Building Drizzt

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Who else has made a Drizzt Character? And what did you do? He is pretty hard to emulate from the books esp as a ranger

I made a Ranger Stalker cause of the stealth, and dual wield but sometimes I think a fighter/thief might have been better...

 

I'd say we all did at some point, but I got over his obnoxious character and ridiculous build pretty quickly once I had read the novels and FR rulebooks.

And after seeing a plethora of good-aligned, dual-wielding drow which are totally not Drizzt, I quickly grew to hate even vague resemblances.

 

Drizzt's stas for the FR Hall of Heroes Guide are pretty simple to emulate in BG. Just make an Elf Ranger, Dual Wield Scimitars, add some MR with Keeper and you are good to go. Give him his weapons, elven chain + 4 or 5, give him a Lion figurine and voila... as close you are going to get to the books.

What you have to realize is the actual books tell a story, making a character great. BG doesn't do the same thing. There shouldn't be that many super-high level characters in such a small area. Games like BG put tons of them in a small area. It really doesn't correlate to the actual story lines.... but it is what makes the game fun. Otherwise, if they actually followed the storyline as you would when playing a tabletop version, the PC game would be lame.....

 

I'd second BoV's proposal, just make an elf ranger (or fighter/thief, if you prefer, focusing more on the stealth). Dual wield scimitars, put pips according to those proficiencies. Download or make your own Drizz't portrait and put it on your character. Magic resistance is not even that necessary, it hardly seems to be mentioned in the books, I think.

On the other hand, I also second Keneth's post. I read some of the books on Drizz't, but he's really such a pansy in those books. I'm not really sure where the cool guy Drizz't idea came from, he's mostly a total wuss who's good with a sword. Also the writing in the books is rather simplistic.

 

As a fun twist, you could arm him with a pastry bag and call him Drizzl.

 

Salvatore's really good at creating characters, the problem is that the stories often don't measure up. I think the reason Drizzt remains to be a "beloved" FR character is that he's one of the best swordfighters in FR and (FR-reality wise) he's one of the few non-evil Drow. You can let your imagination run wild with just those two facts alone, nevermind that he has connections with other notable FR characters like the sisters, Artemis Entreri, the rogue Jarlaxle, etc.
People love the character. The books are more like accessories.

A stalker would definitely fit the Drizzt theme. Arcane magics, good melee combat capabilities, and a backstab to make up for the lack of a Hunter mode (Drizzt's berserk mode).

 

That's arguable. As far as I'm concerned, Drizzt certainly isn't worthy of any accolades. He was a half-arsed concept off the top of Salvatore's head to begin with.

The "cool" factor comes from the fact that we've all seen him slaughter 20 or so gnolls like it was nothing. By the time he makes his second cameo in BG2, his pathetic, whiny arse is only deserving of a sword.

 

Drizzt and Elminster put FR on "the map". What makes Salvatore's books on Drizzt good reads are the Musings of Drizzt before each chapter. You see into his soul. He's not whiny. He has convictions.

 

Convictions that allow returning villains because he never finishes them off. Gets on my nerves, that. He might not be whiny, but he's definitely a pansy. His character traits are mostly good aligned drow, good fighter, not much more.

Salvatore's writing (at least in the books that I've read) is pretty simplistic, too. It reads more like children's books than anything else. Nothing wrong with that, but I tend to lose interest in it after a while.

If the musings makes the books good for you, great, but it doesn't work for me. Plus there are a lot of books that have similar starts for chapters.

All that said, I still don't see the big deal about Drizz't, the coolness-factor, why people always seem to want to insert him into any story about D&D.

 

You say that as though the two are somehow exclusive.

 

I always thought it was odd that Drizzt appeared in the Baldur's Gate games set in the Sword Coast, but did not appear in the Icewind Dale games rather than the other way around.

 

Me too. But if you think about it, Drizzt is the "biggest" character in the FR novels. BG was by and far a more Epic game, so they added Elminster and Drizzt to the "bigger" PC game. Makes sense from a marketing standpoint. Also, there isn't a major Realmsian player in the BG region like an Elminster, the Blackstaff, Halaster, a Seven Sister, Fzoul, Manshoon, Szass Tam, etc... they had to add big names from other regions for the WOW factor of FR fans.

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No, the point is they are not automaticallly synonymous.

 

Well I don't know any of these people, except for Drizzt and Elminster due to their cameos in the games. And even then I had no notion of who they were when I first played BG2.

