Anyone else play Forgotten Realms/Dragonlance novel characters?

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Im playing, Drizzt Do'urden, Artemis Entreri, Jarlaxle, Raistlin in my game, with 2 random clerics(couldn't find stats for Crysania). With their abilities/feats/skills from 3ed sources. So far, Artemis seems to be much stronger than Drizzt Do'urden.

Sorry, this is a rather random post

Its strange that in the novels Drizzt never uses ranger 'spells'.

 

1)Drizz't kinda sucks in a real RPG, but he's a cool character.

I think he casts "call animal" or something to get a seal to retrieve Gwenhwyvar after the statue was dropped into a frozen lake. I'm not too sure though, I haven't read a Drizz't book in over 10 years.


I've played the original Hero's of the Lance (Caramon, Raist, Tanis, Tas, Goldmoon and Sturm). I wish I had room for the others. I've also tried a Strider, Legolas, Gimli, Frodo, Sam, and Gandalf party.

 

no harm done, it's an interesting question.
How would you concieve them? You could wander off their defined classes a bit, like fighter or cleric instead of ranger. It would make them better to play. There's always a ranger character in these novels, which is almost crippling for an IWD2 party.
For example, the LotR party: Strider has been clearly defined as a ranger, Legolas has his sure striking bow, sounds like another ranger, and Sam is a gardener, yep, a ranger. Even gollem acts as a pathfinder, which would make him :sigh: a ranger.
Both Drizzt and Catti-Brie are rangers.
Even Belkar from the order of the stick, is a ranger.
It's widely acknowledged that the ranger class in IWD2 is severely underpowered, so playing any of these parties to the letter, is gonna subtract from your game experience.

 

Not really, no. One of the great things I like about roleplaying, at least if we're not talking about compuer games, is that you can discover so many things about your characters simply by playing. You play, and suddenly that one question mark in his description you just couldn't figure out becomes clear. If I play a character who's already an open book, if you forgive the horrible pun, you can't really get a feeling like that.
Plus, I feel that no matter what I do, I cannot really take credit for it. No matter how great and original the character is, I really can't be too happy about it, seeing that he's someone else's creation. Kind of kills the mood for me. And it would feel like an interactive fanfiction, which I, personally, find very dislikeable.

Edit: Oops, I really paid absolutely no attention to where this thread was posted. Sorry for that. Then I might answer: Maybe as a thematic choice.

 

I realize that Rangers are rather underpowered, but if you're playing a fairly role-playing sort of party and aren't in a heavily power-gamey mode, there's no reason that you can't succeed with a ranger in the party. I always loved having a ranger in the party, for various reasons....a) good for getting thru the Fell Wood without using a game guide, etc., b) I enjoyed having an archer in many of my parties, particular for sniping at spellcasters, c) a good high-DEX (for the archery) ranger is a good stealth character, and I enjoy stealthy characters, and d) a good high-DEX, decent STR, ranger in the best leather I can find can have a pretty decent AC and makes for a passable rear guard tank when necessary.

So yeah, Rangers may not make for great power-gamey juggernauts, but they can be fun nonetheless, if your playing style is suited to them.

 

There's a brilliant portrait for Raistlin on IWD2 that really helps set the mood for the character.

I'd like to try playing Mina one day, maybe Dalamar too. Rhys Mason would be good as well I think

 

Should be very interesting playing as Mina. ***(spoiler alert)***






She would have to have godly stats ^^, since she is one of the good goddesses that has lost her memory, and believes herself to be a mortal woman.

Catti-Brie

Human female 6th-level fighter
AC: 2
Move: 12
Hit Points: 42
THAC0: 15
Number of Attacks: 1
Alignment: Chaotic good

STR 12
DEX 16
CON 15
INT 14
WIS 16
CHA 17

Weapons of Proficiency: dagger; long bow (specialized); long sword; short sword.

