question about paladin's charisma benefits

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At what level is the paladin supposed to receive the charisma modifier addition to his armor class and save rolls that the manual mentions? In one of my past games I had a level 16 paladin/4 fighter and I don't recall ever seeing his charisma modifier added to either AC or saves. Was I just not observant or does he have to be a pure paladin to get this bonus or is this a known glitch?

 

Nay he does not have to be pure. He should recieve the bonus from the start (only for pally levels). I don't remember how high the charisma abiltyscore should be, but I guess over 15.

 

You don't get any AC bonus (monks wearing no armour and no shield get a WIS bonus to AC).
The paladin's Divine Grace bonus to saves is effective at the first paladin level.

[edit: the bonus is equal to the CHA bonus, 1 point for every two points above 10]

 

You get your CHA bonus to your dodge AC if you have Divine Shield in NWN/NWN2...

 

The manual does indeed mention that a paladin gains a charisma modifier to his AC. Unfortunately, as Caradhras points out, you never get a charisma bonus to AC. I don't think it is a bug, just a mistake in the manual.

 

Maybe the devs were plannin on putting Divine Shield in but cut it out at the last minute?

 

Or maybe it's just that the IWD2 manual is useless. I've found that ignoring it completely and relying on the many excellent user-made guides available is easily the best bet.

I don't know what it is with games these days, but so many manuals are crap now. Apart from never being printed out (which annoys the hell out of me) most of them contain information that's just plain wrong, if it's there at all! Come to think of it, no wonder development companies are getting lazy: we've got so much excellent fan-written stuff, they must be wondering why they bother with manuals and patches at all. Just dump a game out there, and let the mod squad get their teeth into it. No overheads, and they do a better job anyway. Just a pity they have to pay some people to code a game in the first place, really.

 

Magpie, to be fair, the official manuals are probably written in parallel with the game's actual development. And little changes in the rules may happen faster than the tech writers can keep track of or the dev people may just forget to tell the writers. OTOH, fan-written stuff, as you put it, has the advantage of looking at the finished product when being written, without the time constraints of a profit-driven company trying to release a new product.

Also, it can be annoying that manuals are not printed. But given the much smaller size of the boxes in which games are now released, manuals have to be correspondingly smaller. And that will end up forcing the standard font size used in the manual to be smaller to get all that info into the smaller size. And that ends up making for a rather uncomfortably difficult manual to read.

Such was the case with the IWD2 manual. The advantage of a PDF file manual is that at least it will be more readable, even if it doesn't have the convenience of a printed manual.

 

I wouldn't call the IWD2 manual useless. I was quite disappointed when I first saw it, but it is quite nice to read and you can relook things you don't remember. It can of course lead to frustation if you take days for planning the optimal party and you suddenly realise in mid-game that the feats you took don't work and your specialist mage can't cast your favourite spell because the description in the manual is wrong.

The reason why the manuals are so crap is that the companies get away with it.
Have you read one review where the tester scolds about the crappy manual ?
Did any review lead to a worse fazit because of it ? The main difficulty in BG2 might be finding out which spells and actions are far more powerful than their buggy description.

For BG1 there was at least a "readme" file which told the changes since the print of the manual, why not in the later BI games ?

It doesn't matter if the company name is ruined, the responsible people in management don't plan to work there very long anyway. Just maximize the profit until the company will get broke, bought or other things.
And for the customers it doesn't matter if they get solid work, only the reviews in the magazines which get their money from advertisements and commercials decide what they will buy.

And why print a proper manual ?
You can get far more money by selling official strategy guides which contain what should be in the manual.

Theese are imho the reasons for the bad manuals, not the fan-made guides which might even reduce the sales of official strategy guides.

A well-made printed manual is important, so you get at least something special for your money.

.pdf files are horrible to read, if there's no manual I'd rather have a .txt file on the cd where I can scroll at will instead of those uncomfortable scans.

 

Crucis is right. Manuals are typically written several months before software is released (there are a lot of reasons for this that I won't go into right now). And since many features may be changed or dropped near the end of the software development cycle, some information in the manuals is bound to be incorrect. That's why the readme included with most software contains an "errata" section.

In addition, cost is another reason that most manuals are .pdfs now. Do you know how expensive it is to print hundreds of thousands of copies of what is essentially, a mini-book?

Not that any of these savings are passed on to the customer, but that's another matter....

 

Kmonster, I agree that there's a certain something about having a manual that you can put in your hands and read without the need for having a computer. But printing what is essentially a small book is a time-consuming and costly process, and probably needs to be done well in advance of completing the software development and burning the game CDs.


I don't particularly like raw TXT files as a replacement for a manual. Far too ugly. I'd rather have PDF files.

However, a better alternative might be set of website-like HTML (or whatever) files that could come with the game, and provide a spiffy electronic manual, without the cost of printing up hardcopy manuals. An advantage of this route would be that the manual "developers" could keep working and updating the "manual" right up to the same time that the game software development has to be closed for final CD burning, etc.


Acrux, don't be so quick to think that the "savings" haven't been passed on. Look at it in reverse. If printing is so costly and becoming moreso year after year, leaving out a paper manual is one way to prevent a game's cost from having to cover the cost of a paper manual. After all, how much more would a game cost if it had to include a large manual like the BG2 manual, which was almost as large and thick as the entire IWD2 gamebox.

 

Printing books isn't expensive, especially if no colors are used as in the IE manuals. The BG2 manuals surely cost the company far less than $1 each, probably far less than 10 percent of the costs for printing out a .pdf file with your own printer.

 

The consumer cost for software with paper manuals and those with PDF manuals are both rising at the same rate. Many of these companies are relying on the assumption that most purchasers don't think/care/realize about the manual (after all, we KNOW - and as a researcher that's a word I don't use lightly - that most users don't look at a manual anyway), and so it's a great way to save money without worrying about (too much) negative customer feedback.

I work in user experience for a major software company, and I've seen these kinds of decisions being made, for better or worse. I, for one, consider PDF manuals to be quite convenient (no worries about loss, etc.), but I can understand why some people don't care for them.