those pop-ups. I saved and reloaded hundreds of times just to make sure I didn’t miss a single one.

The Log and The Reality Check

After about ninety-something hours, I had my numbers. This is where it gets real messy, and the results were an absolute kick in the teeth.

Here are the final XP totals when I stepped up to the Mountain Pass entrance, right before the fast travel point:

• Run 1 (Control): 11,850 XP
• Run 2 (Denial): 11,550 XP
• Run 3 (Completionist): 12,125 XP

Seriously? That’s it? Between the run where I refused to gain Inspiration and the run where I obsessively farmed it, the difference was 575 XP.

575 XP. To put that in perspective, killing the entire Goblin Camp—the leaders, the stragglers, the chickens—that’s thousands of XP. Failing a major side quest and missing its XP reward probably costs you more than 575 XP. The amount of extra XP I gained for all that hyper-focusing was the equivalent of killing maybe three or four slightly tougher Goblins. It’s a rounding error, plain and simple.

Why Did I Care Enough To Do This Grind?

You’re probably thinking, “Dude, everyone knew it was just about the reroll,” and you’d be right. But I didn’t do this just for science; I did this out of spite.

Years ago, I played an old tabletop game run by a GM who was obsessed with hidden mechanics. He swore that if we collected enough “flair tokens”—tiny, almost pointless in-game awards—it would unlock a super-secret, game-breaking Artifact. I spent six months chasing those stupid tokens. I wasted countless hours playing my character in ridiculous ways, and in the end? Nothing. He just laughed and said he made it up to see how far we’d go. That memory soured me on trusting hidden game systems forever.

When I saw the BG3 Inspiration system, with its tiny, almost invisible XP reward, that old toxic loyalty mechanism flared up in my brain. It became a personal mission to prove that Larian wasn’t pulling the same fast one. I needed to verify if those pop-ups were the key to some secret advantage or just flavor text.

The Verdict: Not Worth Your Time and Effort

So, do the BG3 Inspiration events give anything? Yes. They give you a reroll and a fraction of an XP bar. Are they worth your time and effort to obsessively chase? Absolutely not.

The Inspiration point is there to give you the reroll—the ability to save a critical failure. The tiny XP blip is just icing on the cake, an acknowledgment that you roleplayed your background well. You will gain more XP by simply killing one extra monster than by spending thirty hours micromanaging background triggers. Just play the game how you want to. If a point pops up, great. If not, don’t sweat it. You can sleep soundly knowing that the real reward is just the reroll and the fun of the storytelling.