BG First Time Playthrough

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I got easy TUTU installed so I may even play this all the way through. No other mods as I mainly just wanted an interface that was a bit less painful to deal with. If anyone highly suggests something please feel free.

My character is a Chatoci Good Wild Mage named "Leandra"


That is definitely the best portrait. Kinda reminds of some ex-girlfriends from way back in the day . . .

So few questions as I go along:

1. Safe to 'store' stuff in the chests in the Friendly Arms?

2. Seems like early game combat is all about:
a. launch ranged attack
b. run
c. repeat and avoid getting hit until enemies dead

Obviously a bit more complicated when you add more party members and go underground but with just Imoen and your main character the stuff you encounter at the very beginning strikes me that way.

 

Yeah that is obviously a pretty impressive attribute sum. I forget what I held out for, but I definitely rerolled at least 25 times. My standard practice is to reroll, transform everything to 10 and look at the remainder, store it. Store it again if it is bigger than what is stored and keep rerolling until I hit at least +21. I guess if I was one of those arithmetic whizzes I could do that just at a glance but the transform everything to 10 seems to work for me.

I had her all min-maxed with 18 Str, Dex, Con Int, and decided . . . nah, I'll add a bit of 'reality' to her and restribute a bit of that to Wis, Cha.

So Charisma isn't of much use in this game? Or only for bards?

 

Ah thanks for the move. I'm finding the early phases of this game rather soporific. Kinda nice to have a truly 'relaxing' game. Todd and his minions have really perfected the art of beguiling games that amp up your hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and nervous system to the point of over wattage One has grown accustomed to such excesses these recent years.

The good side of this is that a return to these old gems can be (a) quite fun on a Saturday morning when you are not tired and just want something passive to play at; (b) an excellent alternative to pharmaceutical sleep aids on those work nights when you need to get to bed!

It is rather remarkable how gaming has transformed these past 10 to 15 years.

 

You need to be able to carry the stuff back to the store. I've had to cast a strength spell to haul the loot back at times.
Also being able to stockpile extra potions, wands, scrolls, and other consumables can come in handy, especially if you use the ease-of-use patch.

If you go on to BG2 there are a bunch of good magical staves (is it staffs or staves?) that are situational but useful to keep for their spells. Such as the staff of earth which kills golems, and the staffs of air and fire that can summon elementals as well as kill them.
Not so much in BG1 or TOTSC, but my mages did wind up with a bunch of wands and a few situational scrolls, although I'd often metagame the scroll selection.

I'll say again, unless you want to keep a spell slot reserved for strength, you need strength to haul the loot. On the other hand, that could be what the Amulet of Metaspell Influence is for. Use the extra slot for a Strength spell. Without it you can't "GATHER YOUR PARTY TO VENTURE BACK TO TOWN".

 

staff plural

either form is correct much as dwarfs or dwarves...

 

I'd say staves and dwarves. Dwarfs is just spelling made up by Tolkien because he liked that better, just like elfs.

Also, there's a specific hidden container on the bottom side of the map of the FAI where I usually store the stuff I don't want to sell. I'm also never sure if all the papers I get in the course of the main quest will ever be actually needed as physical evidence or something, so I just store them there. I don't actually think I ever really need them, but just in case. And you don't get any money for them anyway.

And yes, BG1 is all about the archers. At some point you'll want one guy with the heaviest armor and shield you can find to be a tank. With the best armor you actually can mostly avoid getting hit. The rest of the party can use ranged to assist.

 

Regarding re-rolling for attributes, my rough strategy is three-fold:

1) First check what the minimum attributes are for a given class. If there are any, say, 12-13 or higher, ignore them in your re-rolling.
2) Average the scores by sight. Aim for at least 14's across the board, preferably 15 or higher in each score.
3) If you see a single-digit score anywhere, best to ignore that set and re-roll.

Over the years I've become fairly adept at very quickly seeing the rough average score (you're only checking at most 6 numbers, after all), which allows me to re-roll at a pretty fast rate and usually not miss the good sets! I say usually: one can sometimes zone out a little and accidentally skip a decent roll... I usually click once a second these days to avoid that happening.

Addendum: for fighters, first score to check after getting a good average is obviously strength. Unfortunately this can lead to frustrating catch-22-type situations...