But he never mentioned he thought that Drizzt's convictions made him whiny.

 

You might not of, but when BG was 1st released I would bet my last penny the majority of the buyers were from the PnP Forgotten Realms fan-base or at least familiar with the AD&D game world or fans of the novels. Hence they put in cameo appearances from the major players of the that game realm. CRPGs have exploded since the release of BG1 and probably include a much larger base of non PnP players these days.

 

The Icewind Dale series takes place too early for Drizzt to be wandering in Icewind Dale. IWD takes place at a time when the game should be using 1e rules (despite using the 2e rules set) and as I recall Drizzt was started after they went into 2e. YOu can tell this because they have gods like Myrkul still being used rather than Kelemvor or Cyric.

 

The FR Campaign Boxed set came out during 2E. It had Myrkul, not Kelemvor, as the god of the dead. The Avatar Crisis came about during the days of 2E. There was a re-release of the campaign with the god-structure rearranged to match what went on in the Avatar Crisis. So both are applicable to the series.

Also note that after the Avatar crisis there were still worshipper's of Bane/Bhaal/Myrkul. The powers they rec'd were supplied by Cyric or Iyachtu Xvim the Godson, but were supplied in secret. You see this in the power struggle that went on in the Zhentarim organization as followers of Bane and followers of Cyric were battling it out for supremacy of the organization. God's don't truly die in the Realms until they lose all of their followers. And they are reborn when there are those who restart the belief. If I remember correctly, though it's been years since I perused my FR collection, one of the Gods/Deiities release supplements touched on this subject.

 

I wasn't. I haven't read any of Salvatore's or Greenwood's novels until after I had played BG. None of the people I know personally were either. I was somewhat familiar with FR, even though I had been playing D&D for years prior, but we only really came to like FR because of BG and IWD. And after that, our interest slowly died off, especially with the advent of Golarion.

BG is as generic an RPG as it gets, so it appealed to a large audience. I don't doubt that there were many existing fans, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they were a majority of the consumer base.

 

The first boxed set was under 1e rules. That was the reason why Bhaal had to die along with all the assassins because FR has this odd need to to have the story fit the change in mechanics. Assassins were dropped in 2e so the designers decided they needed a reason for all the assassins to go away for the new edition (why you can't just go the reflavor a thief route we will never know).

The first box set came out in 1987 two years before 2e rules came out.

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IWD2 takes place in 1310 DR and apparently is said in the introduction and it takes place 20-30 years after IWD1.

Time of Troubles is in 1358 or so (or earlier if you want BG to make sense in some ways).

Drizzt helped clan Battlehammer to retake Mithril Hall in 1356 and was born in 1297. IWD is too old for Drizzt to be there as is IWD2.

 

It sounds like they should have kept with 2nd edition rules for IWD2, although I understand why they used the then-new 3rd edition rules for marketing purposes.

Still, the implementation wasn't the greatest, but not nearly as bad as Pool of Radiance 2:Ruins of Myth Dranor (I always call it that because the first Pool of Radiance game, along with the sequel Curse of the Azure Bonds Holds a special place in my heart as what got me interested in Dungeons and Dragons so many years ago.

I actually played CotAB first as it was given to me as a gift by a fairly ignorant relative, and sought out PoR.

Anyways, I don't know why I never noticed the dates until now, but for the time period, they should have just stuck with 2e rules.
It would have been less work too, just mix up the BG2 engine and a variant of the IWD skin to make the game.
I wounder if it would have been more popular that way even though 3e was out?
On the other hand, IWD2 wasn't bad at all.
PoR2 on the other hand really suffers from not being able to choose your own skills and feats, and they should have either kept it 2E or implemented that feature.
That, and found a way to not make the combat so slow and monotonous. Even the parts of CoTAB like wandering the ruins of Yulash where you keep getting jumped by the same groups of random enemies (Zentil Keep Terror Team or Red Plume Deserters. The terror team lived up to its name) wasn't that boring.

 

I agree in a perfect world IWD2 would have used a 2e based engine (possibly with 3e insets like IWD eventually received in the expansions). The primary reason is that the rules that are used in IWD2 are not even complete. They were not even "perfected" as the 3e only rules and those were behind what they eventually go to in 3.5 (which far from perfect but were much better than 3.0).

That is why Neverwinter Nights works better overall mechanically than IWD2. By the time NWN came out the rules were actually complete and so could be better implemented by the game.