What are your thoughts on NPC's joining your party? How many PC's do you make? How do they affect the challenge or enhance the immersion or experience? I haven't played in a long time and never with the NPC's. I remember there only being a handful "ok" sounding voice acting profiles to select from. Some were so bad as to be totally unusable. 1. Do the NPC's have unique sound profiles? Is it possible to use their profiles for a PC? 2. Do they add voice acted cameos and written script that enhances the story or provides entertainment/immersion value? 3. Do you control them in combat or do they control them-self? 4. Do you see any advantage for fun or challenge of using 3 or 4 PCs and using NPCs to fill out the party to 5 or 6 full-time slots? 5. Who is your favorite NPC? Why?
i sometimes i get spugnoir early in the game so that he can accumulate enough xp and feats to craft wondrous items for the party. then i dump him if i already have a party arcanist, or keep him if not. other than that i usually pick up the fighter in the air node for extra muscle.
NPCs in your party make the game more problematic for the player because: 1. NPCs in your party can't loot items - you have to transfer items from your PCs to the NPCs in your party. 2. NPCs in your party can turn on you during combat if you do something that they won't tolerate (such as attacking other NPCs that aren't evil or hostile towards you). It's like having a paladin PC in your party - you can't do anything that you want without repercussions for your actions. 3. whenever a NPC in your party is closest to an exit (or blocking an exit), your party won't change maps if you click on the exit - you have to manually move the NPC out of the way and then have one of your PCs click on the exit. 4. some recruitable NPCs will automatically and permanently leave your party at a later stage in the game (such as the next time that you enter a village or exit the Temple of Elemental Evil) which is extremely annoying if you wanted them to be in your party until endgame! 5. some recruitable NPCs won't relinquish one or more of the items that they have in their inventory. You need to level them up 1 level and then talk to them and select the dialogue option "We need to talk about your equipment" and then buy their equipment from them before you can take those items away from them. Some recruitable NPCs will never relinquish one or more of their items while they are conscious (Fruella will never willingly relinquish her Great Cleaver, Prince Thrommel will never willingly relinquish his sword Fragarach, and I believe that Furnok and Serena will never willingly relinquish their Rings of Invisiblity (but I'm not sure about that)). 6. accidentally damaging NPCs in your party during combat might make them attack you (I'm not sure about this - maybe another player can enlighten us about this). 7. having an NPC in the left-most portrait slot at the bottom left of the screen will prevent you from being able to get any quests. The game considers the character in the left-most portrait slot to be your party leader. I always have 3 PCs in my party because if you only have 1 PC in your party and that PC becomes unconcious or dies, then the game ends (no matter how many conscious NPCs that you have remaining in your party!). I always create an elf rogue PC (who is my party leader) and 2 half-orc fighter PCs. I always have 4 or 5 NPCs in my party. It depends - if you add level 4 NPCs such as Elmo and/or Furnok and/or the level 3 NPC Fruella to your party when your PCs are only level 1 (or add high level NPCs such as Burne, Rufus, and/or Otis to your party when your PCs are much lower level), then the NPCs in your party will initially make combats MUCH easier due to their better weapons, items, feats, attack bonuses, spells, AC, and Hit Points (until your PCs catch up to them both in experience levels and equipment). Most of the recruitable NPCs have worse attributes (ability scores) and feats and known spells than PCs that you can create, so they aren't as good as PCs (except Darley, Elmo, Lareth, Oohlgrist, Otis, Pishella and Scorpp who all have prodigious sets of attributes (ability scores)) and make the game more difficult (which is a good thing in my opinion). Some of the recruitable NPCs have special abilities (for example, Oohlgrist and Scorpp are large creatures (so they both have a 10 foot reach and they can wield a large weapon in each hand!), and Darley has Spell Resistance, poison immunity, energy resistance, natural armour and Damage Reduction) and special items (such as Prince Thrommel and his sword Fragarach). I recommend having different NPCs in your party for each playthrough of the game. It's fun to hear their different personalities which makes the game more fresh for players that have completed the game multiple times. Yes, although some of the NPCs have voices made by the same voice actors (which ruins the immersion somewhat), and the mute recruitable NPCs (which Gaear informs me in the following post are only Cavanaugh the Beggar and one of the Eds) have no voice samples at all! Some of the recruitable NPCs have outrageous voices (such as Zaxis (crazy singer), Morgan (stereotype pirate), Ted (stereotype country hillbilly), Elmo (dumb drunkard), Sargen (crazy schizophrenic), Raimol (stereotype subordinate soldier), Fruella (obnoxious control freak), Oohlgrist (powerful, scary voice), etc.). I get tired of and annoyed by the PC voice samples