Let's all have a big argument about cheese.

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Traps.
Firkraag - definetly not
Shadow Dragon - I'm as undecided as today's Australian Federal Election
Irenicus - why not? He is pretty intent on draining the tree.
setting a whole lot of traps near a door, opening it and running of - could work, a % chance based on inteligence, or eyesight maybe.

Project image is IMHO not cheesy, it is supposed to do what ever you do with it. It is intelligable for any high level mage not to explore anything himself (tsk, and get his hands dirty). Same with CC - If I were a mage I would have a invis/dimesion door/ MS one on all of the time and by the time you are able to but three Abi Dalzims in one you are of a rediculously high level anyway.

Mordenkainens Sword - It's a level 7 summon, I would be disapointed with anything less considering you have access to coacfieds at this level.

 

Traps i agree with in principle, to be used as a 'safe area' that you can guard, or to lure enemies to. But the rangeof traps mean that they can be placed just outside visual range and detonate a bad guy.

What is it with traps anyway? They look like snares, it even says "set snare succeeded" and yet they shoot arrows at people. Explain, please? Either that or give traps a tiny radius so you have to make something actually walk on them. Then the insane damage might be a just reward, but i can still see it being abused... I prefer not to use them, which is a shame coz i like yoshimo...

 

Ah, Cheese. what is exactly cheesy in this game? taking advantage of bugs in the game certainly it is. But I don't think that doing things that are not allowed in the P & P game and are allowed in BG2 is not. If we are going to follow Ad&d rules by the book, we should edit party members after getting killed and substract 1 point from their CON stat when we cast raise dead upon themk, making them roll their percentage of survability. we should raise the level of certain spells that are actually one level of magic up that they appear in the game-Mordenkainen Sword is a 8th level spell, not 6th, as stated in Bg2.
As for the Item-Spell or Spell-Spell combo, I am just tired of using them in P&P gaming for my own advantage, and my Dungeon Master uses them for his own advantage too. My theory is "If it doesn't break the rules, it's ok".

As for certain tactics such as surrounding a Dragon with traps before attacking. This is a kind of cheese that only affects your gaming, not the outcome. You want to be a pure power player? ok to you, I prefer a good fight.

I think the worst possible kind of cheese without breaking the rules is choosing the most powerful party members, no matter if they never would choose the same side. Normally, Keldorn or Mazzy never would side with Viconia, Korgan or above them all, Edwin. Lots of suggestions for powerful parties rely on real-good/real-bad party combinations that would never be allowed in a P&P game with a decent DM.

 

Ah, gotta disagree with you on the party thing. I used to take parties that would get on with each other, but since trying minsc, edwin and jahiera together i never looked back. They hate eachother, and that makes it that much more fun. And the korgan/mazzy combo is a laugh...

 

try Viconia and Keldorn, at each others throats from the first minute. And when Keldorn called her a b*tch, I almost fell out of my chair.

 

How about "quasi-cheese," such as gaming the fog of war to diffuse a battle and take out enemies one at a time? Or likewise, gaming the AI by luring enemies onto killing grounds one at a time, or making alot of use of stealth artillery spotting. Doing this makes even Insane seem easy. Much more interesting to take the battles full on as the designers intended at a lower difficulty level, no?

 

I agree about fog of war cheese. But matching up good and evil characters is downright funny--I've DMed more than one campaign where a trickster or an evil SOB riles up the good guys over and over again, but the good guys can't afford to kill him or leave him behind. Like the argument about stealing Ribald's ring, there are plenty of "role playing" ways to justify a mixed-alignment party.

 

Fog-of-war/Cloudkill is still taking advantage of the engine to create a situation no intelligent adversary would fall for, so I'd label it as cheese. Worse from a Wand of Cloudkill, since those suckers ignore MR. Don't have enough experience with traps to have an opinion - will have to see what I encounter when I take my (soon-to-be) assassin from BG1 into BG2.

It's not the principle of Project Image that I'm calling cheese over, it's the fact that it costs you none of your regular spells when you use it. It's things like this that make the Sorceror class so insanely powerful with a bit of forethought. Maybe I'm a bit rusty on my PnP rules, but surely using your PI to cast spells should cause you to use up those spell slots. It's powerful enough as it is without making it essentially a free re-memorisation of every spell you have.

 

Project Image can get really cheesy if you are playing a bard.

 

Bards can't get project image. Do you mean mislead?

 

Bards can PI from a scroll.

 

Yes I was referring to mislead, but they can cast it from a scroll, and that would indeed open the doors for uber-cheese for a bard.

 

I take it you are referring to the bard singing his son effectively 5 times, cumulative? Naughty, very naughty.

A lot of people have mentioned using several project images, i never saw how.

If project image died when hit like reflected image or mirror image... then would it be fair?

 

Pick-pocketing is cheesy if you have put, say, only 5 points into that skill, but effectively raise that skill to 100% by reloading every time it fails. A character with only 5 points in pickpocket would never attempt it because they would be pretty sure to fail. Because of the consequences, only a very skilled, very stupid, or very evil (i.e. didn't care about reputation) thief would ever try to pickpocket.

 

@ Harbourboy - that's what potions of master thievery are for.

 

My favorite Project Image cheese is abusing the (lack of a) summoning limit. Imagine something like six planetars and a horde of Mordy swords and skeletal warriors, all hasted . . . and if Death Spell is giving you problems just send them in one by one; no spellcaster in the game has more than a few memorized.

 

@ chiz

Yep, that's what I'm talking about. I'm really surprised this was never corrected in a fix pack. I understand that they have to allow more than one bard song to be active, because if you have two different bards each playing a bard song, those two should be cumulative. (If, for example, you took Haer Dalis' and had a bard PC.) However, there should be some way of ensuring that each bard can only have one bard song active at a given time, and for the game to recognize a mislead copy of the bard is still, in effect, the same bard.

 

I think the ability enhancing items in the 3E games such as IWD2, which add a few points to stats, are far less cheesy that the ones in BG2 that simply assign a stat, regardless of the original ability score.

Imagine the following character, Reginald the Pathetic, a cleric:

S 03 D 03 C 03 I 09 W 09 Ch 03 Stat total: 30

This guy would be about as fit for adventure as my 90 year old great aunt Elaine.

However, give him Crom Fayr (after Mauler's Arm at the beginning of the game), the girdle of constitution, gauntlets of dexterity, and the ring of human influence, and then have him quaff a potion of insight, and he becomes godlike:

S 25 D 18 C 18 I 09 W 18 Ch 18 Stat total: 106

And if he wanted to feel smarter, he could drink a potion of genius or two.

Actually, come to think of it, anyone played through with a stat total of 30 (or 24, the minimum)?

 

Stat enhancing items arent that bad. For example, the kit reginald the pathetic has taken. His bonuses to Int, Con and Wis are tempoary, the bonus to cha isnt really cheesy since it has a less than huge effect. 18 dex is nothing that special. The only nasty thing is 25 str from crom. That weapon is pure evil.

 

In general, cheese is whatever is non-roleplaying or unrealistic. It is the degrees of cheesiness and whether or not something is realistic that we argue.

Fake-talk is definately the big cheese.

Stat enhancing items are bad when they enhance too much like crom.

Though, I say cheese is every other person having a magcial weapon or armour or other equipment. Magical items are supposed to be rare or at least fairly so. There should be different types of each weapon as opposed to one type and ten million of that type enchanted. Like weapons forged by other races, places, different materials etc.

Firkraag may be arrogant like all other red dragons, but he'd would let you set traps around him. He'd get annoyed then kill you.