f13.net

A bunch of buddies want to start playing it together on the net. Since we're all spread across ontario cause of college/university and stuff we wanted to get into something to make up for the lack of seeing each other. I was just wonder if NWN has something out or coming out beyond the gold that has both expansions? Paying 50 bucks for the gold and another 50 for underdark.. doesn't sound appealing for a game that outdated.

Also, do the expansions require a cd key as well? I remember a friend of mine going through hell because his CD key was in use when I first tried to play.

First of all, no way you should be paying $50 for Underdark.  It was like $29.99 brand new.  And yes, you need CD keys for all expansions.

Hordes of the underdark came out earlier this year I believe, which doesn't really make it outdated in my mind.

Meh, play something new with your friends. The shininess of NWN will wear off halfway through the second chapter of the first storyline. Looking back at how much time I spent with that game, I wish I hadn't. It's just not worth it.

Get ye the expansion, Schild.   The original storyline is shit.   Shadows of Undrentide is very good - played through it at least twice.   Hoardes of Underdark is probably better yet (, if mysteriously lacking out of the box multiplayer support,) but I've been too distracted to meddle with it.

The best thing, I say THE BEST THING, about Neverwinter Nights is that it's far and away the easiest graphical, multiplayer compliant, fully customizable isometric RPG on the market.   You can, and people have, put together all kinds of amazing Campaigns and expansion material for it.    The developers have continued to provide post-product support and add-ons for NWN that rivals even Half Life.

About the only downside of Neverwinter Nights is that it's hopelessly mired in the AD&D Third Edition ruleset.    As we've learned from Deus Ex 2, too much streamlining can be a bad thing.


Yes, each expansion has it's own CD-Key

Why not just get together in an IRC chat and play D&D? You'll save some money and you can jump right in.

I bought the Gold recently and I've been struggling to even pick it up and finish it after I got through the first chapter. It's got this very Diablo-like feel to me of go here, whack this, find something stupid, repeat. I really don't get jazzed about the online capabilities simply because I like single player RPGs a lot more. Perhaps there is more to the game I'm missing because right now I'm having a hell of a lot more fun messing around with KOTOR.

Something new?  Like what? I'm not being a prat... just trying to find something new, myself.

Exactly.  It is a pretty damn small genre within a genre.  RPG with multiplayer coop.  The bioware games are really the ONLY ones that come to mind at all.  BG1, BG2, NWN and expansions.  What else is there besides the very good suggestion of IRC.

With IRC in mind, aren't there even front ends that have monster manuals and dice and shit built in?  I thought one of them even had a system where you could import maps and stuff.  Never used any of it, but vaguely remember being on a site like that one time.

Or you could all fire up net meeting and share a photoshop map.  Hell, the dm could have a black layer on top of the map that he erases as you explore.  That would be pretty nice.

Gamestop (http://www.gamestop.com/product.asp?product%5Fid=B645421AB) has a pretty good deal on Gold+HotU.

I've been playing NWN a lot lately. I always come back to it after getting burnt out on MMOGs.

My problem with NWN's is that you go in thinking you are going to play some 3rd edition goodness, in reality, you are playing diablo 2.

I'd much rather they had slowed combat down and made it strategic instead of a clickfest.

um, what would the second easiest graphical, multiplayer compliant, fully customizable isometric RPG on the market be?

If you haven't played them, Spellforce or Beyond Divinity.

The original campaign pretty much sucks, if you ask me.  The second is OK and the third is pretty good.  [heresy]I liked it better than KotOR[/heresy]

Don't even play the original campaign, it will turn you off two very good expansions.  Play shadows of undrentide and hordes of the underdark.  The second expansion is much better than the first, but its its a sequel to shadows so it helps to play it first, and its cooler to keep using the same char rather than have on artificially bumped to 15 for HoTU.

I played the Beyond Divinity demo, I think, and I liked it.  I forgot about it.   :)  I didn't know about Spellforce... I'll give it a go, too.

Yeh the first game's storyline is horrid.  The most annoying thing to me about NWN is the dam puzzles.  I do like DL'ing the player mods and gaming through them too.

I wish they would have turned it into an MMO though.

Vampire: The Masquarade, I guess.  

