First run through this game- feedback please

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As the topic title states, I'm playing though this game for the first time. Since I don't have a lot of time to devote to playing games, I would like to make my play-time count. I'd like your feedback on how to go about this to make it as rewarding as possible.

I have the Diamond edition and have installed everything it offers (expansions, mods, etc.) and updated to the latest patch (had to do critical rebuild to install it, BTW). I have tinkered with my character’s stats using LETO (downloaded from SP) to make him resemble a PnP character of mine. Nothing crazy, cheesy, or game-breaking.

I am playing as a human fighter and have weapon focus in long sword. In fact, I just found my first long sword +1 after defeating the intellect devourer. Yay! I am at about level 4 right now and am thinking about doing the weapon master prestige class later on. I have been getting the skills that will allow me to do that if I choose, but they seem to be useful anyway. Cleave is a life-saver when surrounded by multiple escaped prisoners.

I have completed the prelude and the peninsula and have just barely started the area with the docks. I made it through 90% of the peninsula and prison area all by myself and finally went back and got Tomi to help with opening locked chests. I intend on keeping him for the foreseeable future, as I find his company to be agreeable.

So, here are some of my questions, comments, observations that I’d would appreciate some feedback on from those of you who have some experience with this game. I know that some of my questions will come from my general unfamiliarity with 3E rules.

-Am I splitting XP with my henchman? Pros and cons of henchmen?
-I have taken the craft weapons and armor skills. Just one rank so far for each because I don’t know what good they are. Should I continue to develop these skills? In general, what skills are useful and which aren’t? I have been sticking mainly to class skills and NPC interaction skills like persuade and the like.
-Which feats are worth taking and which are useless? I’m concerned about getting feats that are on the list but not really used in the game or just are not worth it.
-What are good weapons to focus on for a weaponmaster? I’m planning on doing long sword. Are there better weapons to focus on to get more out of the class?
-What good are fire beetle bellies and should I be carrying these things around?
-About 2/3 of the way through the Peninsula quest, Aribeth and everybody else who I had previously spoken to started taking to me like they had never spoken to me before. Is this normal/okay?
-The game crashes all the time, which is very frustrating and the only feedback the MS can give on the error report is that they are researching the problem. Are frequent crashes normal?

Thank you in advance for any help/advise that you are willing to lend. I’m not looking for spoilers or anything that would rob my game playing experience. I just don’t want to be playing and at some point in the future regretting the way I developed my character because of something I did not/ could not foresee.

 

I'm playing on XP with SP2.

 

For questions about feats and such, I'd recommend checking the guides here: http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/NWN/index_tips.php

There should be faqs for Fighters and Weapon Masters.

For the crashing, check your Override folder. I had some stuff in mine that was causing me to crash. I made a backup and went through the folder, cleaning out some junk.

Didn't see any issues like the one your having with Aribeth, but I quit playing the OC pretty soon anyway. It's really pretty dull compared to the thousands of better mods out there...

 

Yes, you split XP with henchmen, summons and familiars. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as NWN scales XP to your level. In the end, you'll be perhaps a level lower than if you had not taken along a henchman, but that's no big deal.

Pros: Banter, extra skills (open locks, healing, back up fire power).
Cons: Slight lag in levelling, trying to keep them alive despite their moronic AI.

I've never used craft weapons and armor, so I can't help you there. They seem fairly useless, though, as you'll only be able to create non-magical weapons/armor (if I remember correctly).

Generally, for a fighter-type character, I'll stick with Discipline (useful for resisting knockdowns and disarm attempts). Any other skills are fairly optional. If you do go for a Weapon Master, stick 4 points into Intimidate, then wait until you gain WM-levels before adding more. Intimidate is only a cross-class skill for the fighter, while it's a class skill for the WM. Don't expect too much use of this skill in the OC, as it's a skill that was only introduced in one of the expansions.

