First off, thanks to all the devs for all their hard work. It's great to play ToEE again. I started a new game last night (5.8 NC) and I'm concerned about my party size. I started the game with 6 PCs and I wont be recruiting any of the NPCs. Will this throw off the XP and leveling? Will 6 party members make parts too easy? Is the new content balanced around a party of 5? With a party of 6, what level should I expect everyone to be at toward the end of the game? Also, I set the PC's HP to Max as well as all NPC's HP to max. Is this a good balance? I set t it to max because I know I will save/reload at each level-up until I get a decent HP roll. Rolling for HP is probably the worst mechanic in D&D, imo. I'd be happy with the average each time. I'm looking to create a challenging game for myself. Last time I played, my party of five was too high level for much of the encounters and they rolled right through it easily. I realize that there's been a lot of balancing since I last played. I'm wondering how others setup their game.
Hi Quint, It is difficult to say what max level your party of 6 will be with the new content. My party of 4 in 5.8.0 is level 9 having done Welkwood Bog, The Moathouse, Hickory Branch, a couple Nulb quests such as Imridy's Run, Moathouse Witch, The Forest thing with the drow (escapes my mind at the moment), Delko Grove, and Emridy Meadows. As you can see, I havent even entered the temple yet. I would expect my group to be level 15+ by the end. The question of party size comes up a lot. What it comes down to is how many actions do you want per turn against your opponents. If you have one PC, you gain exp a lot quicker, but you get one action against possibly 20 monsters. I have solo'd with a cleric before up to the balor, but the beginning levels are rough. Do you have a specific goal in mind for your party of six? I cant imagine your group being less than level 12 or 13 at the end assuming you play through all of the content.
I dont have any real goals for a party of 6 other than being able to squeeze in a paladin. Party consists of: Human Fighter (greatsword) Human Paladin (longsword/shield) Dwarf Cleric/Fighter Human Druid Human Rogue/Fighter (archer) Human Wizard (Generalist) I just want to see all the new content and have it be challenging, but not impossible.
Bear in mind that there has been really no attempt to balance the NC version at all. Doing so would be an enormous job. The new content is being re-introduced (in a separate modpack) because so many people want to play it. As you progress in NC, you will very likely find that the later game is very unbalanced indeed. We could have tried to limit this by turning the XP award percentage way down, but if we did that, no one would progress to higher levels, which they also want to do. That only leaves restructuring all the battles, which is where the "enormous" part of the proposed job comes in. We could try to undertake that and probably be finished by 2015. If your main concern is having a balanced game, you should probably stick with 5.8 standard.
Ranth: without giving things away, what level were you when you did the Moathouse Respawn and did you find it tough / easy / whatever? I tried to balance it out a little to be a challenge at around lvl 8 but by then you have fireballs and a couple of those well-placed may make the encounters very short.
I hope I am not giving anything away by saying this, anyone that has done the encounter before should know the below info. If you haven't, stop reading now. I must have been level 8 or 9 and I did find it challenging. The key to the fight is the witch and the bodak. If the witch resists a fireball or other AoE, then she can do some damage. The bodak can kill a PC immediately, and then I normally reload. I think I reloaded about 3 times for that fight. Something to note, is that when I went to fight the drow I entangled them with my druid. Not seeing the sister, I entangled her. This brought her into the fight, and the drow warrior ran at her and killed her. Even if he didn't kill her, I would have had to to stop the fight. Could we change this to make her mob turn on once a drow death counter hits a limit (with a global vars)? I did this is WotGS to spawn the Hommlet citizens once you defend the town. It would keep the witch's sister from entering the zone until the drow are dead.
Sorry dude, but NO WAY! Thats the best thing I've heard happen in ages EDIT: O btw, thanks for the feedback. The bodaks are indeed nasty but consistent with a casting of create undead, which is the effect I was going for. What did you think of the treasure? I toned that down, too. (Other feedback welcome).
Okay, so I'm going to start a new game with 5.8. Here is an odd question dealing with Front End X and a new game. In Front End X I can chose the party's make of PC vs. NPC. What would happen if I set the ratio at 6 PC and 2 NPC and then started a new game and only added 5 PCs to my party? Theoretically I could then have 3 NPCs join later in the game such as Otis, Fruella and Meleny. Or does ToEE scrap this and ignore the possible open slot?
Ignores. You would have to manually reset it to 5-3. Or, you could add a new PC from the book in the Inn.
And this exactly what I did, started with a 6/2 mix, created a party with 5 PCs, went to the inn and added another PC. I thought it would work but wanted to experiment but was not sure if it would cause problems wit hthe engine later on. Thank you for confirming my suspicion. I'm assuming, just for discussion purposes, that I cannot start the game with a 5/3 mix with only 5 characters, exit the game and then start Front End X, change it to a 6/2 mix and continue with my journey. Again, for discussion purposes, presumably I could start with a 6/2 from Front end, create my party with 6 PCs, run around Hommlet and do some areas for XP, come back and do the quests in Hommlet and save while in the Welcome Wench. I could while at the inn drop a PC and then pick up Otis, Fruella and Meleny. I will at some time in the future explore the possibilty of doing this just for the knowledge gained. But taking into account as well that my wizard's familiar will take up a PC slot. Yes, the familiar in the early stages s handy, but becomes a liability after getting up to 3rd or 4th level as it gets killed quite often during battle because of the limited HPs. I generally place it in the rear out of the way. At that point it is time to put it in the backpack.
I think you probably can change it on the fly, yes. You can't alter Humble NPCs mid game though, but I think you can do the party numbers. Try it and tell us
I set NPC HP to max, though I'd need to check whether doing it by levels or HD gives them more. It seems that the HP options, unlike Humble NPC, can be toggled on and off in the frontend and take effect without restarting the game, so I like to alternate max PC HP, sometimes allowing my characters to gain the max and sometimes requiring they roll for it. Since the ratio of max HP gains to rolled HP gains can be adjusted as you play, you can give your guys some more max HP level-ups if they're dying too much, or have them roll more if you think things are getting too easy.
