Hello, Escapists! I am Saladfork, as you can see, and I am going to do my first let's play here on The Escapist.
Before I start, however, we need to make a few decisions. In the regular Neverwinter Nights game, you can create one player character to serve as the party leader and player surrogate. In Storm of Zehir, though, you can create a party of four characters from scratch, which is handy for us.
I reserve the right to make one of the party members myself (Mostly out of concern for party balance; can't go around with 4 wizards, now can we?.......Although....) but the other three are entirely up to you, escapists. Name, class, alignment, looks, race... whatever you want. Have at 'er. I'll pick whichever characters sound the most interesting. If you'd like to give a rundown on how you'd like that character to be played (aggressive, passive, diplomatic, etc), then let me know that as well. If you only have part of a concept (like how a character should be played, or just a class/race combo), you can just put that down too, and I'll fill in the blanks myself.
Now, if you're not familiar with neverwinter nights or D&D 3.5e, here's the rundown on character creation.
The first step is choosing a race. I won't show how they all look (mostly so I don't take up too much space on the first post) , but Neverwinter Nights 2 is a 6-year old game and, as you can see in this dwarf, the graphics reflect this. The half-elves in particular got shafted on the graphics.
Some races are split up into sub-races. As you can see here, Dwarves come in 3 varieties; Vanilla, chocolate and butterscotch. Here's a list of all the total subraces, if you're interested. This is kind of long-winded and not very entertaining, so only read this if you don't want to look it up yourself
Well, that was needlessly verbose. Aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, here's the next screen.
As you can see, you can customize your character a bit here. Hey, wait does that button say, 'toggle facial hair'...?
OH OH THAT'S JUST NOT RIGHT
Now we choose the first class of our character. Multiclassing, that is, taking multiple classes, is possible in this game as you level up, but at level one we only pick one. I won't go through every class, as they're rather self-explanatory, but they grayed-out options are classes we don't qualify for. Some classes require a minimum level in certain skills, others require a minimum base attack bonus, and some require specific feats. A few prestige classes are only available to certain races, and some classes (such as paladin) are only availble to those of certain alignments. Speaking of which...
This is where we select our alignment.
I'll get this out of the way right now: D&D alignment is complete bullshit. In a change-up from previous NWN2 installents, though, it is our alignent that dictates our possible actions rather than our actions dictating our alignment. For example, if you choose an 'evil' alignment, and someone offers you a job, you can either take it ('neutral') or extort more money out of him ('evil') whereas a 'good' character would have the option to just take the job or... I don't know, compliment his shirt or something.
Honestly, I kind of like this system. I mean, after all, someone who is used to just murdering every problem he finds is probably not going to be as likely to offer to do something for no pay as a paladin of the god of charity might be. I'm still not a big fan of the concept, but it's decently excecuted here.
Besides, every party member has an opportunity to chime in on any conversation, so if you've got a party of radically dfferent alignments, you could probably see every option possible between al the characters.
Now, for our dwarf here, you'll notice that the lawful options are grayed out. That's because I picked the first class on the list, Barbarian, and of course barbarians aren't big on rules, are they? I'll have to pick either a neutral or chaotic option.
This is where we pick which god our character follows. This doesn't have any practical difference unless you're a cleric, and you don't have to pick one unless yo're a divine spellcaster. If a race has its' own pantheon of gods, like the dwarves here, they'll appear at the top of the list before the rest of the more 'general' gods. My personal favourite is the Red Knight, god of tactics and strategy.
Attribute distribution. Pretty straightforward. You get a modifier on a stat for every two points you have in it. It costs one point to raise a stat from 0-14, two points to raise it between 14-16, and three between 16 and 18. Two things to note about this; First, this does not count racial differences, so our dwarf could raise his constitution up to 16 for just one point per level. Similarly, he could only raise his charisma to 12 for the same. Second, this only counts at character creation, and attribute points we gain from here on out can be applied to an attribute for one point per level no matter what level the attribute is at.
Here's a dwarven barbarian. He'd make an alright front-line fighter.
Now we can pic a background for him. Each background has different requirements (at least 10 charisma, at least 10 intelligence, must be wizard, etc.) and provides things like +1 to a skill but -1 to another. I won't tell you which do what, though; Just pick one that makes sense for your character.
Getting sick of character building yet? Well, we've got a ways to go yet. You could just pick one of the pre-made selections and get going, buuuuuut.... I don't really want to.
