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Notes Page
a random assortment of comments and notes made while creating these pages
No Cheats! - Nope, no cheats, no editors, no illegal or immoral issues.
Collecting stuff - I took everything out of the dungeon I could carry!
Killing Monsters and Experience Points - NPC conversations and ugly math
Leveling Up - I tried not to but sometimes it seemed unavoidable.
Initial Skills and Attributes - I tried to be consistant. Honest!
Class Quest Items - uh... just what it say.
Specific Class Notes - Some esoteric details on some of the classes.
Bugs - Some bugs I have found.
My Screwups - Gee, and I thought I was perfect.
What's in a name? - Where did I find all those character names?
Run the numbers... - NPC conversations and ugly math
Versus Game Guide - A great guide! (some very minor problems)
Minsc Quotes - some I didn't use and one I never completed.
I have not used any cheats, editors or any other type of deviant tools to generate these characters. If you want to modify them when you play your game, that's up to you. But you can be assured that all of these guys and gals were rolled up the 'old-fashioned' way... they earned their stats!
In each game I tried to collect all possible treasure. But even with five players (the main character, Imoen, Jaheira, Minsc and Yoshimo), there is just too much loot to haul out. I left most of the worthless stuff, such as non-magical swords and armor (except for 'good' items like the Katana, Splint Mail, etc.). The main character normally has the most valuable stuff. In the early games, Imoen got virtually nothing; later I discovered that everything she was carrying got dropped outside of the exit from the dungeon, so I started giving her all the 'leftover' stuff (bows, arrows) but she was a little restricted by her weight limit. So in some of the games, you may find a little stash next to the party after they exit the dungeon; in others you may find almost nothing.
Killing Monsters and Experience Points
I also tried to kill all the monsters in the dungeon in order to maximize the experience points but in some cases I may have skipped one or two. Some of the goblins are triggered (by sleep?); in the early games, I usually didn't trigger the ones in the northern portal room because I just wanted to get out quickly. Later I found that they were almost always there the first time I entered that room. Funny they weren't there if I waited a day or two... I also didn't create an infinite number of Lightning Mephits using the Lightning Mephit generator because I really didn't have an infinite amount of time.
In the early games, I used to level up the characters as they reached a new level. But as they could get through the dungeon without leveling up, I finally stopped doing that. When you load the 'promenade' saved games, you will usually find that some or all of the characters need to be leveled up.
In the 'party' games (where the suggested party for that class is finally assembled), I may have leveled up once or twice because I thought the extra skill and abilities required would make it somewhat easier to gather the party. Some parties are ridiculously easy to gather (such as all the NPCs in the Copper Coronet) and some are very difficult as you have to complete one or more quests.
Most of the characters rolled up are pretty good; check individual character pages for detailed information on attributes, skills, special abilities. I always tried to max out an ability that was specific to a race or a class. For example, the Elven Archer, Carolyne Falls, has a 19 in Dexterity; the Half Orc Barbarian, Mokin Glott, has an 19 strength and 19 constitution.
As far as weapons, I tried to match up weapons with class, race and in some cases the portrait I picked. One of the better protraits is of Aleyr Evenstar, a Wizard Slayer, which shows her wielding a wicked sword, a nasty axe and a very cool long bow. So naturally I gave her a one '*' skill in Long Sword, Axe and Long Bow and put the remaining three '*' in Two Weapon Style. I also tried to mix the weapons up quite a bit so you will find specialists in Scimitars, Spears, Hammers, Staff, etc. Also many characters will have more than one Weapon Style while some may have none.
I made a special case out of the Kensai character, Hidoi Hiryuu, as I wanted him to have skills in both Scimitar and Hammer, as well as Two Weapon Style. His goal is to then get two of the best weapons in the game (in some opinions): Crom Faeyr and Belm. Belm gives an extra attack per round while Crom Faeyr is just one nasty weapon!
I suspect everyone will not agree with some of the initial choices I made in either attributes, weapon skills or whatever. But that's fine; maybe you can just get some guidelines from these pages on how you want to create your character. If I have made any obvious errors (such as assigning an unusable skill), please let me know and I will try to correct the problem.
Most characters have two quest items; a few have only one and some others have three or four. Most of the time, these are weapons but there is an occasional amulet or ring to find; someone even has to kill a dragon. I have tried to make the quests consistant with the character; either matching his or her background, or finding an item that matches his or her skills. Obviously you do not have to do the quest. They were just added for a little flavor.
Most of the quest items can be found by reading the Biography in the Information Panel of the character in the saved game. If its not there, you will have to read the Web Page describng the character.
Wizard Slayer - Can't use potions (!) since potions are magical (which I didn't know until I played this class), and since the Wizard Slayer can use no magical items (except weapons and armor); therefore, duh...
Totemic Druid - The spirit animals that she can summon are great! Most low level monsters can't even touch them. Not sure how valuable they will be in the middle or end game, but for the early game, they are very helpful.
Shapeshifter - At first I thought this character may be a little weak but let me tell you---at low levels, the shapeshift to Werewolf is fabulous! I just changed him into a werewolf at the start and never changed back! He might make a good solo candidate but I'm afraid the final chapter or two may be too tough even for a Greater Werewolf.
Barbarian - I cleaned out the entire dungeon without resting! I had to hoard the spells of Imoen and Jaheira for special cases, and I also had to use most of the healing potions I found, but Mokin finished the dungeon in 9 hours! The wierd thing was that it took over a day to get from the dungeon exit to the surface; most of the time it only takes six or seven hours. Something to do with fatigue?
Illusionist - Rotter Omark is very eccentric -- but you'll have to check the game files to find out why. There is a small clue of his eccentricity in the portrait that I use for him.