very quickly, but I never tire of hearing the recruitable NPC voice samples (except when Ronald Rynnwrathi thanks you every freaking time that another character casts a beneficial spell on him (such as Haste)). The unique and excellent voice samples of the NPCs in your party make you feel like they are real people and they make the game more immersive than just having PCs in your party. The voice samples that I like the most are the unique war-cries and dying words that each recruitable NPC has - whenever I hear a recruitable NPC's voice sample when they die, it causes me to pause to reflect on the heartfelt loss and makes me lament their death (even when legitimately killing the recruitable NPC baddies). Incidentally, some of the voice samples that you can choose when creating a PC are also used in the computer game Neverwinter Nights 2 when creating a PC in that game. I don't know. Hopefully Gaear will answer that question for you. Yes to both. Each time that your party appears on a map, there is a random chance that one of the NPCs in your party will say a voice sample appropriate for that map (such as when Elmo enters the pub). Each time that you loot a chest, there is a random chance that one of the NPCs in your party will say a voice sample. Examples of recruitable NPCs having extra voice samples or dialogue text are when Elmo meets his brother Otis, when Riana meets her sister Serena, and when Zaxis finds out what happened to his sister). There is only 1 recruitable NPC in the game that has a genuine quest involing other NPCs in the game - if you have Ronald Rynnwrathi in your party, then once you've gotten him up to about level 15 or so, I believe that he will initiate a subquest (or maybe you first have to talk to him) for you to do (involving his parents, I believe). You control them in combat. Whenever you level up a NPC in your party, you get to choose their character class, new feats, new spells known, which attribute (abiility score) to increase by 1, and you allocate their skill points. You can't see any of a recruitable NPC's attributes (ability scores) except when you get to increase one of their attributes (ability scores) during level up. You can't see most of a recruitable NPC's stats (including character classes and alignment) when viewing their inventory. Meleny. Her voice is SO adorable!
Actually only the second Ed is truly mute. (He never says one word.) The first Ed has a couple lines (voiced), and Pintark has a full sound bank of audio, and so does Kobort (though he only ever says "ya" and "no" and so on, but it's voiced). Are these not working properly? The only joinable NPCs who don't have voiced audio AFAIK are Cavanaugh the beggar and about half of Turuko's dialogue. You could build PC audio profiles with NPC audio if you really wanted to, but you can't use NPC audio independantly by normal means without doing that. We won't be adding any NPC audio for PCs, as it would be a bit confusing and inappropriate for so-called 'fifth wall' purposes. It's NWN 1 (plus a couple from IWD series). We added those and basically doubled ToEE's available voice profiles. The original ToEE offerings were pretty thin. By the way, we're still waiting on sirchet to re-do Ronald's audio to a much higher standard. oke:
All NPCs I bet this has been mentioned before, but I can't find it... Has anyone ever tried a large group, with only one pc, and the rest NPCs? I'm aware that the game ends when the last pc dies, so that might be a problem. Although the NPCs seem to have more personality, which might not be saying much since the PCs only have the personality that I imagine them having in my head. And then I'd wonder which ones to pick up... take one NPC now and replace later with a better one? Should I take the evil ones like the troll? (I've never had the troll in the group, I hear there are drawbacks.) I suppose I'd have to decide to go the evil or non-evil route. I seem to recall that Burne was excellent+, but his apprentice was a bizarre sorcerer/wizard combo. Also I'd hate to hire someone who just leaves later. Lots to consider then, but it's too easy to create "perfected" stat choices on my own characters and I feel like the NPCs, with their sometimes odd or less than perfect stats look more "human." Off the top of my head, I'm thinking Burne (or Spugnir? to start), Furnok, Elmo, Ronald, and yes, even Meleny. I'd probably have to play a bard to have the social skills to get Meleny.
Re: All NPCs From what I can tell online, there are a lot of mid to late game joinables, who really aren't that great compared to the PC levels likely at the time of the encounter... I'm curious about trying some of them anyway. I don't need to create another perfectly crafted team of PC death-dealers.
Re: All NPCs Did you read http://www.co8.org/forum/showthread.php?t=9760 Gazra provided alot of helpful feedback. I haven't played with NPCs before and have similar feelings about adding new "breath" to the game. I was thinking of taking Meleny who btw you need a male with 16 charisma to marry. Zaxis is supposed to have some lively voice acting in that he sings and such. I wish we could merge the thread I started with the thread you started so we could begin a long thread on NPCs. If you do a search for npc in the title is finds nothing but if you type npcs if brings up some threads. This thread lists how much recorded voice and such the various NPCs have http://www.co8.org/forum/showthread.php?t=8009
