Imoen thief skills inactive after dual-class
jaynjay
Member Posts: 12
I dual-classed Imoen to a Mage when she hit level 6 as a Thief. I just reached level 6 as a Mage and her thief skills are inactive. I thought I would be able to use her thief skills when Mage reached her thief level...?
0
Comments
If you have not made a visit to Ulgoth's Beard, I highly recommend it, it's a very nice scenic fishing village, great for little excursions.
The only problem with late-dualling Imoen is that it does mean that your party needs someone else as Thief for quite a while, to deal with traps and locks.
Yes there is the problem that Imoen will probably surpass Thief lv7 if you keep her as a pure thief in BG1, but then I don't interpret BG game mechanics as "literal truths", and think of them more as an approximation of what is happening in my roleplaying world. For example the Dual-class mechanism is rather unrealistic when you apply realistic logic to it. I have started to study magic, oops I've suddenly forgot everything I knew about traps and stealth!
Nevertheless, level 7 seems to me quite a good time for it, because she's maxed-out in the key skills of Find Traps and Open Locks, and I therefore need no other Thief, nor any Thieving potions for the essential skills. I don't like to dual her before she's fully competent in both of those key skills, because if she's in my permanent party for BG1, then that usually means that I'm also intending to take her along in BG2, in which case I'll probably rely on her as sole Thief in BG2. I therefore wouldn't dual her before at least level 6, so I figure that I might as well be more thoroughly canonical and dual her at level 7.
1) Things that can be explained away as the characters' actions between games.
2) Things that can't happen because of the way the rules and the game is setup.
The first part can cover learning new magic spells, gaining stat points, gaining hit points, even gaining levels.
The second part would be like... adding or losing levels if it violates the rules (Imoen going from Thief 4/Mage 7 to Thief 7/Mage 8 since you can't add levels to a class after dualing out of the class), changing kits, etc. You can easily adjust 2 while keeping 1 in mind.
The third thing to keep in mind, sort of a meta-thing:
3) This is supposed to be a game to have fun with. If you don't want to make more work by carefully reducing thief skills to be exact and would rather ballpark it, or want to just add in what you've added from stat books and not worrying about an extra point here or there... no one should be telling you that you're playing it wrong.
Making changes to how "the game is set up" at the the start of BG2 to reflect the situation at the end of a particular run of BG1 could be a legitimate exercise, but a key difference between legitimate modification and merely cheating is the willingness to make disadvantageous changes required by that scenario as well as advantageous ones.
That may be your point of view. If one is playing Single Player that is up for the player to decide. I choose not to care about things that would double the effort required to get things to line up between the games and chalk it up to a bonus for putting in the effort just to get things to line up. There's no easy button to push to get things to match (and if there is I'd appreciate someone telling me about it) and I don't care to go through double the effort to make my characters suck more. So when I adjust down Imoen's thief levels and thief scores she's going to come out slightly ahead (I think it reapplies the various bonuses, not sure) because I don't want to do a bunch of extra math to get it to work out. Jaheira might end up with an extra attribute point or two because I don't want to add an extra step.