A few questions including spoiler-types

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New guy here. I am a born-again RPG player after having taken a long hiatus since Jr Hi when I played Ultima IV (yeah I'm old) until I beat it after 2-3 years (no Internet for helpful hints in those days). Anyway, I am going through the D&D games and just beat NWN-1. So my questions:

1. The Drow girl (Nytharra?) often seems to stand idly by during combat. Is this normal? Aribeth often did the same after I swapped them out. I changed tactics for them numerous times, too.

2. Does Valen always turn on you, or was my "persuade" skill just too low? I was only at 11 with Armor of Command and some other CHA raising items. Aribeth turned on me at first, but I reloaded and made sure I wore my friendly gear so she'd stay with me.

3. I think I may take the two ladies next time...does the Drow girl turn on you? I can't help but wonder if it was a game design just to make the final fight tougher with a traitor among you.

4. Is there a way to cross that long corridor of fire in the cavern near the Fire Giant fortress? It turned out that I had that 90% (?) fire-resistant belt with me at the time, but sadly I had nobody who could ID it for me, so I kept burning up trying to run far enough into it to get close enough to use the demon hand to grapple myself past the final part of the flames. So much for that!

5. Same cavern, when I tried to come back out, the lantern posts that had been there in orfder for me to grapple across the chasm had disappeared. So was getting past that fire corridor the only way back outside?

Thanks!

 

Welcome to the boards. And questions are always welcome, we have hardcore players with insights you probably won't find anywhere else when it comes to games like these. The NWN archives should also have a lot of useful old threads.

1) It's an AI thing. The easiest way to deal with it is to slot the "Follow Me", "Attack Nearest" and "Hold Position" group commands to your quickbar.
You can also download AI mods, but that's whole different can of worms. The good ones are pretty intuitive but you'll still need to get used to using them.

2) He doesn't if your persuade is high enough and depending on your other dialogue choices (true names are a powerful thing). Note that Hordes of the Underdark is a high level campaign with a starting level of 15 or so. Most important skill checks will be balanced around people starting the game with ~18 or so skill points, higher as the campaign progresses.

3) Depends on your choices. The epilogues depend heavily on how you handle the true names thing (high dialogue skills recommended) with various good/bad/neutral/romantic/etc endings.

4) Don't remember this part anymore, sorry.

5)Did a search for you and apparently there's a bug where you need to put on the puzzle ring and then restart the game for the torch bracket to show up for the demon hand to grapple.

 

Thanks for your input. It's very much appreciated. I avoided using a walk through except when absolutely stuck. Stupid mimic and his gem pile nonsense.

1. I kept mashing the "attack nearest" button to no avail, but in the final battle, I was getting throttled by Mephistopheles and ran away, right past Aribeth hoping he'd attack her instead. That worked and she started swinging dual +10 longswords (with keen, acid, sonic, etc) to great effect.

2. Noted for next play through. I imported my OC and SoU F/C but hadn't bothered adding persuade skills.

3. I was broke and couldn't buy any true names.

4. No problem. I'll have a high lore henchman or woman next time and try the fire belt.

5. Cool. Will try to remember that for next time. Could be a while with football season starting soon.

 

One thing not mentioned was the "guard me" command in addition to "attack nearest". It sometimes works when the other does not. Add it to the quickbar too.