At this time last year, I had the intention of playing through Baldur’s Gate II in the following months. Well, that never came to pass. Only in the last few months have I been playing it again. After constantly getting my butt kicked I decided to start over. My human fighter character now no longer is a berserker and has insane might and a proficiency for long swords instead of bastard swords. I also gave him a silly name and made him look like a bearded dwarf in his portrait, while his on screen representation in the game world looks just like a regular non-bearded fellow. I am probably going to regret this.

I decided to pay more attention to the rules this time. So low AC is good and low THAC0 is good. I read through the manual once again, because what’s the point of collecting physical copies of games if you don’t even do that right? One passage I probably already read, but didn’t remember was the part about multiclassed characters not being able to cast spells when wearing certain types of armor. I had an AHA moment when I realized that was probably the reason why some NPCs couldn’t cast spells. I had wondered about this when I started over and Imoen couldn’t do magic. I don’t understand why this is. Probably a balance issue. Because why couldn’t you cast spells if you are wearing a leather jerkin? But anyway, this is going to be of great help.

And as always: RTM!