Morrowind if you're willing to change the defintion of isometric to include FPS.   (Insert: "YOU KNOW WE DON'T" <club!>)

The thing about NWN is that they did a doozy of a job of it.  If the field were flooded with multiplayer complient, fully customizable isometric RPGs, NWN would still rank the best among them.

CD is required to play online, and I think Hordes of the Underdark is only $20 now.

It's worth it, especially if you get some good fan-made modules. The main quests that come with NWN and the expansions suck ass.

http://nwvault.ign.com/Files/modules/HallOfFame.shtml

I recommend:
Honor Amoung Thieves
In the Company of Thieves
Elegia Eternum (This one is near professional quality.)
Excrucio Eternum
Penultima City and Penultima Rerolled
A Halo of Fires
Shadow from a Soul on Fire

Seriously, there are so many different modules and Persistant Worlds out there for NWN that you could play everyday for a year and not have tried them all.  There is tons of stuff you can do with NWN.

I really wish we could merge NWN with Temple of Elemental Evil.  I LOVED the detailed third edition TURN BASED combat in TOEE.  Too bad the aggro and scripting was abit screwy.  I wish there was a turn based way of playing NWN.  The interface was also way better in TOEE.  If you are going to use a radial menu, don't use cryptic symbols.  Give me fucking WORDS.  I can read them on their side you know.  Not only does it take up far less space on the radial dial allowing FAR more options but it also makes more sense and is more intuitive.

My problem with NWN is that it is almost unplayable for me without constantly pausing it.  I don't mind it with just myself and my wife playing on our LAN, but online it became a nightmare because the pause option had to be disabled for sanity.  At that point you could not access your characters special abilities very easily and it essentially became diablo (like had been said before).

Beyond divinity might be a good suggestion, I have not played it.  hopefully it is more in depth than that shitfest (although pretty) called "Sacred".

Spellforce as I recall was an entirely different type of game.  It was more of an adventure RTS than an RPG.  You built bases, structures, units, and attacked the enemy or roaming mobs with them.  Unless I recall the wrong game.  I would certainly not suggest it as a replacement to NWN.  It may very well interest those who do like NWN though.  It was... weird...  I don't know if I liked it or not after I finished the demo.  I found it abit too tedious to ever want to purchase though.

Bingo. I'm not some adrenaline-amped kid slamming Red Bulls and Mountain Dews and clicking like I own stock in Logitech. Same gripe I have with the RTS genre.

I don't mind that there are RTS games out there, I don't feel I should like every genre. But when RTS plows through the TBS landscape, it kinda sucks imo (I'm looking at YOU, Brian Reynolds).

So as not to derail this thread, could you start a new topic and do a quick review on Spellforce?  I searched for it and didn't find anything.  The box looked good on the shelf, but there are so many of these types of games out I didn't know if it had anything to put itself above the pack.

Yes, I could look for reviews in a lot of places, but I'd like to get this group's opinion on it.

Thanks.

Grab the spellforce demo.  Much better than us explaining it to you.

Dungeon Siege.

=P

Ok, I finally did this.  It seems like a playable game so far.  I got through the tutorial last night which was painfully slow, but I did learn a lot tricks that made the game more playable than first perceived.

The graphics are fine.  The RTS is basically Warcraft with some added shiny.  I haven't had much experience yet with the RPG aspect since you only lvl twice and in the campaign you get your avatar is very high lvl.

I noticed in the campaign that your Avatar has a TON of items and spells.  It demonstrates how item-centric the game probably gets, which is fine for a single-player with Multi-player option game.

The thing I really liked was the ability to jump up to an overhead view and then all the way to a almost first person view of the geography.  The game is running quite smoothly on my older game playing rig with no problems.  I'm quite surprised I can zoom in and out, rotate, etc. so well since my v-card starts coughing on heavy CoH battles or fast super jumping through skyscraper downtown areas.

Another cool thing was the way the scripted "cut scenes" are done with whatever backdrop you have created.  In the tutorial, I had several workers and a large army along with a few buildings near that portal thing when the "cut scene" started.  All of that was there.  The main characters moved in and out of my workers and army to get to their positions during the act.  The buildings were there too.  It did a lot for immersion I thought.

