I haven't been following this thread from the start so I'm not sure if this has already come up but...
Did you know that if you are playing a dwarf in IWD some of the villagers in Easthaven will think you are part of some secret dwarven expedition here to reclaim Dorn's Deep. You can even get one of them to give you a small gem for a promise to share some of the recovered dwarven wealth with them.
Yeah. There's also a follow up to that. If you take on the promise of sharing dwarven wealth, later on when you come back to the destroyed Easthaven you'll be asked about your expedition.
Also, for different characters there are different neat things, like if you are an elf, they'll comment about Erevain. If you are a halfling they'll comment about small people and you get a knucklehead trout. Same for gnomes, only you also get a comment about Oswald in Kuldahar.
And of course, bards get a moonstone for singing a song.
Invisibility 10' Radius can let you maintain invisibility even if you're casting spells at the enemy. If you assign your characters to begin casting their spells (Fireball, Acid Arrow, Insect Plague; whatever) at the very moment that another character finishes casting Invisibility 10' Radius, they will go invisible immediately after breaking invisibility, only appearing for a fraction of a second (which isn't long enough for enemies to target you). Having auto-pause on spell cast makes it easier to time this.
But you can accidentally fumble the timing if your characters are facing the wrong direction, because your characters can waste a fraction of a second by turning to face their target, missing the window for being covered by Invisibility 10' Radius. To avoid that, have them cast a spell on themselves to cloud their aura, then have them target the enemy of your choice, and then cancel their action. They will turn to face the correct target, ensuring that they don't miss the invisibility window by turning around later.
It's a tiny optimization that can have a big impact on gameplay. This method will let several spellcasters act completely without opposition for the first several rounds of any combat, allowing you to solidify a heavy advantage early on.
Did You Know: "It would be better if BG was closer to PnP" edition
Intelligence.
Mages are restricted based on maximum spell level access by intelligence to Intelligence/2, rounded down.
This means that of the NPC mages in BG2, only Edwin should be able to learn level 9 spells, and everyone is a cheating bug abuser for letting the rest of them learn and memorise spells they shouldn't have access to without first using DoMT and the Machine of Lum the Mad (or chugging potions of genius every single time you want to memorise something).
Not that you should worry about that, of course, since your mages are limited to 100 pages in their spellbooks, and on average, a level 1 spell takes 3 pages (and costs 100 GP per page, on top of the cost of the scroll) so the chances you'll have any space left is pretty slim.
Wisdom
Priests, Paladins and Rangers all have a % chance to fail cleric spells at below 13 wisdom. 5% for Anomen, 35% for Minsc. Sorry, Minsc! Sorry, not sorry, Anomen, stop flirting with me.
Constitution.
Characters lose 1 point of constitution permanently whenever they're raised from the dead. No more constitution? Gone forever. With constitution below 18 they have a minimum 2% chance of permanently exploding to death whenever you cast raise dead on them (at 6 Con, this would be a 45% chance to explo-die on casting Raise Dead and rising every cast).
Of course, that's assuming the character wasn't killed with Disintegrate, Death Spell, or Finger of Death, since then they're gone forever anyway.
Even better, below 25 Constitution, they have a minimum 1% chance to instantly die of system shock when polymorphed, petrified, or whenever somebody casts the Haste spell on them. This goes up to 50% chance of instant death at 6 Constitution, and after a few Raise Deads, a 75% chance of instant death at 1 Constitution with no save.
And yes, you could theoretically murder someone by casting haste on them in their sleep every night for a year until they died of old age with no chance of resurrection, or plain old system shock heart attack. Not that anyone would be that sneaky, no sir.
Aging.
Speaking of Haste spells, each cast shortens the target's lifespan by 1 year. While this should have little impact on the twenty year old main character during the course of regular play (assuming they don't instantly drop dead from system shock), extreme users will note that their maximum lifespan as humans puts a hard cap of around 90 or so casts of Haste or Improved Haste before they die of old age, and about ten for Keldorn. Wishes, incidentally, age the caster by 1 year for humans up to 3 years for Elves for limited wish, and everybody 5 years for full Wishes, so wish rest spam is probably not for humans.
Fallen Rangers.
By the PnP rules, Fallen Rangers are treated as Fighters of their level, losing any excess experience (so a level 10 Ranger with 760,000 Experience would become a level 10 Fallen Ranger with 600,000 Experience, rather than a level 11 Fallen Ranger). Unlike Paladins, which are specifically exempted from weapon specialisation after falling, Fallen Rangers are not, and would be able to specialise and achieve Grand Mastery accordingly after committing the evil act that makes them fall, because crime totally pays.