Here are some skills.
Here are some more.
Different classes have different class sills, i.e. skills that they can raise for one-to-one point to level ratio. I won't bore you with the details (for once) but if you have no preferences, I'll pick skills that the party could use, like healing, survival, or diplomacy.
Now we pick a feat (or, if human, we pick two). There are a few handy background feats you can only get at first level taht can do things like make you harder to hit (luck of heroes) or ake your spells harder to resist (spellcasting prodigy).
Lastly, we make the finishing touches; A name, a story, and a voice. Most of the voices annoy me, and you can't hear them anyway, so I'll just set the to either 'none' or something I can bear to listen to.
And there you go! One character. I'll be checking back in about a day to see what you guys can come up with.
Part 1 [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.352813-Lets-Play-Neverwinter-Nights-2-Storm-of-Zehir-Update-1-Im-on-a-boat#14000462]
Before I start, however, we need to make a few decisions. In the regular Neverwinter Nights game, you can create one player character to serve as the party leader and player surrogate. In Storm of Zehir, though, you can create a party of four characters from scratch, which is handy for us.
I reserve the right to make one of the party members myself (Mostly out of concern for party balance; can't go around with 4 wizards, now can we?.......Although....) but the other three are entirely up to you, escapists. Name, class, alignment, looks, race... whatever you want. Have at 'er. I'll pick whichever characters sound the most interesting. If you'd like to give a rundown on how you'd like that character to be played (aggressive, passive, diplomatic, etc), then let me know that as well. If you only have part of a concept (like how a character should be played, or just a class/race combo), you can just put that down too, and I'll fill in the blanks myself.
Now, if you're not familiar with neverwinter nights or D&D 3.5e, here's the rundown on character creation.
The first step is choosing a race. I won't show how they all look (mostly so I don't take up too much space on the first post) , but Neverwinter Nights 2 is a 6-year old game and, as you can see in this dwarf, the graphics reflect this. The half-elves in particular got shafted on the graphics.
Some races are split up into sub-races. As you can see here, Dwarves come in 3 varieties; Vanilla, chocolate and butterscotch. Here's a list of all the total subraces, if you're interested. This is kind of long-winded and not very entertaining, so only read this if you don't want to look it up yourself
Dwarf
Shield Dwarf - Regular dwarves. They get increased constitution at the cost of their charisma, making them pretty good fighters.
Gold Dwarf - They look like more tanned and tend to have darker hair. They get increased constitution as well, but take a hit to their dexterity. They make better sorcerers or warlocks than shield dwarves.
Duergar (Gray Dwarf) - They have a gray colour (as you'd probably guess). Duergar get increased constitution (I'm starting to notice a pattern here) as well as a few nifty bonuses like the ability to enlarge themselves and become invisible once a day, complete immunity to poison and paralysis and resistance to hostile magic. All of this comes at a cost to charisma twice as large as normal, as well as an adjusted levelling curve (ECL - effective character level) of one, which means that a duergar will always be one level behind his regular-curved party members.
Elves
Moon Elf - Default elf. They can come in blue, white, and a couple of colours in between. They get increased dexterity at the cost of a constitution penalty (kind of the opposite of the Gold Dwarf in that regard). A moon elf could make a decent rogue, or theoretically a good archer, but... I'll get into that later.
Sun Elf - They get a lot less variety in their skin colours, mostly just varying intensities of tan... Although I guess that makes sense. They get increased intelligence at the cost of their constitution, making them good wizards.
Wood Elf - Wood elves come in brown, green (?) and blue. Their faces are very silly and, for perhaps related reasons, take a penalty to their intelligence and constitution to get added dexterity and strength. They make good rogues or non-tank fighters, but poor wizards.
Wild Elf - These are the elves that eschew civilization in favour of living with the animals (Yes, they still wear clothes. Even in a place called 'Neverwinter'. No, I'm not sure why). They get a simple trade off of more dexterity for less intelligence.
Drow (Dark elf) - Drow come in gray to pitch-black, and are shorter even than other elves (who are already shorter than most humans). Drow are rather infamous for being evil, sadistic and above all, chaotic. Drow get increased dexterity, intelligence and charisma, and like Duergar, get some neat tricks like spell resistance, some spell-like abilities to create darkness and see invisibility, and soe impressive spell resistance. This all comes at the cost of some constitution and an ECL of 2, meaning a drow will always be 2 levels behind everyone else.