Sorceress - Oops! I probably screwed this one up as to a couple of her starting spells. But since I had so much time invested in her, I didn't really want to discard her like an old shoe. So instead I'm giving the fans a chance to vote to build their Sorcerer in their own image. You vote for the name, the sex, the spells, everything! So visit the Fan Vote for Sorceror page and cast your vote! Maybe that will make you happy?
Swashbuckler - This group was made in mind so that players could experience the romances that are built into the game. Unfortunately you can only have a male or female romance being carried on, not both. So I made both a male and female Swashbuckler so you could try either. Or both. Just not at the same time.
Kensai-Thief - This happens to be my favorite class (as of the moment) and it seems like a natural choice for going solo. Sneak by difficult areas or slice and dice your way when you can't. Three '*' in Scimitar and three '*' in Two Weapon Style make him a lean, mean, fighting machine! Also check my page on solo tatics and guidelines.
Monk - I made two flavors of Monk: The Blue Heron, who relies solely on hands (and feet?) to do his damage. But since there was a special weapon made just for Monks (the Scarlet Brotherhood Ninjo-To, available only with one of the add-on CDs, which gives the Monk an extra attack), I wanted to try it so I created Dark Fury.
Imoen's Stuff - sometimes when she leaves the dungeon, you can find the stuff she was carrying right next to the party in Waukeen's Promenade. Sometimes I thought this stuff went missing but perhaps it was because she was not carrying anything when I left.
Time it takes to get to surface - the amount of time it takes to exit the dungeon and reach the surface at Waukeen's Promenade seems to vary hugely; as little as six hours and as long thirty. I can offer no explanation of why this is so.
Experience Points - there are a couple of assassins in the 2nd level of the first dungeon for which you only get 14 experience points (the one next to the escaped clone, for example). This seems pretty strange to me...
Crashes - seem to happen at about the same frequency as in BG 1. For me this is about dropping out of the game once every two or three hours. After a couple of hours, I just save my game and reboot my PC. I can usually tell when something 'bad' is going to happen because the characters start moving more slowly and more jerkily. I suspect a memory management problem but since they haven't let me look at the source, I can't be sure.
I always run with everything possible turned off: virus checkers, system scheduler, anything in my tray...
Biography Editor - now this is an obscure bug! If you edit or change a character's bio, the editor behaves very badly after you get a few paragraphs written. When you reach the end of the line (a very short line, by the way), and keep typing fast enough so you are ahead of the display, you will get some bizarre results. Usually what happens is the buffered characters end up in reverse order. For example, let's say I want to type 'Imoen is really good' but the end of the line occurs after the letter 'a' in really. I have typed fast enough so that all the characters after the 'a' don't appear right away. Then, when the finally appear, I will get the following: "Imoen is redoog ylla" The fix is easy; just type slow.
Somewhat related to this is that sometimes you cannot edit the last line of the bio because you can't scroll down to the last line.
BG Developers, please note: If you guys used some of the same routines for the bio editor that you use in the game, you might find some reasons for some of the slowdowns that occur. Just wild speculation on my part, but you never know...
You can't go through 50+ games without making some mistakes; I certainly made my share. Here are just the ones I know about:
I'm sure there are many more. And I'm sure I will hear about them. But that's OK. I may some day even fix some of the problems...
Where did I find all those crazy names? Well, I found 'em, I invented 'em and I stole 'em!
Here's a little name quiz (without answers!). Maybe I'll post the answers later...
The rest are pretty much just made up.
Why aren't there more NPCs? There were 24 NPCs in BG I but only 16 in BG II. What's with that?
Well... I assume that the goal of Bioware was to have every NPC interact with every other NPC in the game. That means that the more NPCs you have, the more conversation bits you have to program in. And the number grows quite rapidly as the number of NPCs increase (in fact, the number is N*(N-1)/2 if you really care). So in BG 1 you had 24*23/2 = 276 conversations. But these conversations in many cases were not deep (or perhaps did not even exist). But limiting the NPCs in BG2, you only have 16*15/2 = 120 conversations. We have only cut the NPCs by 33% but the decrease in interactions has gone down by more than 50%!
What would happen if you had 30 NPCs? Easy---30*29/2 = 435 conversations! So you can see that as the number of NPCs grows, the amount of conversations (translates to work and time) increases way out of proportion.
So what's that got to do with the All Classes Page? Well... if you only run BG II once (and use the max number of NPCs for your party, which is 5), you only get 5*4/2 = 10 possible personality interactions. But from the above notes, there are 120 possible interactions. You have missed out on more than 90% of the conversations in the game!
So if you want to find out how Mazzy interacts with Korgan (quite funny, by the way), just download the Wizard Slayer file (after they have the party collected) and start playing. The Wizard Slayer NPC collection also includes Yoshimo so you can get some pretty good stuff from this group.
After you've done that one, you only have about 104 more combinations left!
The Versus Game Guide was an invaluable reference for weapons, subplots and other tidbits about BG II. But I did find one disconcerting problem. They have listed Ninja-to's under the Katana weapon class instead of under Scimitars. It turns out Monks can't use Katanas and I had the devil of a time trying to figure out how to give the Celestial Fury to my Monk!
Quotes that didn't make the cut (gee, do I need to make more characters?)
"Boo says, 'WHAT?' "
"I trust those who prey on children no farther than they can be thrown, even if I manage to throw them pretty far!"
"Boo is outraged! See his fury! It's small, so look close. Trust me, it's there."
"Heros of goodness need no warning!"
Quotes that are unfinished (can you help me out here?)-
"Minsc and Boo and _____ "
Other meaningless links...
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