Clerics.
To better fit the options for clerical spell access, their kits would be reworked to: Good, Medium and Poor Equipment Access for each alignment.
Cleric Kits with "Good" equipment access have the fewest faith based restrictions on what they can use: Metal Armour, Flails, Warhammers, Maces, Slings, Clubs and Staves. They would be restricted in what clerical spells they gain, only gaining access to basic, combat, and protection spells, while only getting healing and charm type spells up to level 3. "Medium" equipment access kits gain access to Metal Armour, Maces, Slings, Clubs and Staves. They gain twice as much freedom in spell selection, gaining access to the healing and necromancy type spells, so they can actually raise people from the dead. Finally, only "Poor" equipment access gives the cleric clubs, staves and leather armour, but allows them to actually cast all the cleric spells.
Paladins.
Paladins, being bound by vows of poverty, may only be carry a maximum of ten magic items. This includes their maximum of one suit of armour, four weapons, and one shield.
Likewise, if CHARNAME is a paladin, this vow of poverty would impose a 25,000 gold cap on the party (an amount of money for "living modestly" and being put aside for good causes and the maintenance of a small castle). 10% of all gold the party picks up would be instantly lost, because the paladin is required to donate it to charity.
Armour Fatigue.
Wearing heavy armour is exhausting, so wearing heavy armour, such as Chainmail, for more than one day at a time gives a -2 Fatigue penalty until the character has a chance to rest and recuperate for a few days.
Human Racial Superiority.
Except for Half-Elven bards, only humans get to increase in level indefinitely.
Elves may reach level 12 in Cleric, Fighter and Thief, level 15 in mage and ranger. Dwarves may reach level 10 cleric, level 15 fighter, and level 12 thief. Gnomes may reach level 15 illusionist, level 9 cleric, level 11 fighter, and level 13 in thief. Halflings may reach level 9 Fighter, level 8 cleric, and level 15 in thief. I am so, so sorry, Mazzy. Finally Half-Elves may reach a "whopping" 16 in ranger, 14 in cleric and fighter, 12 in mage and thief, and 9 in Druid.
It's not all bad, since they get extra levels for having high stats in the right areas, so:
Mazzy caps at level 11 Fighter. Korgan caps at level 18 Fighter. Neera caps at level 14 Mage. It's fine, she wouldn't have got level 9 spells anyway. Shame about her level 8 ones. Jaheira caps at Fighter/Druid 15/10. Jan caps at Illusionist/Thief 17/15. Viconia caps at level 15 Cleric. Aerie caps out at Cleric/Mage 14/17. And Dorn, if you assume Blackguard is a Fighter kit, gets to be level 12 for having 19 Strength. If it was a priest kit, his maximum level would be 5.
At least your Elven F/M/T CHARNAME with 19s in all relevant stats caps at 16/19/16 (rather than 18/17/22), so you can still take *one* non-human into ToB (and with level 9 spells to boot)... just don't expect HLAs or anything, only single class characters above level 20, aka "humans", get those.
Not sure it would be better. A lot of what @Pantalion enumerated are also to be considered basic rules. BG2 also functions as house rules.
And kits make things different too. As an example when it comes to paladins, my very first PnP character was in 2E a Human Paladin Errant of Red Falcon (actually dual-classed from a level 4 Fighter). As per PnP rules for this kit, the DM had me give 35% of earnings as tithe, but no imposition on number of magic items (items, not armor or weapons) I could carry. The basic idea is that the tithe is not a vow of poverty, but more like an ethos imposed on the paladins to support their order or church. The only difference might be the Votary who are bound by their kit to lead an ascetic life, but that character is rather hard to role-play in any game, including computer games.
Half-Orcs have a hilarious interaction where you can call them out of being condescendingly racist.
That's Beamdog addition...
And that somehow makes it less fun? Its my favorite race interaction in IWD and it shouldn't matter if Beamdog wrote it or not, its in the official game.
Half-Orcs have a hilarious interaction where you can call them out of being condescendingly racist.
That's Beamdog addition...
And that somehow makes it less fun? Its my favorite race interaction in IWD and it shouldn't matter if Beamdog wrote it or not, its in the official game.
It was a comment, not criticism.
Besides, criticism is usually vital to the welfare of a gaming community and especially for the game developers. So far, Beamdog is doing everything that the old game developers (BIS and Bioware) didn't.