Gnomes
Rock Gnomes - Default Gnomes. They get extra constitution and less strength (which is to be expected really). They are also small (What!? No way) and as such are harder to hit, get an attack bonus and can hide more easily. On the other hand, they can't use many weapons that larger races can, and they can't carry very much stuff.
Deep Gnomes - Continuing the trend so far, there's a sub-race of gnome that live even farther underground than usual, get darker skin tones, and interesting abilites. They get a big bonus to dodge, spell resistance, and spell-like abilities (Blindness, Entropic Shield, Invisible). They get extra dexterity and wisdom at the cost of strength and a great deal of charisma, and an ECL of 3. Whether these abilities are worth the adjustment is up to you, guys.
Halfling
Lightfoot - They get extra dexterity at the cost of strength. And also they're small. That's it, really.
Strongheart - Pretty much the same. slightly darker skin; also, they trade in some of the regular hafling abilites for an extra feat at level one.
Half-elf
Regular - They get some watered-down versions of elf abilities without any of the benefits of being a human. Also, DERP.
Half-Drow - The only difference between half-drow and other half-elves is that half-drow are darker in skin colour and they have slightly better night vision. No really; that's it.
Human
No sub-races, but humans get even stat distribution, an extra feat at level one, and 4 extra skill points at first level and one extra for every level after (meaning that humans get to train in one extra skill than anyone else). All the regular skin colours are present, of course.
Half-orc
Again, no sub-races. Half-orcs get extra strength at the cost of intelligence and charisma. They're also ugly as sin, but unlie half-elves, this was actually intentional, so I won't dwell on it.
Gray Orc
These here are purebloods. They get strength and wisdom at the cost of intelligence and charisa, but they also are faster runners than other races. They also have a good enough sense of smell that they can track hidden enemies. Balancing this back out, gray orcs get an ECL of 1.
Yuan-Ti Pureblood
Alrighty, this species is actually quite important in the story we're about to see. And we can play one! Pretty cool. Anyway, these guys are a reptilian serpent race masquerading as human (though given the skin colours available you'd think they were masquerading as either plague victims or zombies). They get dexterity, intelligence and charisma bonuses with no stat penalties, as well as a natural armour bonus and spell resistance. To top it all off, they get five spell-like abilities, and the only trade-off is an ECL of 2.
Yeah, yuan-ti are pretty overpowered copared to other ECL 2 races like drow. Still, a human with equal experience is perfectly capable of taking a yuan-ti, so don't feel like this is somehow the 'best' option. We're here as much to screw around as we are to complete the game, after all.
Planetouched
Right, I saved these for last because there are six subraces and I was too lazy to write them all out before.
Aasimar - These are humans with a touch of angelic blood in their ancestry. They get extra wisdom and charisma, the spell-lie ability to create light, and an ECL of 1. They default as white blondes, but you can make other variations.
Tiefling - Same as Aasimar only with demonic (or devilish; there is a dfference) ancestry instead. They get extra dexterity and intelligence, but lose out on charisma somewhat. They can create darkness and also have an ECL of 1. Also they have a reddish tint and horns. Kind of a neat look.
Air Genasi - Same as above; find/replace angel with air elemental. They get dexterity and intelligence at the cost of wisdom and Charisma. They can also summon winds to knock people down. ECL of 1, and they look.... wierd. and kind of white.
Earth Genasi - Increased strength and constitution, lowered wisdom and charisma, damage reduction for 20 turns per day, ECL of 1. They look like a guy made of rock.
Fire Genasi - + intelligence, - charisma, set stuff on fire, ECL of 1. Their hair is on fire.
Water Genasi - zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
Shield Dwarf - Regular dwarves. They get increased constitution at the cost of their charisma, making them pretty good fighters.
Gold Dwarf - They look like more tanned and tend to have darker hair. They get increased constitution as well, but take a hit to their dexterity. They make better sorcerers or warlocks than shield dwarves.
Duergar (Gray Dwarf) - They have a gray colour (as you'd probably guess). Duergar get increased constitution (I'm starting to notice a pattern here) as well as a few nifty bonuses like the ability to enlarge themselves and become invisible once a day, complete immunity to poison and paralysis and resistance to hostile magic. All of this comes at a cost to charisma twice as large as normal, as well as an adjusted levelling curve (ECL - effective character level) of one, which means that a duergar will always be one level behind his regular-curved party members.