I might have to pick up this game when the price drops after their expansion comes out.  I noticed that on their website.  I also noticed a rather active community surrounding the game right now too.  That's always promising.

Thanks for the tip.

I have the demo, too, now.  I haven't played it but I will when I can concentrate again.  We're moving soon and I seem to be suffering from an attention span shortage and total thought scatterage.  I might pick up Beyond Divinity, too.  For some reason I thought I had but, in reality, I only played with the demo.

Things are not 'right' in my head, lately.  I wonder how many times I've made an ass of myself in front of you lot in the past few weeks.  :(

I'm sad.

<casts ressurect> (Target fails constitution check.  Corpse turns to dust.  "Oops.")

I've downloaded and am messing around with the Neverwinter Nights Community Expansion Pack (http://nwn.bioware.com/players/cep.html).

It adds 450 community creatred creatures, 14 new weapons *types*, 324 new shields, 772 new inventory icons, 1448 new placables, 121 new NPC portraits.   Other things too, likely.

That pretty much kills any excuse I had that NWN was lacking in assemblable.    I'm picking up my old half-completed module and seeing what I can do with this.

I reinstalled the Gold Edition and HotU as well as downloaded the expansion pack this weekend as well.  The CEP is freakin overwhelming, I can't believe it was free.

One day, I will actually complete a module.  One day...

Initial dabbling with the CEP looks good.  

Creatures added are relatively straightforward and often not entirely complete.  Stirges, for example, don't seem to have any life-sucking capabilities.    (I thought the vividly naked Succumbi was perhaps unneccessary.)

The new weapons are mixxed in with the same catagories of the old ones fairly successfully.   The vast majority of the new weapons are eastern in nature.    Numbchucks [sic], Sais, Tofna, various eastern Polearms, ect.

The placables are perhaps the best addition.     One stumbling block I've often run across in Neverwinter Nights is that, even with both expansions, there's one ugly table you can place.   Any other table you see is either part of the tile set or a desk.    The CEP adds about twenty new kinds of tables you can place: rock on!   I also like the various shop signs.

The module I'm working on is currently very large and ungainly.   I made the mistake of designing entirely from the inside out, while at the same time intending to create an open ended module.    As a result I have no overall focus on which direction the module is going.    Got to take this back to the drawing board.

Yeah, I started a few modules just to test the scripting language and then started making a story up to go along with all my scripting tests.  So I have a story now involving orcs, goblins, and um... dancing circus bears.  If I polish the story it can probably become quite amusing, but I doubt it will ever make much sense.

That is what I get for putting an old man in the woods with three bears playing ring around the rosie and responding to communication trees to do tricks.  I swear I was just playing with the emotes and the pretty funky dynamic pathing...  But then I liked my trick bears too much and made them the basis of the adventure.

Then I went and made an elaborate bear training grounds with goblin masters in a cave.  It is actually pretty neat, they all do tricks (some attacking combat dummies, some running laps, some doing slalom tricks, other playing dead then standing up).  If you pay attention to the ambient goblin chatter you can find out that loud noises will anger them, so I scattered a few ways of making loud noises in your pen near the bears.  Once the noise is triggered the bears actually break open their containments (or so it looks with vanishing boxes and explosions) and then I revert them back to normal AI that hates gobllins and is neutral to all else.  The players escape here as well.

Does this make any sense?  um... not really but it was some neat scripting.  So I had to make up a backstory of a goblin lord who accidentally stubled across some artifact of animal control and took over the woodland bears with it.  Dressing them up as orc for midnight raids on the nearby town.  So that the orcs would be killed by the townsfolk and leave the goblins alone.  The old man in the woods is actually an accomplished druid and he can set the bears right and dispose of the artifact if you return it to him after killing the goblin lord.  You can either kill the orcs first in their camp or get the orcs to rush off and attack the goblin caves if you have done that part first.

This is what happens when you build an adventure around random goofing off and bits and pieces of scripting.  Now my WIFE actually wrote a story first and her adventure was making sense.  And was so much more artistic looking than mine as well.  Too bad neither of them ever got done and I don't even know if we have the files anymore.

Have they actually made NWN levels creatable by people like me who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag yet?

