Other good AD&D CRPGs?

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Psionicist has arguably the most potent attack combo in the whole game against singularly powerful enemies.

Zap that target with ID Insinuation. Most if not all targets won't put up the defenses to block it like Thought Shield or Mind Blank.

Follow up with Disintegrate. Because the target is now held still by Id Insinuation, it has ZERO chance of making the saving throw vs. death and will die instantly.

But I don't like having a single-class Psionicist. I like a Halfling or Thri-Kreen multiclass with Druid, since their bonuses to Wisdom enhances both classes.

Damn, reading all of this is giving me an itch to play those games again. Maybe even write walkthroughs for them.

 

In case anyone is interested, I have published my cheat table at https://fearlessrevolution.com/viewtopic.php?t=23768. Finally figured out how to change classes too. Now I can edit literally everything on my characters. Not tried modifying items, quest status, etc. but who knows what's possible down the line... especially if a particular quest status causes that horrific endgame bug.

 

One more question: is Fighter/Cleric essentially a nerfed Fighter/Druid? The fighter class eliminates all gear restrictions (weapons for clerics, armor for druids) and Druids have access to more Cosmos spells (where most of the useful stuff is). TU seems to be the only thing in favor of clerics -- is TU worth missing out on L4 Cosmos? Or have I missed/misunderstood something?

I'm going to start my new game today. I'm going to go with your original party, but with one major change (on Balanced difficulty):

Your party

I know everybody has been espousing the virtues of a half-giant gladiator but I'm going to make him a Human Ranger (Fire). I'm going to grind with only him in the arena to get him to level 8, then dual-class him into a Thief. At this point I'll add the others to the party and grind away for +2 levels in everyone. My guess is that the thief will gain 4-5 levels while others are picking up 2, since thieves level up very fast. The dual-classing should be completed in good time, somewhere in the desert.

The extra source of backstab is just too tempting for me. Also ranger instead of gladiator will give me benefits of dual-wielding and priest spells when I get the ranger class back. The others can protect the pure-class thief if need be, though he should have enough HP to survive on his own.

My other choice for a second source of backstab was F/D/T but Thri-Kreens cannot be thieves. Mul is a decent option for this but I don't want to miss out on the Thri-Kreen's extra APR and paralyzing bite.

If I die too often, I'll revert to your party

 

Heh okay. I promise to not get frustrated enough to totally give up. At least I'm not going into this totally blind and I'll know I'm dying because of my own poor choices. I'll save before going in and reload if I meet mountain stalkers. And I have a fall-back plan if I keep dying repeatedly.

The reason I want to level up the ranger separately is because I don't want the party capped out at L9 too soon. If I grind for 8 ranger levels and 4-5 thief levels with the whole party, I'm afraid of everyone becoming L9 by the time I reach Tea Kettle or whatever the correct name of that village is. Going into the sewers with everyone else at 3-3-3 or 3-4-4 seems decent to me.

Okay about TU -- but is it worth it? Is it better to have two druids in the party (Half-Elf F/D/Preserver instead of R/C/Pre) and have access to more spells, or is having TU better? Are Free Action and Protection from Evil 10' crucial to gameplay? The rest of L4 Cosmos spells seem not very useful but in infinity engine, these are my bread-n-butter spells. Abjure also sounds nice if it takes care of Slaads and Fire Elementals in one shot the way TU would take care of undead, but I don't need a second druid for that. From the videos I've seen, Neutralize Poison would be nice to have but there are fruits for that.

I'm asking because my experience with other games is that one doesn't get many spell slots of higher levels. So even if a druid has access to everything, a single druid might not be able to cast everything between rests.

 

Totally forgot to mention: the reason I started thinking about Human R/T is because in one of the videos I saw a helm that grants permanent 24 Str. If I get that, I can only imagine how delicious all my backstabs will be, even with pure-class thief. It's a pity half-giants can't be thieves otherwise I'd have multiclassed.

 

Gonna ask what is possibly a very stupid question now: how do I identify whether armor is medium or heavy? I'm assuming all the leather stuff is light but does bone always translate to medium and does metal always translate to heavy? Stuffing this up is going to make my choice of Ranger so much poorer

Also, "Ranger is restricted if wearing heavy armor" -- does this refer to all armor pieces or only chest armor?

Apologies in advance for extremely basic questions. Being a newbie is scary business and I can't find this info anywhere on the web.