Elves
Moon Elf - Default elf. They can come in blue, white, and a couple of colours in between. They get increased dexterity at the cost of a constitution penalty (kind of the opposite of the Gold Dwarf in that regard). A moon elf could make a decent rogue, or theoretically a good archer, but... I'll get into that later.
Sun Elf - They get a lot less variety in their skin colours, mostly just varying intensities of tan... Although I guess that makes sense. They get increased intelligence at the cost of their constitution, making them good wizards.
Wood Elf - Wood elves come in brown, green (?) and blue. Their faces are very silly and, for perhaps related reasons, take a penalty to their intelligence and constitution to get added dexterity and strength. They make good rogues or non-tank fighters, but poor wizards.
Wild Elf - These are the elves that eschew civilization in favour of living with the animals (Yes, they still wear clothes. Even in a place called 'Neverwinter'. No, I'm not sure why). They get a simple trade off of more dexterity for less intelligence.
Drow (Dark elf) - Drow come in gray to pitch-black, and are shorter even than other elves (who are already shorter than most humans). Drow are rather infamous for being evil, sadistic and above all, chaotic. Drow get increased dexterity, intelligence and charisma, and like Duergar, get some neat tricks like spell resistance, some spell-like abilities to create darkness and see invisibility, and soe impressive spell resistance. This all comes at the cost of some constitution and an ECL of 2, meaning a drow will always be 2 levels behind everyone else.
Gnomes
Rock Gnomes - Default Gnomes. They get extra constitution and less strength (which is to be expected really). They are also small (What!? No way) and as such are harder to hit, get an attack bonus and can hide more easily. On the other hand, they can't use many weapons that larger races can, and they can't carry very much stuff.
Deep Gnomes - Continuing the trend so far, there's a sub-race of gnome that live even farther underground than usual, get darker skin tones, and interesting abilites. They get a big bonus to dodge, spell resistance, and spell-like abilities (Blindness, Entropic Shield, Invisible). They get extra dexterity and wisdom at the cost of strength and a great deal of charisma, and an ECL of 3. Whether these abilities are worth the adjustment is up to you, guys.
Halfling
Lightfoot - They get extra dexterity at the cost of strength. And also they're small. That's it, really.
Strongheart - Pretty much the same. slightly darker skin; also, they trade in some of the regular hafling abilites for an extra feat at level one.
Half-elf
Regular - They get some watered-down versions of elf abilities without any of the benefits of being a human. Also, DERP.
Half-Drow - The only difference between half-drow and other half-elves is that half-drow are darker in skin colour and they have slightly better night vision. No really; that's it.
Human
No sub-races, but humans get even stat distribution, an extra feat at level one, and 4 extra skill points at first level and one extra for every level after (meaning that humans get to train in one extra skill than anyone else). All the regular skin colours are present, of course.
Half-orc
Again, no sub-races. Half-orcs get extra strength at the cost of intelligence and charisma. They're also ugly as sin, but unlie half-elves, this was actually intentional, so I won't dwell on it.
Gray Orc
These here are purebloods. They get strength and wisdom at the cost of intelligence and charisa, but they also are faster runners than other races. They also have a good enough sense of smell that they can track hidden enemies. Balancing this back out, gray orcs get an ECL of 1.
Yuan-Ti Pureblood
Alrighty, this species is actually quite important in the story we're about to see. And we can play one! Pretty cool. Anyway, these guys are a reptilian serpent race masquerading as human (though given the skin colours available you'd think they were masquerading as either plague victims or zombies). They get dexterity, intelligence and charisma bonuses with no stat penalties, as well as a natural armour bonus and spell resistance. To top it all off, they get five spell-like abilities, and the only trade-off is an ECL of 2.
Yeah, yuan-ti are pretty overpowered copared to other ECL 2 races like drow. Still, a human with equal experience is perfectly capable of taking a yuan-ti, so don't feel like this is somehow the 'best' option. We're here as much to screw around as we are to complete the game, after all.
Planetouched
Right, I saved these for last because there are six subraces and I was too lazy to write them all out before.
Aasimar - These are humans with a touch of angelic blood in their ancestry. They get extra wisdom and charisma, the spell-lie ability to create light, and an ECL of 1. They default as white blondes, but you can make other variations.
Tiefling - Same as Aasimar only with demonic (or devilish; there is a dfference) ancestry instead. They get extra dexterity and intelligence, but lose out on charisma somewhat. They can create darkness and also have an ECL of 1. Also they have a reddish tint and horns. Kind of a neat look.