Yes.

As I mentioned before (I think?) the community is the main reason NWN has quite an infinite future stretched out before it.

Case in point: Lilac Soul's Script Generator (http://nwvault.ign.com/Files/other/data/1044998316652.shtml), which is excellent for those of us who can't code our way out of a paper bag.   Just answer the questions and it gives you a script.  Cut it out of the script generator and paste it where it tells you to, and voila, you're good to go.

I'm not a bad coder myself, but this thing is a real time saver.

Thanks, Geld!  What a nice wee bit of fun that script generator is!  And clever, too... it generated this for me:



    $_=q`$_='    
       @8GCI';@a=/./g;        
      $j=9;$k=9;$w=25;$            c=35;$e=  
     8;$u=2;$v=1;{$k+=$v*      =$k<6|$k>16?-1:  
    1;$j+=$u*=$j<9|$j>60?-    1:1;my(%l,$m,$n);      
    for$y(0..22){for(0..70   ){$r=($_-$j)/1.6;$s=  
    $y-$k;$d=(($_-$c)**2+(  $y-$f)**2+(($w-$r**2-$
    s**2)**.5-$e)**2)**.5;  if($r**2+$s**2<$w){$m=
     $d<$m||!$m?$d:$m;$n=   $d>$n?$d:$m;$l{$y}{$_}
      =$d;}}}print"\ec";    for$y(0..22){print$_>6    
        9?$/:(($d=$l{$y      }{$_})?$a[($d-$m)*5/  
           $n]:$")fo          r(0..70)}select$q,  
                               $q,$q,.1;redo}`;
                                 s#\s##g;eval


Thanks!  Seriously, though... it's much more fun fiddleing with NWN using this.

Edit:  Unfortunately, it doesn't display  properly and I'm too lazy to care.

omfg. it says ur a furry.

For someone that's always wanted to really dabble in game creation (I used to make text RPGs on my old TI-83 calculator in high school), the additional content added makes picking this up very attractive.  Creating a module looks like it might be a way to keep my rudamentary scripting skills fresh and create a little adventure of my own.  But just how much can you alter with the game?  It is possible to introduce new classes? Can you set up your own cinematics? Can you do some pretty advanced AI scripting with the tool (like could you write a mini-war type scenario where you direct some troops and initiate some skirmishes)?  

However, it's still 40 bucks for the gold box and 30 for the expansion.  I like to keep my game purchases hovering around 50 bucks.  Still, I might pick this up.  On a good note, however, it looks like they're releasing a platinum edition in October for $40 which I assume will contain all expansions and some other goodies. Perhaps by then the gold box and expansion will have dipped to 20 a piece.

From what I remember of the limitations of the scripting engine just after release of the base game:
- You can't add classes.   This might have been changed with an expansion, since the expansions did add classes.
- You can have cinematics, either scripted in the game engine, or included in the module.
- You can script a war scenario, with NPCs attacking other NPCs.

You can add classes, at least prestige classes.  It's been done, just look around.  It involves Hak Paks, tho, and I'm not real clear on _how_ it's done.  Apparently it seems like you should be able to add base classes as well, but base classes don't work out right for some reason, from what I've read.

--
Alkiera

base classes seem to have a bit of hard coding in them at character creation... from what I understand you can add new classes people can level up to after creation, but the attributes of a class at creation is somewhat hard coded.  Problem for rangers who wish to use the updated v3.5 class from the beginning.

To the OP:  You can get the game and expansions off Ebay.  NWN Gold costs $25 US buyout (i.e. it costs less than $25), and HotU costs $14-17 US buyout.  The easiest thing to do is get the CDs from a friend/internet and then email the sellers asking if they can just email you the CD Key and discard the game afterwards.  That way, you get the game instantly and don't have to pay shipping.  I did this yesterday - got the HotU CD Key for $14.99 US, and I would have paid about $15 for NWN Gold if I hadn't been able to barter with a friend for his CD Keys.

I guess if you're going to cry about how email is insecure or how you distrust the sellers etc, you can go buy it retail.

I guess you trust people more than I do.