Other useful skills I like to pick are Healing (more mileage from healing kits), Lore (no need to go to shops to identify your newly found equipment) and Tumble (per 5 skill points an extra point in natural AC). Some find these useless, I find them convenient, but it's not critical to your build in any way.

If you want to make your character a Weapon Master, you'll have plenty of feats you'll need to choose as a requirement. Other than those feats, Cleave, Improved Critical, Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization are good choices for a Fighter.

Remember that you need 13 dex and 13 int for Dodge and Expertise, respectively, which are both required for a WM.

Longsword is a safe choice for any character. For maximum power of your WM, you might want to go for weapons that have wide critical ranges, such as kukri's, scimitars, or rapiers, and then dual wield them (hey, another 3 feats to pick) so you can score as many crits as possible. Alternatively, go for max damage per crit and choose a scythe as your main weapon. Note that for the scythe and the kukri you'll need Weapon Proficiency: Exotic. Other good choices are Greatsword and Greataxe.

None, if you're not a mage of some kind.

No. Don't know what's causing that, either.

Definitely not. My game rarely crashes, so something must be wrong. I'm no expert on this, but you might try reinstalling your game and seeing if it functions normally without patching/ doing anything out of the ordinary.

 

You can get 17+ levels even with a henchman. You really don't need more.

As far as henchmen are concerned: Talk to them. Solve their little quests in each chapter. The rewards are huge. The most important for a fighter are Daelan's (the half-orc barbarian) and Grimnaw (dwarf monk).

Feats for a fighter: henkie already mentioned those required for weapon master. Aside from those improved critical and weapon specialization are good. I think dodge is a great skill for everyone (as is mobility) -- and spring attack, a great feat even if you are not a WM, allows you to run through a horde of enemies without fear of AoO. For dual wielding you need ambidexterity, two weapon fighting and improved two weapon fighting. Great cleave is great early on, but becomes fairly useless later.

Skills: you've wasted some choices. You cannot craft weapons or armor in the OC (there are no materials to make thing with). As henkie mentioned, heal is a great skill for a fighter, persuade is good, as is lore. Discipline is a must.

Weapons: The top weapons for WM are all dual wielded -- the best is rapier/scimitar, followed by katana/bastard sword. Dual bladed swords are better than dual wielding long swords. For a two handed weapon, the scythe is the best followed by the great sword. Your long sword is just fine. Be sure to visit the weapon and armor shop (and go to the basement) with your sword. With the right ingredients it can be made more powerful.

I chose to do the OC without prestige classes. The mod was designed for the base character classes. My fighter/thief had no problems.

 

Thanks for all the advise, everyone. It's been very helpful. I think I'll be dual wielding with my weaponmaster. Should I take a level or ranger to get the requisite feats or should I be able to do it with the feat slots I'll be getting?

 

The Ranger Dual Wield Feat only works if you are unarmored or in light armor. It might be worthless for you to take a level of that class if your character is already using and designed for medium or heavy armor.

 

What does it take to get the items from the various henchmen? Can I just hire them, hand them the thing that they are looking for and be done with it, or do i have to adventure with them, progress through levels with them and talk to them the whole time?

 

You have to be of a high enough level (they have to level up twice from their starting level, per chapter), then you can talk to them and make them give you the quest. Then you can simply give them the item they were looking for. Getting the rewards from all of them is fairly easy to do.

 

So, if I have to level up twice with each one, that would mean I'd have to go through 10 levels or so to get everything, right? That sucks.

 

No. Once you realise you have almost finished the chapter and have collected various strange items, you recruit each one and talk to them several times to complete thier quests.

 

Good to know. Thank you.

A lot of the suggestions I've recieved for my character, as an aspiring weaponmaster, are to dual wield. My guy has 11 maybe 12 dex. So the 15 dexterity needed for ambidexterity is not possible. Do stat-altering items open feat options or do the base stats have to qualify?

