Do you ever "improve" a starting character, as if he's gone through BG1?

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Always change certain stats. Not with the protagonist, though, but with the NPCs, since it makes sense that if you played with them through BG1, then you should also get the skills you want. Minsc, for example, wouldn't have two-handed weapons and/or bows. Jaheira can swap her spear-skills to something else. Imoen's thieving skills could use some tweaking. Usually change Viconia's class to a sorcerer too.

 

Yes - Wordplay - I also change profs for npcs, I forgot. Minsc with bows

 

@Pseudo:
Ah, but you see, it wasn't straight torture. They were just experiments that had an "unfortunate" side-effect of pain. The experiments themselves could involve growing new muscle tissue, which by itself would be incredibly painful if done too quickly, but would still have a positive effect in the long run. (And yes, I do up Imoen's STR from 9 to 10, mostly because I can't stand the carrying capacity of 50 lbs. But I subtract from her CHA twice as much to signify just how much less fun she is. ) The same can be said for psychological torture; sure, Immy was traumatized by the things that Jon-boy made her watch, but in the end she's got more knowledge about the human body. And once she gets over the trauma (post-Spellhold), she's got that knowledge at her finger-tips.

I also figured he also tried out a method to increase CON on Minsc, first getting it slightly wrong, resulting in a DEX increase instead. Then he perfected that method on Jaheira, before he subjected Imoen to it. (I up Immy's DEX from 18 to 19, again subtracting twice as much from CHA.) Eventually he got back to the CON increase on Minsc, and finally succeeded, but before he could apply it to the PC, he was interrupted and the game's events begin.

I don't like Edwin getting the increases he does, particularly because it makes him so bland (10's across the board ), so I blast his DEX and CHA a couple points to make him look more even. It doesn't affect gameplay, but it's more of an aesthetic thing. Viconia I figure should have had the WIS from the very start.

Not quite. The limitation was that you couldn't get an increase from the same exact book again. Different tomes had different methods inscribed in them, it was just that the same methods could not give you the effect again. There was also a clause that the book's instructions had to be dutifully carried out for a full month, which could, at the DM's discretion, take the player out of the campaign for that long while he practiced. (You could, however, wait as long as two months to start, as the knowledge would only disappear in three months time.) And then there's the thing about only gaining one-tenth of a point over 18. But naturally, none of this makes for easy coding...

 

I wish I had My big Magical Item Compendium still. I'm pretty sure that each one of the books said that it was a matter of you could never get another boost to a particular stat from a book of that kind again. Not just the one specific book. The month long Regiment was a lot of different activities but once you had the boost that was that. You had to get any further boosts in other ways.

 

Checking the DMG... p.231 for the physical stat Manuals, p.240 for the mental stat Tomes. The INT Tome states that, and the other Tomes reference it. The Manual of DEX says it, but the Manual of CON isn't clear on it and STR references that one. All in all, I'd say you're right. There's also nothing I could find about the one-tenth thing.
(!@#^%*&#^!%*%! passing off house rules as canon back when I was too new to know the difference... )

EDIT: Oh, and how hard would it have been to code local variables for using a WIS tome? It's not like you would get more than one of any other tome, so there's only one to worry about.

 

Dont' worry about it. I have a couple house rules that I still get messed up as game rules. Without half of my materials it makes it even harder to remember all of them.

The 1/10th thing I think may have been an optional thing in one of those many rules suppliments they released at one point like the high level campaigns stuff. the army and siege campaign stuff and just plain the what seems like a dozen other different ones. Or it may have been caused by the misunderstanding that sometimes occured in the Exceptional Strength Percentage that warriors got for 18 strength.

As for the game. Even if one game stopped it you just load your character into a new game and applied them all over again so there was no real way to stop it. Though when you consider just the origional game you were really meant to only get one and give the second one away. Why there was one put into TotSC I can only guess people felt jipped that they had to give the second one away until we all eventually figured out how to keep all three. By then the problem was already too far along to be fixed.