More than half of the NWN Gold crap was foreign (most from Thailand), sorry, not going to deal with international shipping.  With shipping costs most great deals like that end up marginally better than retail, and you get to deal with Ebay/PayPal/international shipping/possible piracy and fraud.  No thanks.

If I knew someone with the disks, then maybe I could ask someone to crack open a box and send me the keys.  But then what's to stop them from using the keys themselves or just reselling the game?  I can't exactly ask them to email me an avi of them torching the cds.

I know many people have embraced ebay as the great den of deals but I'm a lot more comfortable buying from an EB Games or a local shop.  Ebay gives me no real sense of security. I've yet to really use it for anything other than selling MMORPG items (which may explain my inherent distrust of the procedure).

Well, I bought it.  Now I can't get the thing to fucking work.  I get random crashes when creating characters, when loading areas, etc.  It's not even a very descriptive crash so I can look up what to do.  It just gives me that wonderful Windows XP crash screen; "Send Error" or "Don't Send Error" is not something I want to fucking see.

I've updated all of my drivers, etc ,etc. I've never ever had this many problems trying to get a game to run. I thought it was a sound error at first (Fucking NForce) but even with sound disabled it craps out.

I just fucking pray that EBgames will let me return this fucking heap of shit.  And PC game makers wonder why consoles get 75% of my business.  

BAAAAAAAAAAH.

In the past I had discovered Neverwinter Nights had a nasty habit of crashing on me when other apps would be relatively stable.  Hard lockups or spontaious reboots (which are by default how WinXP handles a BSOD - I disabled that little feature).

How I ended up fixxing it was going into my Cmos DRAM settings and disabling the T1 command and setting my "Fast Mode" CMOS setting from Ultra to Normal.    No apparent performance degregation in FFXI bench, but it totally stopped my NWN lockups and that was good enough for me.  

This translated into less lockups in other applications as well, so ultimately I'm chalking up the issue to shitty hardware/compatibility issue.   (Probably the memory - have to set my SDRAM CAS# Frequency to 2.5 instead of 2 or I run at 512MB instead of 1 GB.      I'm just glad I got NWN to work stably at all.)

Anyway, the whole experience has me thinking that any issues you have with NWN are really issues with your systems hardware being used to the limits.   This is because the kind of sophisticated high end processing work NWN pulls, few other games dare to tread.    Overclocking often leaves holes gaping wide open that full throttle apps like NWN will find problematic.

On the other hand, KOTOR has a nasty habit of crashing every 4th or 5th time I zone, and it has some NWN lineage in there.   Perhaps NWN isn't the god's gift to data archetexture I think it is.

Make sure you've patched the game(s) to the latest version from here:

http://nwn.bioware.com/support/patch.html

You may also want to visit the Support forums here:

http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewforum.html?forum=49

NWN is one of those games, unfortunately, that causes problems for many people (typically sound and graphics issues).

You can also check your Windows XP Event Viewer to see if NWN was kind enough to leave you a more informative error message in there.

Got it working.  When it started crashing at the same time, everytime during loading I figured it was a bad file somewhere. Complete reinstall got it working.

I remember this game sucking upon release.   This SoU campaign is pretty decent so far, if not terribly difficult yet. I think I'll play through the game before diving into the construction set so I can see what you can actually do with it (theoretically).

Well, over the years I've bought about twenty items on ebay, including a DAOC account, a new SWG box, a never-used Eve Online box, and a CoH Beta disk.  For all those items I just had the person e-mail me the CD-KEY (and in the case of the DAOC account, the password).  So far, no problems whatsoever.  There are still more honest people than dishonest people, I think.

I bought two copies of HotU (one for myself, and one for my girlfriend), a copy of SoU (for her), and bartered on IRC for some guy's NWN Gold CD Keys.  Everything worked so far without a hitch.  $43 CDN for two copies of the entire game and expansions (she got a NWN key from a friend.)  And by copies, I mean CD Keys.

If you find an ebayer with a highass rating, you can pretty much trust them.  It's in their best interest to be honest and not fuck you over, else you'll leave legitimate negative feedback (as opposed to retards who don't check their mail and then leave negative feedback, which is what 90% of the negative feedback consists of, apparently.)