That old community was divided in 2, on BIS board people discussed tactics and on Interplay board people discussed the games and the development of other projects. The biggest mistake was made in 2004 when the powers that be decided to close the boards from Interplay. A little bit later on, BIS boards were closed too. The company died soon after. Even before closing them, Interplay paid almost no interest on what fans were saying.
Some of us migrated to Ashford City boards, which was in many ways a spiritual successor of the old mixed boards. At the same time other boards emerged from the shadows even though they were mostly modding communities (Chosen of Mystra, Winterwind and G3s among the largest and best known). And the cold war between Chosen of Mystra (nowadays renamed TeamBG) and G3s did not help at all.
Community never died down, although in more recent years, between 2008-2012 many of them went down and got revived, until Beamdog started it again and now those collateral boards are also alive. Except for the old Chosen of Mystra. Most of their modders migrated to SHS.
I guess this rant might be also qualified as "Did you know?"
Did You Know: "It would be better if BG was closer to PnP" edition
Paladins.
Paladins, being bound by vows of poverty, may only be carry a maximum of ten magic items. This includes their maximum of one suit of armour, four weapons, and one shield.
Likewise, if CHARNAME is a paladin, this vow of poverty would impose a 25,000 gold cap on the party (an amount of money for "living modestly" and being put aside for good causes and the maintenance of a small castle). 10% of all gold the party picks up would be instantly lost, because the paladin is required to donate it to charity.
But if we're going by PnP rules, monetary loot is divided among the characters, so only the Paladin would be restricted and everyone would have to buy their own equipment out of their share.
Did You Know: "It would be better if BG was closer to PnP" edition
Paladins.
Paladins, being bound by vows of poverty, may only be carry a maximum of ten magic items. This includes their maximum of one suit of armour, four weapons, and one shield.
Likewise, if CHARNAME is a paladin, this vow of poverty would impose a 25,000 gold cap on the party (an amount of money for "living modestly" and being put aside for good causes and the maintenance of a small castle). 10% of all gold the party picks up would be instantly lost, because the paladin is required to donate it to charity.
But if we're going by PnP rules, monetary loot is divided among the characters, so only the Paladin would be restricted and everyone would have to buy their own equipment out of their share.
When my protagonist is a paladin I usually donate 10% of my gold to to temples to emphasize his vows.
All this gold is confusing though. Doesn't commerce break down into copper and silver coins foremost? Begging for gold is actually asking for a fortune!
All this gold is confusing though. Doesn't commerce break down into copper and silver coins foremost? Begging for gold is actually asking for a fortune!
Electrum coins for beggers, silver for barkeeps, gold for shopkeeps, platinum for easy hoard transport
Did you know that if you drop the Soultaker dagger just before cultists take it from you that the plot continues on regardless, even after you pick up the dagger again?
Invisibility 10' Radius also reveals another railroad, as the cult's mage conversation is exactly the same, even if you're leaving the basement after killing the demon, and if you didn't actually take the quest from the dwarf in the first place you must first take the quest, explain that you have lost the dagger, hear backstory about the dagger, and only then say you killed the demon (at which point unless you're evil you automatically refuse a reward which you may or may not have already stolen from him).
All in all, one of the worse railroads in the trilogy, but hey, at least you can then sell the Soultaker Dagger for 1000 GP in the inn and nobody will care.
Hey, at least you can then sell the Soultaker Dagger for 1000 GP in the inn and nobody will care.
Surely you should give it to the dwarf and get the hammer as a reward, or doesn't that work?
Doesn't work, dwarf will never accept, or even recognise, the dagger, even if you bypass the cultists and try and hand it over. Just pick his pocket before he disappears in a puff of plot. TotSC quests are some of my personal least favourites for this sort of thing.
Unless you routinely run characters with 18 Charisma, I bet you did, but! Unlike your Lawful Good Paladin, Hull, while you were having fun up and down the Sword Coast, went out and buried Gorion for you. You monster.
Did you know about the unfinished AR2700? I'm sure that some modders stumbled in this earlier, but have not seen anyone sharing it yet. Original post by @Arunsun .
Comments
Also, for different characters there are different neat things, like if you are an elf, they'll comment about Erevain. If you are a halfling they'll comment about small people and you get a knucklehead trout. Same for gnomes, only you also get a comment about Oswald in Kuldahar.
And of course, bards get a moonstone for singing a song.
