Question about Constitution penalties

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Yep, another dumb newbie question; thanks to all of you for your patience. I did check other threads to see if this had been addressed; so
far I haven't found an answer.

My question: How high does your Con have to be to keep from suffering penalties when rolling for HP?

The situation: I am running a fighter/mage with a Con of 12. I assumed that 12 was above-average enough not to suffer any HP penalties; and somewhere in the back of my brain I seemed to remember that in D&D a mage rolled HP on a d4 and a fighter rolled HP on a d8 or d10. However, when I level her for fighter OR mage, I have to (I'm so ashamed to admit this) reload about four times to get her to roll anything but a 1. Even after a couple dozen reloads (ugh!), the best I can get on her fighter points is a 4 or (once) a 5; the best I can get on her mage points is a 2. So here I am with my supposedly buff 18/39 fighter with a -4 AC... who has to hide in back and shoot arrows because she can't take more than 2 hits without dying. Yet when I level Khalid or Jaheira, they almost always go up 9 or 10 points straight off the bat!

Extraneous details: I am running BG/TotSC straight off the 4-CD boxed set install with no patches or mods. I believe my version is 1.3.5521.

Thanks in advance for your assistance!

- starsaphire

 

I believe there is a mod out that can help this. I think that it might be the Ease-of-Use mod at pocketplane.net. There are a few ways to get around this though, like if you have BG2 and ToB, you can get EasyTutu which will make you get maximum HP every time.

 

I'm not sure, but IIRC multi-classes get half of the normal dice roll (d4 for mage levels and d10 for fighters) at the level ups.

 

CON penalties start at 6 or 7 and below, and bonuses start at 15 and above. What you're experiencing is the HP cut that CIG is talking about. Multi-classes have their HP/level split by the number of classes that they have, so a triple-class would be splitting their HP roll by a third, and your F/M will have it cut in half. That means max 2 per mage level and max 5 per fighter level.

 

Ohhhhh, that makes tons of sense. I never even thought of the split die roll; we never did that "in the old days" when I played tabletop D&D!

Thank you; this makes everything so much more clear...

- starsaphire

 

If you wait with levelling up until you can raise both classes at once you don't have to reload that often. 7 HP for levelling up in both classes is far easier to obtain than 5 when levelling only as fighter.

This also applies to your multiclass NPCs, especially Jaheira.

 

Given the probabilities remain the same, and with separate rolls you can effectively "save" one when you get it instead of hoping for them to coincide, I doubt it. But given the screwiness of RNGs, I suppose I can't really be sure.

 

Cool; I'll try that. I have a level coming up soon.

Thanks again, everyone!

- starsaphire

 

You could also just install a max hp on level up tweak.