 

Part of it is the Dark Sun lore. Metal is extremely rare in Athas. Most weapons and armor are made of bone or stone. Dark Sun is D&D meets Mad Max on steroids. So when a metal armor or weapon piece is found, it is almost a godly mythic artifact compared to the usual. The only two armors that would create problems for a Ranger or Thief are the Grey's Scale and Tavelyv's Armor, both metal suits. The Silk Armor is perfect for Preserver multi-classes since you can cast arcane spells while wearing it.

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If you're curious, the original 2nd ed. tabletop version of Dark Sun had some distinct perks for playing a Cleric apart from TU, but they weren't easy to translate to a PC game.

One was channel element, which you could do in various ways and iirc either without limit or very close to it. The other was a move away from the "blunt weapons only" and having clerics use weapons associated with their element. For example, a fire cleric could use a magical obsidian sword that did extra fire damage.

Another incentive was that, if a player was willing to go that distance, to try and become an advanced being. A Human who dual-classed 20 levels of Psionicist with 20 levels of a spellcaster class.

A Human who dualled 20 levels of Psionicist with 20 levels of Defiler could become a Dragon.

A Human who dualled 20 levels of Psionicist with 20 levels of Preserver could become an ethereal almost angelic being called an Avangion.

A Human who dualled 20 levels of Psionicist with 20 levels of Cleric could become an Elemental.

But there was nothing like that for Druids.

 

Seems to me Clerics and Druids are quite different in the PC game too. From your description, the one thing that has been implemented for clerics is non-blunt weapons -- they can use any weapon allowed by their chosen sphere. And Druids can't wear armor that Clerics can.

However, the Fighter class collapses all these differences. To me the main difference between a F/C and F/D is TU vs L4 Cosmos. The xp table difference is a relatively minor consideration. Alignment is only a flavor choice, irrelevant to mechanics.

So I'm assuming the restrictions only apply to chest armor and not other pieces -- or that none of the other pieces are heavy in the first place.

 

Helms, amulets, that sort of thing? Nope.

 

Save scumming for the win. I am finally done with the Arena and Pens. No, I wasn't playing continuously for all these hours but I did play a fair bit. Killed everyone in the Pens except Gilal, Trustee and the cook, got all the chests, bags and equipment I can get and have a party I believe will survive the harsh deserts.

I'm running around with a pure-class L4 thief (almost L5) who has 117 HP , and who will eventually regain Ranger abilities. Everyone else is at least L4 in all their classes. Biofeedback, Flesh Armor and Graft Weapon were the only useful powers I started off with but they were extremely helpful. Life Drain is meh.

Also, instead of giving Metabolism to everyone, I gave Kinetics to one and Telepathy to the other. Especially like Detonate (like a low-level Fireball) and Inertial Barrier when all the guards keep pinging you with arrows.

 

No, I was referring mostly to arm and leg armor. Helms too but I doubt there are any metal helms in Athas. And they seem to use chains only to bind people so I seriously doubt there will be any metal belts!

The way the manual is written, it's easy to expect all this gear to count as 'armor' which might 'interfere with racial abilities'.

 

Oh right. In that respect I do remember that the arm and leg pieces of Tanelyv's armor would also be a problem for Rangers and Thieves, as would the leg piece for Grey's Scale.

 

Oooh. Sorry. Thought it would amount to spam if I started posting about all my little accomplishments!

Finished the game a few hours ago. No easter eggs. For the first run, I religiously followed a guide so I wasn't doing any exploring other than some xp runs. The biggest difficulties were when I ran blindly into monsters that required +x enchanted weapons to hurt. Those were brutal fights because max 1 or 2 of my party could do anything against them at least during the first round when I didn't yet know I couldn't hurt them. Second round onward it was okay because either the ineffective members stuck to spellcasting, or they ran away or (in case of large mobs) I just passed a +2 or +3 weapon from one character to another when it was their turn.

Glad to say I was able to acquire almost* every unique item and complete every quest. My dual classing finished mid-game. Towards the end, I was getting a little anxious because the rest of my party was at levels 8/8/8. So I did some random killing to get them all up to level 9 before I went into the palace ruins.

For the war, I had everyone I could by my side and asked for the Genie's help. On my next run I don't think I'll ask for his help. I want to see if spells like Abjure and Dismissal can get rid of the entire first wave without having to fight them.