Items:
longsword +4 (Kazea or Cutter, obtained from Dantrag Baenre, which is sentient and intelligent, ability to cut stone easily)
long bow +3(Tamauril The Heartseeker, found in Mithril Hall--has a quiver that never runs out of flight arrows +1)
dagger +1 (balanced to be thrown with a +3 bonus)

Yah, I was surprised that she was a fighter too. Since in the R.A. Salvatore novels Drizzt trains her in melee combat, as well as tracking skills, and basic wooden lore. I always thought she was a ranger too.

By the way, got Catti's stats from Heroes Lorebook I think. So, its not up to date.

 

I suspected as much with Mina but haven't got that far through the books yet!!

It's a shame rangers are so pants, some of the Kirath would have been good to play.

 

Aragorn is a Half-Elf Ranger/Paladin. Sam I gave a few Fighter levels to, since he ends up being able to use a short sword (dagger). Gollum is a high level Rogue if I've ever seen one. Gandalf is a Druid, or maybe a Druid/Sorcerer. And he's an Aasamir (well, that's as close as IWD2 gets).

Cattie-Brie is a Fighter. Drizzt (despite what his profile reads) is a Fighter/Ranger with one level of Barbarian (that's my interpretation since I read the Dark Elf Trilogy detailing his early years).

Belkar added a level of Barbarian along the way.

The last sentence of your post confuses me. You don't play a party from another source for power, you're playing it to make the party seem like the party you read about in a book (or movie, or online comic). If you want a power version of Belkar, make him a Fighter or a Barbarian. If you want Belkar the character in the comic, make him a Ranger (with 1 level of Barb).

 

I see where you get the Half Elf idea from, but IMHO it's a bit weird. A Dunadan is not a Half Elf.

If Aragorn translates as a Ranger with perhaps a few Paladin levels thrown in, he won't be that good in game terms with a magic longsword (way better in IWD1) and a light armour (no bows in the book). Not many magic trinkets either.

I agree that you don't play a theme party for efficiency and you don't need to powergame to have fun (actually non powergaming parties make the game more fun because it is more challenging).

But translating the LotR characters in IWD2 is way harder than using basic Dungeons and Dragons characters (or the OotS). Still if you enjoy playing that way there is nothing wrong with it.

I recently started a new game with a party made of my PnP characters... One thing is for sure it's not a powergaming party (one Gnomish Pally, one Barb, one Drow Bard and one Rogue).

Do you take advantage of IWD2 to play your PnP characters?

 

I think I got the mistaken idea that Catti-Brie was a ranger from a BG mod or something. That and her bow skill, which i tend to associate with rangers.

Sure, playing an underpowered class increases the difficulty, and so also the challenge. But a ranger's spells become useless quickly. Eventually most of its attack spells are no more than distractions from combat, which any other warrior can also do better. I find this annoyingly useless spellbook a big disappointment, and it doesn't add to my enjoyment of the game, despite the challenge. The ranger is mediocre in combat *outdoors against chosen enemies*, and just gets worse against other enemies.

@ crucis:
I appreciate your affinity with rangers, especially since you wrote a mod (Light of Selune) about them. I criticized the 'Updated Classes' component, but the mod is good, and deserves recognition.
You mentioned 4 reasons that rangers are good, but these only hold true from a roleplaying perspective:

a) game mechanics spoiler:

Spoiler

repeatedly clicking the Wilderness Lore with any character that has it (say, a high-WIS druid with no points spent in it) will eventually get you the area information you want. Spending skills is a waste.

b) archery is a useful option for first strike/reduced threat/mopping up situations. But having a dedicated archer in the party would involve figuring out what level enchantment the enemy is immune to, and using arrows of that type. Magical quiver is a valuable source of income, so I get an amusing mental picture of a ranger chucking gold at the enemy. Of course, your mod offers an alternative, and it is impressive.
c) in powergaming terms, a mage with a few rogue levels will do the trick. but i admit my illusionist rogue is using a LoS bow to sneak a bit better...
d) i always send in my combat characters first, for more muscle. if a mage is targeted, i could send everyone to kill the stray attacker, or cast Mirror Image and think about it later. And there's always the option to run around like a decoy till the enemy retargets... A 'rear-guard' suggests there's a frontline and a second battle - i prefer to kill enemies one at a time, to reduce numbers faster.