But you can accidentally fumble the timing if your characters are facing the wrong direction, because your characters can waste a fraction of a second by turning to face their target, missing the window for being covered by Invisibility 10' Radius. To avoid that, have them cast a spell on themselves to cloud their aura, then have them target the enemy of your choice, and then cancel their action. They will turn to face the correct target, ensuring that they don't miss the invisibility window by turning around later.
It's a tiny optimization that can have a big impact on gameplay. This method will let several spellcasters act completely without opposition for the first several rounds of any combat, allowing you to solidify a heavy advantage early on.
Intelligence.
Mages are restricted based on maximum spell level access by intelligence to Intelligence/2, rounded down.
This means that of the NPC mages in BG2, only Edwin should be able to learn level 9 spells, and everyone is a cheating bug abuser for letting the rest of them learn and memorise spells they shouldn't have access to without first using DoMT and the Machine of Lum the Mad (or chugging potions of genius every single time you want to memorise something).
Not that you should worry about that, of course, since your mages are limited to 100 pages in their spellbooks, and on average, a level 1 spell takes 3 pages (and costs 100 GP per page, on top of the cost of the scroll) so the chances you'll have any space left is pretty slim.
Wisdom
Priests, Paladins and Rangers all have a % chance to fail cleric spells at below 13 wisdom. 5% for Anomen, 35% for Minsc. Sorry, Minsc! Sorry, not sorry, Anomen, stop flirting with me.
Constitution.
Characters lose 1 point of constitution permanently whenever they're raised from the dead. No more constitution? Gone forever. With constitution below 18 they have a minimum 2% chance of permanently exploding to death whenever you cast raise dead on them (at 6 Con, this would be a 45% chance to explo-die on casting Raise Dead and rising every cast).
Of course, that's assuming the character wasn't killed with Disintegrate, Death Spell, or Finger of Death, since then they're gone forever anyway.
Even better, below 25 Constitution, they have a minimum 1% chance to instantly die of system shock when polymorphed, petrified, or whenever somebody casts the Haste spell on them. This goes up to 50% chance of instant death at 6 Constitution, and after a few Raise Deads, a 75% chance of instant death at 1 Constitution with no save.
And yes, you could theoretically murder someone by casting haste on them in their sleep every night for a year until they died of old age with no chance of resurrection, or plain old system shock heart attack. Not that anyone would be that sneaky, no sir.
Aging.
Speaking of Haste spells, each cast shortens the target's lifespan by 1 year. While this should have little impact on the twenty year old main character during the course of regular play (assuming they don't instantly drop dead from system shock), extreme users will note that their maximum lifespan as humans puts a hard cap of around 90 or so casts of Haste or Improved Haste before they die of old age, and about ten for Keldorn. Wishes, incidentally, age the caster by 1 year for humans up to 3 years for Elves for limited wish, and everybody 5 years for full Wishes, so wish rest spam is probably not for humans.
Fallen Rangers.
By the PnP rules, Fallen Rangers are treated as Fighters of their level, losing any excess experience (so a level 10 Ranger with 760,000 Experience would become a level 10 Fallen Ranger with 600,000 Experience, rather than a level 11 Fallen Ranger). Unlike Paladins, which are specifically exempted from weapon specialisation after falling, Fallen Rangers are not, and would be able to specialise and achieve Grand Mastery accordingly after committing the evil act that makes them fall, because crime totally pays.
Clerics.
To better fit the options for clerical spell access, their kits would be reworked to: Good, Medium and Poor Equipment Access for each alignment.
Cleric Kits with "Good" equipment access have the fewest faith based restrictions on what they can use: Metal Armour, Flails, Warhammers, Maces, Slings, Clubs and Staves. They would be restricted in what clerical spells they gain, only gaining access to basic, combat, and protection spells, while only getting healing and charm type spells up to level 3.
"Medium" equipment access kits gain access to Metal Armour, Maces, Slings, Clubs and Staves. They gain twice as much freedom in spell selection, gaining access to the healing and necromancy type spells, so they can actually raise people from the dead.
Finally, only "Poor" equipment access gives the cleric clubs, staves and leather armour, but allows them to actually cast all the cleric spells.
Paladins.
Paladins, being bound by vows of poverty, may only be carry a maximum of ten magic items. This includes their maximum of one suit of armour, four weapons, and one shield.
Likewise, if CHARNAME is a paladin, this vow of poverty would impose a 25,000 gold cap on the party (an amount of money for "living modestly" and being put aside for good causes and the maintenance of a small castle). 10% of all gold the party picks up would be instantly lost, because the paladin is required to donate it to charity.