*Little disappointed that I forgot to get the Armor scroll from Old One Eye -- I went without his 'help'. Also, the guide says there's a buried chest just south of Kel's wagon in the Elven Caravan -- either they've made a mistake or I don't know how to look for it. I've found no such buried chest (yeah, I got the other one in the dragon's eye). It's supposed to contain cahulaks+1, bracelet of graft weapon, quarterstaff, gem, and 100 cp. Finally, I haven't met Alhena who is supposed to appear at the caravan campfire after the final battles. She hasn't appeared yet though I've done some traveling around.

Also, now that I've finished the game, is there anything to really do? I've accepted leadership of TeaKettle (as leader, I get to name it whatever I want). Is this only an opportunity to gather random xp before starting the follow-up game or can I actually do any unique stuff?

Does everyone carry the sword blank with them even though there is nothing we can do with it? Or is it just me? I haven't overwritten my save before killing Balkazar. I want to experiment if using the sword blank on the venom extract will have any effect. Highly doubt it though. Quite disappointed that I couldn't envenom a normal Obsidian Sword or a Metal Long Sword. Only the Stone Dagger worked to get Terror Blade.

 

Having the Ranger/Thief dual-class is no big deal. I could have just as well had a Gladiator/Thief or Fighter/Thief. Of the three, Fighters level up fast, Ranger and Gladiator level up slightly slower (same xp table for both). As soon as I was able, my Ranger/Thief was wielding El's Drinker and Dagolar's Dagger (the only one-handed +3 weapon) so having the Ranger for no dual-wielding penalties seemed useless to me. Unless dual-wielding penalties apply even for having a small weapon in your off-hand (I don't know -- someone please clarify).

Having an extra source of Cure Light Wounds is meh when even your weakest party member has 64 HP. I might as well chomp into a pear. And he gets only 1 spell slot. Always ended up casting Bless with him. A F/T or G/T would have been able to don better arm and leg armor. A G/T would have had 3AC better -- 1 from L5 Gladiator, 1 from any metal arm armor, 1 from Grey's Scale leg armor. (I avoided metal even though my off-hand was a small blade because I'm not very clear on how the restrictions work.)

I don't think I've properly figured out backstab yet. There is no combat log so we don't really know what's happening. I always stood behind monsters with my thieves but not sure if they were actually backstabbing. Didn't see super-high damage numbers. I think you have to first engage them from front with a different party member, then the thief can go behind and backstab. Totally unclear on this. Please enlighten me anyone.

Wrt your earlier post about clerics and druids having different xp tables: actually they have the exact same xp tables (according to the manual). So the only difference between F/C and F/D is TU vs L4 Cosmos. Alignment doesn't matter unless you are planning to dual class a human into C or D later.
Btw, TU was quite useful. I came upon some shadows who couldn't be hurt with normal weapons. Only one of my characters was able to hurt them at the time. TU saved my arse in that battle.

Last thoughts: don't think I'll play with a Thri-Kreen again. Mid-game you have to give them weapons because you start encountering normal-immune monsters. No more 5 attacks per round. The Produce Fire Chatchkas are nice but (in my route) they appear too late. I'd rather have an armor-wearing ring-wearing Mul, especially since a lot of them confer permanent spell effects.

 

Oh... now that you mention Easter Eggs, this happened to me:
First of all, I don't know what people keep complaining about. There are enough rest points in the game. You can almost rest after every fight. I didn't, but could have. I'm used to playing IE games without resting too much so maybe it's just my play style to keep playing without resting.

Anyway, about the easter egg (more like a bug): The map where I was supposed to meet Hototo and Dagger. No matter what I tried, Dagger didn't appear for me. Something bugged out. I reloaded several times (save was before entering the map) and tried all different things I could. So I did the next best thing. Killed Hototo. The uncured slave runs off into a corner in the northwest. Where he runs off to, a campfire appears among the grass (this appears even without killing Hototo). If you use the campfire and leave it lit, then exit and re-enter the map, another campfire appears right next to it (at least it did for me).

I was trying all different things -- seeing if resting for 8 hours or more would get Dagger to appear. He never did. So I guess this was one 'quest' that I didn't complete.

 

Summary of questions:

1. Do dual-wielding penalties apply for non-rangers (or rangers in heavy armor) even if your off-hand is a small weapon?
2. Where is the buried chest in the Elven Caravan and how do I get it?
3. Is there anything to do after the game is over?
4. Is there something I must do for Alhena to appear?
5. Are you all carrying around a sword blank even though there is no use for it?
6. How exactly does backstab work and how can I be sure I'm doing it right?
7. Any top-of-head ideas on what I might have done wrong with Hototo and Dagger?