 

Too bad it didn't get any for a long while, and I lost interest in IWD/BG in general in large part due to the lack of feedback, good or bad.

I should note that had I remained interested, I'd have likely tweaked whatever areas of LoS that were lacking, along with adding another side-plot or 2.

Yes, but note that I *did* say in my above post that these were largely role-playing-ish reasons.

Oh, of course, if you're talking about particularly nasty enemies who are immune to certain level weapons, of course it's a concern for archers. But my general tactic for archers has always been to use the dirt cheap arrows on the enemy cannon fodder and save the good magical arrows for the nasties. Other than the extra damage, there's not all that much point in using some expensive +2 or +3 (or more) arrows/bolts/bullets against some animal or monster than a lesser arrow can hit.

Speaking of LoS, heck, I don't even remember the details of LoS' items. Oh, I know that there are a number of archery related things, which shouldn't be a shocker, considering that I happen to like using archers, even if it isn't a power-gamey thing to do.

I like having a a rear guard/ body guard for my mages. Now, sometimes that role is filled by a cleric, sometimes by a ranger-archer, and sometimes by a rogue. There are simply times when you are going to get attacked from the rear, or the enemy is going to be trying to surround you. Heck, any veteran player knows that there are some battles where you *are* going to be attacked on multiple fronts. And at those times, I often team up one of my primary tanks with a secondary tank at the front, and a similar pair at the rear, and keep my spellcasters in the middle.

Remember that I build parties that are not completely powergaming and have a measure of roleplaying to them. While I don't play exactly the same party every time, I almost always have 2 solid tanks, a cleric, some sort of rogue (pure, or ftr/rog, or rngr/rog), and either a sorc and ranger, or perhaps a sorc and some sort of MC wizzy.

I enjoy stealthy tactics and enjoy parties with both a ranger and a rogue in them, so that I can have a stealthy recon "subteam" that I can use to for "recon in force" missions. Heck, I've even used a fighter X/rogue 2 or 3 MC as my #1 tank quite effectively, and with the right mix of stats and skills, this character can be an effective stealth character as well. (This sort of character works best if you start as a rogue for the skill points burst, and then only take another rogue level every 4th or 5th fighter level, just so that the skill point cap high enough so that you can dump a boatload of SP into the stealth skills.)


Regarding targetting tactics, I won't say that I only target 1 character at a time. I do tend to allow my tanks to each take on their own enemy. However, if I have an archer, and there isn't an enemy spellcaster to surpress, I use the archer for finishing off wounded enemies. Ditto for my mages, if they don't have a pressing need to cast some important spell.


People should remember that when I'm discussing the builds and tactics that I like, I'm talking as a person who doesn't particularly enjoy overly power-gamey builds or tactics, etc. So I realize that some of the things I mention above won't be the 100% best and most efficient powergaming way to do it, and there's no real point in criticizing it, since I'm not promoting my thoughts as power gaming ideas.

 

I tend to hog items, and am very reluctant to use valuable quiver or potions. I used +3 arrows against Sherincal once, because I was having a difficult time. There was a nagging feeling afterwards if there wasn't a 'cheaper' way...

The LoS items I was talking about were The Emerald Bow, the Gyrfalcon arrow and Silent but Lethal bow.

Since I'm now playing with 2 clerics, an illusionist, a sorcerer, a druid and a bard, I can't keep my spellcasters in the middle. With only 2 or 3 good melee characters in my party, I'm forced to use my spells wisely. I used to have a barbarian in my party, he made combat a lot more straightforward... but this new party is fun - I like spellcasting.

About feedback: It's nothing to worry about. I started a poll about my 6th party member lately, and only 11 people voted. But the input was considerable, from these few people. And since my guide is out there, it doesn't matter how many people read it right now. In a couple years, maybe hundreds of people will have read it.
It's like your mod: It's out there, and people are using it.

