Adding characters after game has started

Liana

Even though I've been an avid tabletop ADD player for over 20+ years I am new to electronic gaming, and especially IWD. Thankfully I found the manual on the developers website and though many concepts are familiar to me, I can't find the answer to my problem. Being new to IWD I'm making mistakes, which usually is not biggy. However, one of my mistakes was a identity getting my cleric killed. I couldn't figure out a way to carry the body back to the Temple so I left in in the caves. I was hoping that when I returned to town, Hrothgar would ask if I wanted an NPC cleric to join us, but no dice. Now I'm at the very beginning of the Tree town ( think it starts with a K) and don't want to proceed further until I understand my options and whether I'm going to have to plan on doing this entire campaign without a cleric...yuck! Can someone with more experi nice please let me know my options? Thank you.

Audaces

You don't need a body to resurrect a dead character - as long as the portrait is still there (grayed out), you can visit a temple (there is one in Kuldahar) and purchase a resurrect.

All you really need to do when a character dies is either raise them immediately (if you have a cleric and have the spell ready) or collect the equipment and head to a temple.

elminster

Sure.

Hopefully you picked up all their items. If not they probably didn't have much of any value so its not a biggy.

Basically there are two different approaches you could take here.

1) Go to the temple in Kuldahar (tree town) and talk to the priest in charge. The temple is roughly in the top-right corner of the map. After you talk to the priest you should be able to access a menu that shows a number of healing options. You need to click on the dead characters portrait on the right side of the screen and either select "Raise Dead" if they are a non-elf or "Resurrection" if they are an elf. You can choose "Resurrection" if they are a non-elf as well it will just start them off at full health (as opposed to Raise Dead which just gives them 1hp). Half-Elves can be raised with Raise Dead.

2) Go into the gameplay options and move the difficulty slider into "Story Mode". This will raise your character. You can then move the slider back to Core or whatever difficulty you were playing.

Liana

Oh no...boy I wish I had thought about you guys earlier before trying the fix the problem by myself through trial and error. That method works well on tabletop D&D when you can beg the DM for a do over due to stupidity, but not a good idea here. I couldn't pick up any of the gear when the character died, which I thought was odd. Still don't know what went wrong with that but at least I know now that I should have been able to. At the time, I just assumed it was a part of the program. When I went to the temple in the first town with Hrothgar, i was disappointed that I didn't get an option to resurrect. After that failed, I was headed to Hrothgar and hoped he provided a replacement or solution. When that too failed, I assumed that maybe I had to remove him from our party through the reform party option...so I did. Now I don't even have his picture showing up grey anymore. I'm hosed aren't I?

elminster

There is a way you can add a cleric back in but it basically involves moving your save file to the multiplayer save folder, starting a multiplayer game (you don't need anyone else to do this), loading your save, and then adding the character in during the character arbitration. You'd then save your game and then move the save back to your single player save folder.

Its not difficult to do but it might be easier if you just restart. You can even export your remaining 5 characters (go into the character screen for each character and use the "export" button and type something in) so that you only have to remake the cleric.

Liana

Would the characters be able to start at their higher level? With the exception of the new 1st level cleric , of course.

elminster

All the characters would be at whatever level they are now (as well as having the equipment they have now).

Liana

Wish me luck..I'm going to give it a shot! I just exported and saved each character independently. Now il go back and try and load a new single person game. I assume I'll reform and delete all of the non cleric characters that are automatically loaded and then I'll see some button that lets me load or import my own charactes.

Liana

This is an epic fail for me. I think I'll go back and reread the manual on starting multiplayer games or loading characters. I skimmed over that info because I didn't think I would apply to me. I must be doing something basic wrong. Thank you for the advice.

elminster

Liana said:

Wish me luck..I'm going to give it a shot! I just exported and saved each character independently. Now il go back and try and load a new single person game. I assume I'll reform and delete all of the non cleric characters that are automatically loaded and then I'll see some button that lets me load or import my own charactes.

You are going to find yourself at some point when starting a new game with a screen that looks something like this.



Hit "delete" on all these characters. You'll be then left with a screen that looks like this.



Click "Create" on any one of these. This will take you to a screen that looks like this.



I've put a yellow and red box around the arrow keys found here. You can use these to cycle through all the available characters you have exported. When you have found one you like you can hit the play button next to them (which I've put blue boxes around).

ARKdeEREH

I haven't played the enhanced edition, but in the original Icewind Dale you could have a character join whenever you wanted. Since I didn't like the idea of having multiple PCs, but wanted the extra inventory space I would play a solo game up until the point where I needed to carry more than I could fit in my inventory. Then I would save and load the game and import characters, have them pick up the stuff, export them, and then delete them back out of my party. As soon as I arrived in a town where I could sell my stuff I would repeat the process so that I could get the inventory items back, then discard the extra PCs again. I did this throughout the entire game and its expansion. Unless they prevented this in the enhanced edition it should be possible to create/import a character whenever you want.

If you have lost your cleric character completely (to the point where you can't resurrect by conventional means), you could load a save game from before s/he died and export the character. In your current game you can import the cleric character into your game and solve the problem that way.

FinneousPJ

@Arkdeereh In EE you can only import using the multiplayer "trick".

by_the_sword

I started the game with a party of four that were woefully inadequate to handle the challenges of the game. What I did was find an earlier saved game with those characters, loaded it, and then "exported" those characters. They were only about level two or so. I crated two other party members then imported the old characters into the new group, then restarted the game.

On my first run through with the party of four, I created the party with room to add new members that I met along the way, thinking that the game was like Baldur's Gate. Apparenly, it is not.