As for the copies being in Thailand, again, don't have them ship it to you.  Just get the CD Key.  Now you get the ultra cheap (and functional) asian prices, without the horrific asia->america shipping prices.

Dealing with all of the crashes this game can produce is just a trial in itself.  After getting it working, it had a crash that corrupted the entire game module, FUN!

Several reinstalls later and a complete system reinstall (I was due for one, Windows installations don't age like wine). I got it working. Except there's always a problem with the art. It NEVER installs correctly.  There's always some 2D art that is missing.  One time it was all spell icons and some character portraits.  Now it's all of the loading screens.  Also, certain art items in the game have made me crash.  I can't open a certain chest without it crashing.  

I'm not sure anything actually fixed anything beyond now at least I can create characters and so far haven't run into any unavoidable crashes. Of course, I now have two alternating save points incase one gets corrupted.  

People that make games this technically troublesome need to not be making games.  There's just no excuse for this kind of shit.  Yes, they've made a game that's a great model for user created content and their 2 expansions have produced better gameplay, but really, I haven't played a game this buggy since Fallout Tactics.

It was never buggy for me under 98.  Under XP?  Whole new ballgame.

I've run it under 98SE and Win2000, and never had any problems either.  I have had issues with other games that ran fine under 98SE and look terrible under win2000, namely anything using Direct3D v8 or 9.  D3Dv7-based stuff seems to be okay, mostly.  This may be partly due to the age of my card (geforce2 GTS 32mb) and nVidia driver differences between the two OS's.

--
Alkiera

The biggest bugginess I found in NWN was in Win98SE, and only on the construction set. For the first few months, that thing would either crash randomly, or it would corrupt my modules for no good goddamn reason. I know I started over twice on the campaign module I was making because of the corruption bug which they finally patched out. I ended up saving every five minutes and then copy/pasting backup copies into a separate directory in order to have a chance of finishing any module with more than 4-6 areas. I might actually have finished the module had I not lost so much time to that bug.

Haemish, the NWN Toolset WAS incredibly buggy under 98SE, I agree.  Above I was mostly speaking of the game.  The ToolSet is another matter, tho 2 expansions later, it seems to be somewhat more stable.

--
Alkiera

So who all is running the game under XP?  Sounds like Rasix and Jain Zar are having issues with it in XP.  Haemish, have you run the game in XP?  Does it run better for you in that OS vs 98SE?  Or did you give up on it after your 98SE problems?

I am waffling on whether I want to try and get into it again.  Not looking forward to any massive frustrations after my fan fiasco.  Which followed right on the heels of my router dying.  With a network card failure stuffed in between.  It has been a bad couple days for my little LAN.

Here's what I've gleaned from the unofficial support forums.  If you have any of the below, NWN may be a bitch to get running on your system:

Win XP/NT/ME
NTFS partition
Any new video card, particularly an ATI (it also tends to hate some AGP settings)
Onboard sound.
ATI motherboards.

Even if you're in the clear above, there's just a lot of things that can go wrong installing the game (files get corrupted, maybe the NTFS thing) and getting it to run at all for some people is problematic. There's also little quirky errors that you'll only find by scouring the damn support forums for hours.  Seemingly runs the most stable on old systems, but then they run the game very sluggishly.

I guess what I'm saying is, buy at your own risk.  Pretty much any place you purchase it from will have a return policy that makes getting your money back a near impossibility.

But other than that it's fine?  Sad.

Well, it's doable with the above. But that's where about 90% of the problems tend to be.  And yes, it is sad, no game should suffer so many different technical fuckups.  Broken quests and unbalanced gameplay would are welcome compared to something just not working.  

It's pretty bad when a game as old as NWN still has a thriving tech support forum.

Ohh god, I haven't even cracked open the toolset yet.  *braces for pain*

Well i am (or was, haven't touched it for ages) running it on XP-Pro and have not had any problems.

But then again i don't seem to get many of the problems that apparently plague the mainstream.

I am too, and it's running fine.  My hair, however, is seriously bugged. :(

Playing under XP fine with zero problems, and I have been playing a ton over the past few weeks.

After taking a look at the self-help tech support forum I noticed it had a total of 25 threads active yesterday.  About half of those were actually related to technical problems.  Not exactly a huge number considering the amount of people that actively still play the game.