Your mod could use some adjustments: When I had a high level druid that I wanted to give a mix-in of ranger, it cost me -11 reflex save bonus. The new reflex save progression for rangers seemed to take over the characters' reflexes... It was gone when I uninstalled Upgraded Classes. Besides some nice spells for my druid, all that this component offers is detrimental effects, like turning diplomacy into a cross-class skill for a sorcerer. Perhaps you could make a powergaming-compatible adaptation of the component, so players can choose their play style.
Another guy had some criticism about strength requirements to use certain bows in the game, so you could add an option to remove restrictions. I didn't like the 13WIS restriction on the Cera Sumat sword; I always install Improved Holy Avenger from Ease-of-Use over it
I like the improved traps component - it makes detecting/disarming traps more significant. And unlike BG2 where a sprung trap is another ....XP missed, here I can live with it.

 

Yeah, I can see where it'd be a bit tricky in that circumstance. Still in a fight where the baddies are hitting you from front and rear, even with 2 tanks, you could put one front and rear, if for no other reason than to draw the attention of the baddies and free up the spellcasters to nuke away. In the river caves, that's mostly all my tanks are doing ... keeping the monsters away from my spellcasters.

I suppose. But I've got to say that 11 people is 11 more people than commented on my mod, after dealing with the initial incompatility issue with the EoU mod, which (don't know about now) was using an out-dated version of WeiDU that caused some problems when you tried to install both mods.

I don't doubt it.

Coine, I don't remember why I did the sorc/diplomacy thing, but IIRC it was because diplomacy is a 1 pt skill for sorcs in the 3.5e rulebook (don't have the rulebook nearby to verify).

Regarding the ranger save thing, it may just be that the method I was forced to use isn't compatible with multiclassing. Oh well.


On a tangential note, I've always disliked the way that the talking skills are class related. I see no reason that a character of any class shouldn't be skillful in any of the talking skills, with a few exceptions. In the last few games of IWD2 I played, I editted the skill point files to set all classes to having the talking skills as 1 pt skills, although I have to say that it wasn't so every character in my party could be a talker, but so that my lead tank, often a silver-tongued fighter X/rog 2-3, could be the party leader without having to rules-lawyer myself into having the sorc do the talking.

A. I'm just not at all likely to start working on this mod again any time soon. Sorry. I'm doing other things with my free time these days. (I also haven't created any new portrait edits for my IWD2 portrait site in a year or 2 either. Although I have to say that after getting my new PC last year, I got a newer version of PSP and it had some really cool tools that were REALLY fun to use for portrait edits... particularly the one for playing with light sources.)

B. While I'd probably fix, if possible, or remove, if a fix wasn't possible, any elements, like the ranger saving throw thing, that are bugged, I'm not so sure that I'd dump stat requirements. I believe in them.

Hey, players can play how they want, but mod designers can design their mods how they want as well. And frankly, I don't think that it's all that shocking to expect that a mod designer who's more of a role-player and less of a powergamer to lean towards designing from a role-playing perspective.

I've always liked such restrictions. And IIRC, there's a WIS 13 restriction on Holy Avengers according to the D&D manuals.

That was the entire point. It bugged me that traps in IWD2 are soooooooo insignificant in most cases. When players just say "bleep it" and run their high HP tank over any traps, you know that traps just aren't nasty enough.




Anyways, coine, I appreciate the feedback, even at this late date.

 

I posted the same feedback months ago, but you haven't been on the boards for a while. And I wasn't on the boards, or even playing IWD2, when your mod first came out. Personally I like mods for the feedback aspect - it's much easier to contact a freeware author to try and get it improved, than contacting the makers of an old game in the hope they get around to making another official patch... I also gave feedback to the makers of Custom.dll fix and Tactics4IWD2. I would have done the same for Ease-of-Use and Icewind GATE 2, but I understand that Weimer has abandoned his projects. Actually I've been trying for a while to find a solution for why the new druid spells (yours too) aren't working in IWG2, to no avail...
It's to be expected that only a portion of IWD2 players will play any mods at all - many see the vanilla game as the *real* game and don't tolerate modifications, and some are just uninformed, clueless, overcautious, uninterested or lazy. So reading a powergaming guide is easier than installing a mod, that's why I got more feedback. That and the forum has gotten bigger, I think.

