I'd like to play either Baldur's Gate EE or Icewind Dale EE with my son. I have 4 questions, and would love answers from those who have done it:

1. How easy is it to get multiplayer working on one of these enhanced edition games? Are there different options? I installed the GOG Galaxy client, which is also supposed to support multiplayer - I'm not clear what Beamdog brings and what the GOG client brings to the table, and how we set up multiplayer. We'll be playing mostly in the house on our shared wireless network, but may play sometimes remotely when I travel for work.

2. How does multiplayer gameplay work? I always have lots of default pauses on for when the party first sees an enemy, gets hurt, finishes a spell, etc. This way it is almost like a turn-based RPG. How would this work in multiplayer?

3. How do we control different player characters? Probably to start my son will just be able to control one character, so I would take care of the rest of our party. Also, how about NPC's in our party? Who would control those - or should we just create our entire party?

4. If you have tried both games multiplayer, which do you think is more fun or easier to play in the multiplayer version of the game?

2. Can't answer the other questions but I can address these. Because everyone has different auto-pause settings, the auto-pause is disabled in multiplayer. The option to pause is there, it just makes it awkward to play for everyone else.

3. You need to pre-generate characters. I haven't played multiplayer for EE (my multiplayer experience came from the Gamespy days), but it looks like you can give other players additional slots. There is going to be a button that says "change player". Click on that and select the player you want to give the slot to.

When a player pauses the game it's paused for everyone. Establishing pause rules between you two is probably your best bet.

I'm not really sure how to handle casters without pausing. I think the best way to do that is what you mentioned above. Tell each other when you need to pause and ask the other player if he's ready to unpause when you're done.