Armour Fatigue.
Wearing heavy armour is exhausting, so wearing heavy armour, such as Chainmail, for more than one day at a time gives a -2 Fatigue penalty until the character has a chance to rest and recuperate for a few days.
Human Racial Superiority.
Except for Half-Elven bards, only humans get to increase in level indefinitely.
Elves may reach level 12 in Cleric, Fighter and Thief, level 15 in mage and ranger.
Dwarves may reach level 10 cleric, level 15 fighter, and level 12 thief.
Gnomes may reach level 15 illusionist, level 9 cleric, level 11 fighter, and level 13 in thief.
Halflings may reach level 9 Fighter, level 8 cleric, and level 15 in thief. I am so, so sorry, Mazzy.
Finally Half-Elves may reach a "whopping" 16 in ranger, 14 in cleric and fighter, 12 in mage and thief, and 9 in Druid.
It's not all bad, since they get extra levels for having high stats in the right areas, so:
Mazzy caps at level 11 Fighter.
Korgan caps at level 18 Fighter.
Neera caps at level 14 Mage. It's fine, she wouldn't have got level 9 spells anyway. Shame about her level 8 ones.
Jaheira caps at Fighter/Druid 15/10.
Jan caps at Illusionist/Thief 17/15.
Viconia caps at level 15 Cleric.
Aerie caps out at Cleric/Mage 14/17.
And Dorn, if you assume Blackguard is a Fighter kit, gets to be level 12 for having 19 Strength. If it was a priest kit, his maximum level would be 5.
At least your Elven F/M/T CHARNAME with 19s in all relevant stats caps at 16/19/16 (rather than 18/17/22), so you can still take *one* non-human into ToB (and with level 9 spells to boot)... just don't expect HLAs or anything, only single class characters above level 20, aka "humans", get those.
BG2 also functions as house rules.
And kits make things different too. As an example when it comes to paladins, my very first PnP character was in 2E a Human Paladin Errant of Red Falcon (actually dual-classed from a level 4 Fighter). As per PnP rules for this kit, the DM had me give 35% of earnings as tithe, but no imposition on number of magic items (items, not armor or weapons) I could carry. The basic idea is that the tithe is not a vow of poverty, but more like an ethos imposed on the paladins to support their order or church. The only difference might be the Votary who are bound by their kit to lead an ascetic life, but that character is rather hard to role-play in any game, including computer games.
@Pantalion A lot of those sound horrible...
Besides, criticism is usually vital to the welfare of a gaming community and especially for the game developers. So far, Beamdog is doing everything that the old game developers (BIS and Bioware) didn't.
That old community was divided in 2, on BIS board people discussed tactics and on Interplay board people discussed the games and the development of other projects. The biggest mistake was made in 2004 when the powers that be decided to close the boards from Interplay. A little bit later on, BIS boards were closed too. The company died soon after. Even before closing them, Interplay paid almost no interest on what fans were saying.
Some of us migrated to Ashford City boards, which was in many ways a spiritual successor of the old mixed boards. At the same time other boards emerged from the shadows even though they were mostly modding communities (Chosen of Mystra, Winterwind and G3s among the largest and best known). And the cold war between Chosen of Mystra (nowadays renamed TeamBG) and G3s did not help at all.
Community never died down, although in more recent years, between 2008-2012 many of them went down and got revived, until Beamdog started it again and now those collateral boards are also alive. Except for the old Chosen of Mystra. Most of their modders migrated to SHS.
I guess this rant might be also qualified as "Did you know?"
Invisibility 10' Radius also reveals another railroad, as the cult's mage conversation is exactly the same, even if you're leaving the basement after killing the demon, and if you didn't actually take the quest from the dwarf in the first place you must first take the quest, explain that you have lost the dagger, hear backstory about the dagger, and only then say you killed the demon (at which point unless you're evil you automatically refuse a reward which you may or may not have already stolen from him).
All in all, one of the worse railroads in the trilogy, but hey, at least you can then sell the Soultaker Dagger for 1000 GP in the inn and nobody will care.
Unless you routinely run characters with 18 Charisma, I bet you did, but! Unlike your Lawful Good Paladin, Hull, while you were having fun up and down the Sword Coast, went out and buried Gorion for you. You monster.
I'm sure that some modders stumbled in this earlier, but have not seen anyone sharing it yet. Original post by @Arunsun .