01kipper: It sounds like what you described would work on C64 (as long as the thief only has leather armour or no armour equipped, ETA: and no shield equipped).

But if the PC version requires two setup attacks, try this strategy with the enemy thief in Kovel mansion:

1. Delay until after the enemy moves (not a problem if he moves first).
2. Attack enemy with "setup character A" (not your thief)
3. Attack enemy with "setup character B" (not your thief)
4. Attack enemy with your thief, opposite "setup character B".

cbarchuk: Does the set up attack need to be the actual first attack of the round? Does it need to hit the target?

kmonster: Not exactly true for the Gold Box games.

In other games than PoR double class characters get a total of the average HP the single classes would get rounded down, triple class characters can get even less total.

In Pools of Radiance 19 con is treated just like 18 but multiclass characters usually can get more HP than should be possible.

How the hitpoints at partial level ups are distributed doesn't always look logical, it seems as it was written directly into the code how many HP they should get for partial level ups, just try out a little.

From my old PoR notes about max HP at level up:

fighter/thief with 17-19 con: 7 as fighter, 5 as thief
fighter/mage with 17-18 con: 7 as fighter, 4 as mage
cleric/mage with 16 con: 5 as cleric, 4 as mage
cleric/fighter/mage with 18 con: 5 as fighter, 4 as cleric, 3 as mage

In later games multiclasses get far less HP, my 18 con cleric/fighter/mages in CoK couldn't get more than a sum of 9 HP for a level up in all 3 classes combined, no matter how I split the level up.

kmonster: Fighter level should get 10:3 = 3, mage level should get 4:3=1, thief level should get 6:3=2 as maximum.

kmonster: The manual of bodily health always grants +2 HP to the +1 con, independent of what happened before.

dtgreene: The problem is that, regardless of how Nature might be (and in Nature being female is not strictly a negative thing anyway), it is unfair to those players who like to play female characters. There is no sensible gameplay reason why female characters should be strictly inferior to male characters. If you are designing a game and you *really* want male and female characters to be different gameplay wise, make sure to balance the choices. (The best option, IMO, is just to make sex purely a cosmetic thing that doesn't affect character stats or abilities.)

In any case, this sexist rule is not present in 2nd edition anyway.

dtgreene: Of course, this does give me some questions:
1. Is there a limit to the amount of CON you can get, or will the game allow you to keep using it, even if doing so would raise your CON above 25 (which isn't supposed to be possible)?
2. If your CON is too high to be increased (assuming that the game limits the CON you can have after using it), will using the manual still give you more HP?
3. Does the game check for integer overflow? For example, if you have 254 HP when you use this, will you end up with 254, 255, or 0 HP after using it?

(Note that questions 1 and 2 likely only come into play if you duplicate it or re-use the same character for multiple playthroughs, and 3 may involve abusing level draining (with save/reload until you get favorable results) to get your HP much higher than it would normally go, but I am curious about how the game handles these situations.)