Air Genasi - Same as above; find/replace angel with air elemental. They get dexterity and intelligence at the cost of wisdom and Charisma. They can also summon winds to knock people down. ECL of 1, and they look.... wierd. and kind of white.
Earth Genasi - Increased strength and constitution, lowered wisdom and charisma, damage reduction for 20 turns per day, ECL of 1. They look like a guy made of rock.
Fire Genasi - + intelligence, - charisma, set stuff on fire, ECL of 1. Their hair is on fire.
Water Genasi - zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
Well, that was needlessly verbose. Aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, here's the next screen.
As you can see, you can customize your character a bit here. Hey, wait does that button say, 'toggle facial hair'...?
OH OH THAT'S JUST NOT RIGHT
Now we choose the first class of our character. Multiclassing, that is, taking multiple classes, is possible in this game as you level up, but at level one we only pick one. I won't go through every class, as they're rather self-explanatory, but they grayed-out options are classes we don't qualify for. Some classes require a minimum level in certain skills, others require a minimum base attack bonus, and some require specific feats. A few prestige classes are only available to certain races, and some classes (such as paladin) are only availble to those of certain alignments. Speaking of which...
This is where we select our alignment.
I'll get this out of the way right now: D&D alignment is complete bullshit. In a change-up from previous NWN2 installents, though, it is our alignent that dictates our possible actions rather than our actions dictating our alignment. For example, if you choose an 'evil' alignment, and someone offers you a job, you can either take it ('neutral') or extort more money out of him ('evil') whereas a 'good' character would have the option to just take the job or... I don't know, compliment his shirt or something.
Honestly, I kind of like this system. I mean, after all, someone who is used to just murdering every problem he finds is probably not going to be as likely to offer to do something for no pay as a paladin of the god of charity might be. I'm still not a big fan of the concept, but it's decently excecuted here.
Besides, every party member has an opportunity to chime in on any conversation, so if you've got a party of radically dfferent alignments, you could probably see every option possible between al the characters.
Now, for our dwarf here, you'll notice that the lawful options are grayed out. That's because I picked the first class on the list, Barbarian, and of course barbarians aren't big on rules, are they? I'll have to pick either a neutral or chaotic option.
This is where we pick which god our character follows. This doesn't have any practical difference unless you're a cleric, and you don't have to pick one unless yo're a divine spellcaster. If a race has its' own pantheon of gods, like the dwarves here, they'll appear at the top of the list before the rest of the more 'general' gods. My personal favourite is the Red Knight, god of tactics and strategy.
Attribute distribution. Pretty straightforward. You get a modifier on a stat for every two points you have in it. It costs one point to raise a stat from 0-14, two points to raise it between 14-16, and three between 16 and 18. Two things to note about this; First, this does not count racial differences, so our dwarf could raise his constitution up to 16 for just one point per level. Similarly, he could only raise his charisma to 12 for the same. Second, this only counts at character creation, and attribute points we gain from here on out can be applied to an attribute for one point per level no matter what level the attribute is at.
Here's a dwarven barbarian. He'd make an alright front-line fighter.
Now we can pic a background for him. Each background has different requirements (at least 10 charisma, at least 10 intelligence, must be wizard, etc.) and provides things like +1 to a skill but -1 to another. I won't tell you which do what, though; Just pick one that makes sense for your character.
Getting sick of character building yet? Well, we've got a ways to go yet. You could just pick one of the pre-made selections and get going, buuuuuut.... I don't really want to.
Here are some skills.
Here are some more.
Different classes have different class sills, i.e. skills that they can raise for one-to-one point to level ratio. I won't bore you with the details (for once) but if you have no preferences, I'll pick skills that the party could use, like healing, survival, or diplomacy.
Now we pick a feat (or, if human, we pick two). There are a few handy background feats you can only get at first level taht can do things like make you harder to hit (luck of heroes) or ake your spells harder to resist (spellcasting prodigy).
Lastly, we make the finishing touches; A name, a story, and a voice. Most of the voices annoy me, and you can't hear them anyway, so I'll just set the to either 'none' or something I can bear to listen to.
And there you go! One character. I'll be checking back in about a day to see what you guys can come up with.
Part 1 [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.352813-Lets-Play-Neverwinter-Nights-2-Storm-of-Zehir-Update-1-Im-on-a-boat#14000462]
