"So Long and Thanks for all the Gear" -- A trope where an NPC leaves the party in a scripted event, and just takes all that sweet gear you gave him... so its lost forever. As much as I am really loving this game (and especially the Co8 mods), one thing I dislike is that some NPCs just abruptly leave the party. I couldn't figure out what I did to annoy Otis, but it looks like he just leaves the party when you visit Nulb, figuring he did enough. So I tried replacing him with Rufus. I'm grinding to try to bring him up to our level but found out that he too will eventually leave due to some scripted event. Are there any "safe" NPCs who will be with me long term?
Mostly, it depends on your party alignment. Melanie and Fruella you have to do something to get them to leave as examples. good parties cannot recruit evil and vise versa. You can get one or both of the sisters in Nulb, I'm not sure about Otis as I never recruit him.
I started to write, "You basically have bad luck", but now that I tihnk about it, there are many many NPCs who will leave under many or most or all circumstances. Mother Screng Burne (I've never recruited either of them, come to think of it) Turuko and Kobort Zert Lareth Thrommel Furnok (in theory) Ronald (very late game) EDIT: Rufus, too, of course. Those are just off the top of my head. For NPCs who will stay the course, try Spugnoir, Meleny, Zaxis, Elmo, Bertram maybe?
How abruptly do they leave? Maybe it'd be possible to add a, "hey, give me my stuff back," dialogue option just before. At least, for the ones that leave on friendly terms.
Yep, Rufus just dipped. Once I got him to level 6 he was like "OK gotta leave now...." I get that this game mechanic is stopping you from relying too much on NPCs, but still its annoying that they just suddenly decide they're leaving, especially midway through a dungeon crawl.
Yeah, I looked at the scripts for that one a few days ago, and it appears to trigger on any area transition (at least). It would probably be more sensible if it only happened at 'town' areas (although you'd still have to know it's coming without further adjustments). This is of course based on the original module saying that at level 8, Rufus has to report in to someone (which he doesn't explain well in his dialogue here). I think back then, you wouldn't actually be able to level up in the middle of a dungeon; you'd need to go back and spend some down time training. So you wouldn't have him wandering off in the middle of an excursion. And of course, you could actually role play asking for any stuff you loaned him back.
