The Black Pits - Start fresh, or import?

Nonnahswriter

Hey all.

So I was curious about starting the Black Pits. I opened up the screen, and got really excited that you get to create your own custom party (squee!).

Thing is, I also recently beat Baldur's Gate, and I've got my Charname sitting in the import files waiting for BG2:EE. So, I thought, why not import him into the Black Pits to give him something to do?

Then I realized that he keeps his levels if he's imported. Which was fine, until I tried to make another custom character from scratch, and she started at level 1.

So I've come to the conclusion that if I want to import my character, I'll have to import the rest of my Charnames after I go through their playthroughs of Baldur's Gate (which won't be hard... I have a lot of Charnames to go around... It'll just take a while.)

OR...

I could just remake my characters and start fresh. I heard that the Black Pits experience cap was around level 10 for most classes, and it's scaled so the low-level parties go up really fast.

I really like the idea of taking all of my Baldur's Gate heroes and putting them together in the Black Pits, but since I haven't tried it yet, I'd like to get an opinion from the other players who have gone through it. Would I get more out of the experience if I just started fresh with new characters?

Please and thank you!

StrayedMonkey

First time through I would recommend starting fresh. After that importing 6 of me is pretty awesome.

If you start at whatever level you are when you beat BGEE you will tear through the black pits early stages pretty quickly and effortlessly

Fardragon

From a story point of view, it doesn't make sense for the protagonist of the main story to appear in The Black Pits.

And the difficulty doesn't scale with level, so not starting at first level makes it very very easy.

Nonnahswriter

Okie-dokie, thanks for the responses guys. But now I've got a different question...

Does Shadowkeeper work with the Black Pits? I've been trying to edit my saved file (it's a long story involving very sleepy hours in the early morning and me clicking the button too fast in rolling stats), but every time I try to open the file, an error pops up saying that the CRE signature is missing. I can't seem to figure out what could be different about the Black Pits save file versus the Baldur's Gate save file (aside from the whole creating-all-six-characters-thing and separate adventure part...). Does Shadowkeeper just not like Baeloth?

If this is true, then I will be very...very sad...

Fardragon

I haven't tried editing files, but the engine can certainly tell the difference between Black Pits saved games and BG saved games.

Nifft

Maybe it thinks characters in slots 2 through 6 are NPCs, since it thinks it's looking at a single-player game.

Try using multi-player (and assigning all the characters to yourself, of course), and see if ShadowKeeper likes that better.

Corvino

I've been completing a runthrough then using my level-capped Charnames to solo the Black Pits, which takes the edge off the entire "importing an endgame character makes it easy" angle. It can be quite challenging, and means you need to use all your abilities and items to overcome a given situation.

You could sort of, almost *maybe* put it down as a lost chapter between BG1 and BG2 as we do know a couple of months-to-years pass in the meanwhile. *Spoiler Sorcerer* showing up in Larswood could merely be a foreshadowing - who's to say the Djinn hasn't transported him in time as well as space?

Nonnahswriter

Nifft said:

Maybe it thinks characters in slots 2 through 6 are NPCs, since it thinks it's looking at a single-player game.

Try using multi-player (and assigning all the characters to yourself, of course), and see if ShadowKeeper likes that better.

I tried it, and no error this time. Bad news though is that I'll have to make the characters all over again as a multiplayer file... Multiplayer didn't like me trying to load a single player game. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion!

Nifft

Nonnahswriter said:

I tried it, and no error this time. Bad news though is that I'll have to make the characters all over again as a multiplayer file... Multiplayer didn't like me trying to load a single player game. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion!

1 - Start a new multi-player game.
2 - Import from saved game (your single-player save).

* OR *

1 - Load up your single-player game.
2 - Export all the PCs.
3 - Import them into your multi-player game.

... now you can save as a multi-player game and SK ought to understand it.