 

I guess that the thing I like about mods is that many actually expand your opportunities to play the game. Maybe not so much with IWD2 mods, since it is, for better or worse, such a linear storyline. But last time I played BG2, there was a great medium sized mod (don't remember the name) where you took a boat to some little island with a tower. Don't remember the reason, but you had a nice little, well-contained adventure in that tower that was fresh and new, and even had some new area artwork. It was great to have a brand new adventure. And I can't imagine not wanting to have opportunities to expand the game, if I want to continue playing it. It's get boring to constantly replay BG2 or IWD2 without modding the game. Even different items offer a chance for some differentiation.

 

The Tower of Deception, yeah it was nice. My personal favourites are Improved Anvil, the Planar Shere mod and Dark Side o/t Sword Coast. I'm still making my first run through the megamod I installed (14GB, loads of mods from BG1 to ToB...), and can't claim to have played the real IA because of all my overpowered gear. Melanthium from Planar Sphere was supposed to be the most powerful enemy in the entire game, but he was disappointingly easy to defeat The creator of IA is adamant that it be played without incompatible mods, and ToD one of the few compatible ones...
I'll be sure to play a compatible version of IA once i finished this run through (I just have to try all the mods...)

IWD2 could really do with some more mods. Too bad it's not possible to add sidequests and maps...

 

That's the one. I really enjoyed that mod.

I tried loading IA on my previous computer, but it just wasn't up to the task.
And unfortunately my new PC has a hi-res wide screen monitor, which makes the IE games too small in windowed mode, and too ugly in full screen mode.
I have read that there's a mod somewhere that allows IE games to be played on such monitors now. And maybe I'll download it and try it out at some point.

Yeah, the limitations do really make adding really good mods difficult, if not impossible. I haven't played the IWD2 NPC's mod, but I imagine that it was quite a challenge to create. I have to admit that it never intrigued me largely because one of the things I liked best about IWD2 was creating my own characters from scratch... backstories, stats, even custom portraits.
You probably realize that I have my own IWD2 portait site, but above and beyond the pics I just created for the fun of it for the site, I'd also create pics specifically for my parties' characters. Sometimes I created pics to fit a character and other times I'd have a really special portait edit that I loved and I'd fit a character to the pic. So, using the characters and pics that someone else made for the NPC mod takes away a huge portion of the fun of party building for me in IWD2. (That said, my comments are not a slam on that mod. Just an observation on what I loved about IWD2.)

Anyways, you can create some side plots in IWD2, but as long as you are limited to the areas already in the game, you have to fit those side plots and NPC's into the existing flow, which is doable, but can make some areas seem rather crowded.

 

A lot of people praise Tower of Deception, but I played many mod-quests which seemed to be of similar quality to me. I guess my sense for atmosphere and aesthetics isn't as well-developed as my thirst for powergaming... One thing that bothered me was that ToD requires you to cast Fireball at a certain point, or you can't progress I was using a mod-spell Smart Fireball instead (lvl5, insta-cast, huge damage, enemies only, plus fear.).

More even than portraits, I'd like to have voicesets. I'd love to have the voices of Irenicus, Edwin, Jan, Minsc and Viconia in my party

I'm not a fan of the NPC mod either, because I love character creation from powergaming perspective. And I agree that it's sad that so much effort goes largely unappreciated. But modmakers aren't catering to the demand, they just do what they like A recent poll on SP showed that the great majority of players don't install mods, and liked the Bioware NPCs much better than any mods, as do I. I loved taking the 5 recurring NPCs all the way from BG1 to, well, level 50. I dropped Imoen, Minsc and Edwin already, because they reached the maxed level, even with mods. Viconia will soon be done too. My F/C/M and Jaheira will stay in longer due to their multiclasses. I'm taking Yoshimo along for thief duties (he can be brought to ToB, and doesn't even need to be in the party at the end of SoA to keep his level !), and in ToB I have the possibility to bring in Irenicus and Balthasar (maybe, it depends on my alignment...)

 

I tried making som Drizzt characters, and BG characters for icewind dale, but the continuity felt all wrong to me. The events in icewind dale takes place 20 years or so, before Drizzt even leaves the underdark. So that bit kind of "ruined it" for me.