Well, now that you 3 said it worked in Win XP, all of my problems magically vanished.  All of the missing art shifted into it place and the game sent a pop up to my screen promising to never crash again :)

To be fair(and less of a dick), I played last night for an hour without a single glitch besides some missing screen loading art.  

The game seems to transition between pathetically easy and hard as hell on the drop of a hat.   Using Deekin now as my henchman, he's goddamn hillarius although not terribly helpful being that I play a monk.  Thus I have no lock picker, no trap unsetter and no healer.  It's almost time to reup the dwarven rogue bitch.

I figure my problem is something install related because it doesn't fit ANYTHING on the boards.  I might have some bad CDs, I don't know.  I get different art problems and different crashes every time I reinstall.  But the crashes will be consistant.  Like on this install if I crash opening door #3, I will always crash opening that door.  It's not sound related, because it'll still crash with sound off.  I don't think it's video related, because I have a fairly decent card and up-to-date drivers.

/shrug  I figure once I beat SoU I'll give installing another shot but try to make it as clean as possible (no other processes running, etc). Because I imagine corrupted art files will wreck havok with trying to make a module.

The first can be solved once you can afford a pair of the gloves that add magic damage to your attacks... just punch everything that's locked.  The second becomes less of a problem at higher level, when it nearly takes an act of Ao to cause a trap to actually succeed on hitting you.

That said, the rogue/cleric may well be a better choice, I admittedly didn't take Deekin as my henchman(for my monk) until HotU, when he's a pretty uber bard.

--
Alkiera

You guys like the rogue/cleric mix?  My wife used to play dwarven rogue/cleric in it and we found it pretty difficult to get the game to agree that she was sneak attacking so she rarely if ever got the extra damage, and when she did it seemed random (sometimes it would kick in for no reason when she was face to face solo fighting something, but we found it nearly impossible to set up a scenario where it would work).  The cleric portion seemed to be a bless bot pretty much.  Some nice buffs in there that really helped, but the healing is pretty useless in the game considering how plentiful the healing kits and potions are.  And the kits and potions work even better than the cast heals.  This is from the original campaign.  I don't know if all this changes with expansions.

We own two copies of the game and I have the itch to play through it (or an expansion) with my wife, but the first time we gave up in frustration about halfway into act 2.  Her character kept getting corrupted forcing us to remake it with exp and item handouts in the DM module.  This had to be done constantly almost every play session.  The main savegames also started getting more and more corrupt as we played causing mission flags to get reset and such.  We had to start redoing things we had already done.  At one point we got stuck.  There was some key/item we needed to get into a place we had already completed, but we were mysteriously missing the item.  The game decided to change it's mind and say we didn't do that part of the game so we could not continue.  We searched the items in the DM module but none of them were the item we needed... and it didn't poof back to the well thingy in the hub like it should have.

So uninstall went the game.  It doesn't sound like it is much more stable these days.

Agreed that heal spells are not overwhelmingly useful in the game, for some reason, primarily due to the numerous potions/kits.
As fas as sneak attack, I haven't had any problem with it.  The rule is that if your target doesn't get his dex bonus to AC, i.e. is surprised, or actively fighting something/someone else, you get your bonus sneak attack damage.  If you're tanking, you get it pretty rarely.  I've played both fighter/rogue and monk/rogue.  It's handy for the skills, but sneak attack is dubiously useful for both.  Only really handy for killing things that are beating on more-fragile teammates...  and lots of things are immune to sneak attack.(undead and golems, for example)


How long ago was this?  There have been a lot of patches to fix problems with the mission/scripting engine, and the expansions did add a good bit of stability.  I too had some problems playing thru initially, corrupted savegames, etc, but my last couple times thru had no problems.

 It depends alot on your system, apparently.  If you had crash/blue screen/etc errors before, you may likely still have them.  A lot of the corruption/mission issues seem to have been fixed, however.

--
Alkiera

We started playing right after release and gave up in frustration about 3-4 months after.

Not much crashing problems, some random seeming crashes in the module maker, but we didn't have many ingame problems.  The thing it that does not mean anything to us anymore.  We both have new systems with new OS since then.