Biff the Understudy?

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Hey there. I just read this at a site about Baldur's Gate game, and I have never heard about this before. See:

Biff the Understudy
Human, Fighter, No Alignment
Many conversations in Baldur's Gate require the participation of a certain NPC, and if such an NPC is accidentally killed, the game summons up Biff the Understudy to say the required lines. Biff can actually join the party in some instances, though his statistics are poor. He also has a brief cameo in Baldur's Gate II (this time as a literal understudy for Haer'Dalis).

I know him in BG2, ofcourse, but have never seen him in BG, saying the lines of an accidentally killed NPC. Is this true, and how this is possible? It is really breaking the wall, but also rather humorous. That is, if this is true.

 

If you have paired NPCs, for example Jaheira and Khalid and one dies in the party and you kick the second out. Biff will be summoned as the 'companion' NPC to prevent errors in dialogues and joining.

So if Jaheira dies... you kick out Khalid...

Next time you see Khalid he'll have Biff for a wife!

He's a debug character essentially.

 

Oooh, great, this is suprising! I have to see this!

Err, does this also work on (easy) TuTu games? I do not have a BG1 installation to try it out right now!

 

I've not played EasyTuTu, I couldn't get it to install so kept to my standard TuTu installation I knew worked

Haven't tried it in TuTU either should work, in theory it's pulling files from BG anyway.

 

OK, thank you very much my friend, I wonder if all the people here knew this little funny fact and I was the only ignorant one...

 

I've read any number of threads about this but I've never checked it out myself. I'll have to try it next game.

 

I vaguely recall seeing Biff in BG1 when I semi-accidentally killed someone (the wizard?) in the thieves guild while doing the skyship component quest. His cameo in BG2 is even more hilarious, when you know his BG1 function.

 

You beat me to it That was the first time I saw Biff. I only completed the thieves' guild quest after killing the wizard, and since he's supposed to have an exchange with the head thief at this point Biff appeared out of nowhere to fill in for him. I didn't know this at the time, of course, so all I saw was Biff randomly appearing and having a completely nonsensical conversation with the other guy. It was pretty surreal (and very funny)

 

And this happened on my first run(s) through BG, so I thought "Who is this Biff guy?"

 

Yes I got the same thing. I had a three archer firing squad (Coran, Kivan and Imoen) and as soon as the mage chap went red, they nailed him. Biff popped up and I had a hearty chuckle.

 

The easy way to see Biff is to use the CLUAConsole to summon up paired characters like Jaheira, Khalid, Xzar, or Monty. That way, you'll get to play with him in your party too, and also the characters might go hostile if you kill their partners.

 

I remember killing someone accidentaly before the proper convo had taken place and he appeared, however there was a rare annoying bug which created multiple versions of him

 

One tends to encounter Biff more if one is an evil character, since proper evil characters would be killing everyone, party NPCs included.

Easiest way legal way to bring him up is to go to the stage where Shoal the Nereid is, and kill her after Droth spawns.