 

Base stats, of course. Otherwise, you could just drink a potion before leveling or something cheezy.

NWN (and 3rd ed. AD&D) is a complex game and one should generally not "think about becoming" a prestige class. You really have to plan ahead for it. You need both 13 INT and DEX and if you don't start with those you're unlikely to get there by the end of the campaign, and if you do you'll get maybe 1 or 2 levels of weapon master, so why bother?

The NWN campaign is fairly easy, though, and you could probably get away with dual-wielding even without the feats.

 

My explanation wasn't very clear, sorry for that.

Basically, what happens is this. At their default level for a chapter, they'll tell you the first part of their story. Once they (and thus, you) gain a level, they'll tell another part of their story. Gain another level and they'll tell the last part of their story.

This works from their default level of a chapter. So if you start a new game in the OC with a character you've already played through SoU, you'll be around lvl 12. If you then talk to a henchman, you can tell them to level up, and they'll level up to 11 or 12, and you can get the entire story from them in one go, as they start at level 4 and would tell their entire story once they reach lvl 6 anyway.

Hope this clarifies things.

About the Ambidexterity thing: Yes, you need base stats, and, as Sir Fink explains, it's generally best to plan your character out in advance, as this works best. And, to me, is a big part of the fun anyway.

 

Two months of playing this game and I have finally gotten to the third chapter of the OC. It taken this long to get here for a couple of reasons:

1) I'm not able to spend too much time gaming.
2) I have tried to do every subquest I could along the way.
3) This game sucks, and I have found it increasingly difficult to find the will to continue to play it.

At first, I really liked the game but now it is just old and boring. And it’s not the storyline that bugs me, either.

The monotony of everything is killing me. I rarely pick up any new or interesting items.

There is little variety in scenery: you have the indoor tile-set, you have the outdoor, the crypt, and you have cave/underground. There is precious little in between. I mean, for heaven’s sake, the Dryad’s home/lair used the brick and mortar tile-set that you would find inside a house in the city. Did that strike anybody else as odd? All the cities and towns look the same and it’s always twilight out. Overall, the graphics are mediocre at best. I’ll take the outdated but beautifully rendered 2-D of the Infinity Engine over this left-handed monkey’s intro to 3-D modeling any day.

I could go on about other things, like how I find it incredibly stupid that my guy likes to shout obscenities and verbal challenges at the inanimate objects that he bashes, but I think you get the point: I don’t like this game.

Is this game redeemed by the expansions? I have not played either of them.

 

Do yourself a favour, skip the OC and export your character to HotU or download a good mod from the net. The OC is rather boring and repetitive and if you don't enjoy it now you won't like it later (although some passages are IMHO better than others).

 

Ditto what Caradhras said: the OC is just going to bore you and\or piss you off...

SoU is a little better...from what I hear HotU is even better than that.

There are TONS of mods that are better...

The lack of tilesets can get old after a while, but I'll say this...if the mod creator did a good job, you won't even notice that your seeing the same tilesets over and over...you'll be too into the story.

Oh, and if you have the Diamond Edition...DON"T PLAY KINGMAKER...honestly, it's worse than the OC...to me, it's so insulting that I consider Kingmaker one of the WORST games I've played...so, beware...

 

SoU is great. People rave about HotU, but I loved SoU. Maybe it's because I play rangers quite a bit, and Chapter 1 SoU is fantastic for them. Lots of animals to charm and talk to, a use for tracking skills... much better than the idiotic 1-dimensional OC. Repetitive is the word! Chapter 2 is perhaps even worse than 1. I've never got past it. Not due to the difficulty, just the boredom. At least a Weapon Master will kill the hordes of weak enemies quickly. HotU is decent, but it's just to 'roided up for my tastes. Too many magical items make me feel it's not my character doing the work - but then, that was also my problem with BGII & ToB, and I decided to help make an extra item mod for it, so what do I know?