I'm sorry, I don't get your point...you mentioned that I can go all Cleric then you complain in my next sentence when I said it doesn't matter if you want 3 Fighters and 2 Fighter/Mage/Thieves since games like Icewind Dale involve trial-and-error when it comes to classes. I had to play the first game for 2-3 times before I settled for my preferred party.

And please stop telling me I'm disingenuous when you yourself act like one.

He is saying that the composition of your party very much does matter; you can't just take any slapdash party and expect to do well (example that springs to mind is a party of all thieves). The bit about the clerics is him saying that an all cleric party is probably strong to reasonably make it through the game.

The internal part of the game is figuring out these things on your own. Which strategies works best, what tactics to use etc. If you start by knowing all the tricks why even bother playing the game? Playing with an over-powered party also breaks the balance of the game.

It is not possible to know all the tricks in the game. In fact, new tricks are discovered for old games all the time.

In fact, I believe that, in the past year or so, a new trick was discovered for Super Mario Bros., a famous game that is over 3 decades old at this point.

In other words, knowing all the tricks at the start is not going to happen.

(Also, some tricks are not that easy to pull off. For example, polymorph teleporting can be tricky.)

Nobody else want's to know. Besides, your attempt at rebuttal is nothing but logical semantics.

Not true.

(Also, you have a stray apostrophe in the part I quoted just now.)

So, those who think that this is a stupid question, stop posting in here.

Those willing to give me suggestions, feel free to discuss.

See, that's where you're wrong: I already learned something extra from this thread: sneak attacks only work once per target. It would have been quite difficult to figure that out on my own.
I played the game at least once to finish, years ago, with "the party I wanted". Turned out that it didn't work that well at all and it lessened my enjoyment of the game. It was for several reasons, chief amongst them the mishmash between second and third edition rules that this game uses.
So, instead of "lacking capacity to understand", this thread is rather a means to doublecheck if I'm avoiding the pitfalls of past playthroughs. That, and I like discussing game mechanics.
Finally, I don't have as much game-time as I used to have, so starting a game blindly and ending up with poor selections due to lack of information, would eat up this precious time.

Same here.

Anyway, back to the main topic:

One nice thing about the Icewind Dale series is that you can change your party mid-way through; if one of your characters isn't pulling her weight, just delete her and create a new character via character arbitration.

Unfortunately, IWD2's XP system is horrendously designed; actually adding a new character midgame will result in the rest of your party getting more XP than they would otherwise. For this reason, if you do decide to create a new character later in the game, I seriously recommend using the cheat console to raise the new character's XP and level to an amount that is comparable to the rest of your party. Yes, it is necessary to cheat in order to avoid becoming more powerful than intended.

Incidentally, if you simply avoid leveling up when you have enough XP, you can continue to get more XP from enemies, possibly getting enough to break the game. I have seen this strategy referred to as "level squatting", and since you mention that you don't want your party to be "too munchkinny", you might want to go out of your way to avoid doing this.

Note that these issues don't apply to IWD1; in that game, the XP system behaves sensibly, there's no advantage to delaying level-ups, and adding a new level 1 character will not risk breaking the game. (If you add the new character no later than level 9, the character will be at most 1 level behind after the rest of the party has gained 1 level, which is reasonable, and the rest of your party will not be leveling faster than normal.)

In your dreams. Sue me in all of your pettiness.

Not of your own volition.

I agree almost everything you said, with small adjustments.

About the need to have the capacity to understand: I spent my life teaching. Not as a direct job but either as part of my job or simply helping others (Turkey has serious education problems). I apologize if the word "capacity" offended anyone. When I use that word in my academic writings, I do not mean a person's intelligence but the will to learn something or the foundation (background knowledge) to be able to learn it.

We teach addition and subtraction to be able to teach multiplication and division. Then we use those to teach exponents. Than comes equations with x. Then we teach graphs, slopes, derivations, integrals etc. When I am teaching Heat transfer lesson, I expect my students to know how to solve some basic differential equations and Laplace transformations.

A few months ago someone wrote on forums that a game is rigged because his "knowledge" in probability & Statistics told him so. I had given that lesson before and saw the error in his logic. To be able to correct that error, I wrote him what we teach in 7th grades. He called me idiot among other colorful words. That person might be a genius but did not have the "capacity" to understand that answer.

About people I wrote.

Einstein: Expelled from school.

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Du-Fi/Einstein-Albert.html

Descartes: He had great trouble adjusting the academic life. He traveled Europe, not only to see every other lifestyle and expand his view but also to escape. The church was openly attacking his work. Seeing how his friend Galileo was executed(1642), he added a separate part to his famous work "Principles of Philosophy" (1644) which he proved GOD's existence. That part basically contradicted many things he argued in all of his works but still managed to get him off the hook (literally).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-works/

Bill Gates: In an interview, he explains how fun it was to be successful despite everyone against him, telling him how his ambitions were crap when he was 18-20. He constantly faced bankrupt but managed to go on with his success with "basic". He mentions that at that time, they were giving a special award to programs who sold more than 10 thousand. When BASIC sold more than a million, he asked those people what would be a "proper" reward for 1 million sales.

Elon Musk: He often mentions how Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity all faced bankrupt in 2008 because newspapers, politicians, Journalists and testers were against his ideas. This eventually forced him to go public with Tesla since he badly needed the capital. He often mentions how he regrets that decision. In a public interview, the reporter asked him if he had anything to say to those people who attacked his work back then. He said "OK" and sipped his glass of water. The audience went crazy :)

Steve Jobs: Do I even need to tell his story?

All those people succeeded because they believed in themselves and in their ways despite what everyone else told them. They DID ask others' opinions. Elon Musk says "Learning is a very simple process. Just read books and ask people". So yes, it is NEVER bad to ask questions but be prepared to RESPECT answers when they are not what you expect.

Dunning Kruger at its finest. Even very smart people can fall victim to it.

The reason for his expulsion were due to a "bad attitude" according to your linked source. That's a bit vague, but it doesn't sound like he was disillusioned with school and was being a disruptive student. This seems rather incidental to his later genius, and more indicative of moody teenage years.

Not surprised to hear that the church got after him, but they kinda were a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of any intellectual of the era.

This is the survivorship bias I was talked about. The vast majority of people in that sort of situation fail. For every one Bill Gates there are millions of Joe Nobodies you've never heard of who started a promising company but saw it fizzle. A fair chunk of them are brilliant and driven people who, for whatever reason, never had that big break and their company just quietly died. The argument Gates is using here works equally-well regardless of whether we're talking business ventures or lottery tickets. A lottery winner can rightly say that they would have never won without playing, and people who told them it was a bad idea were wrong. Just because there's a skill element to creating a business doesn't change the comparison; it's still a fallacy to ignore all the people who fail.

In some respects, I view this more as a value judgement than a case of there being a right or wrong decision. Gates took a high-risk path, and he made it work and won big. He had every right to make that decision for himself, and now he gets to reap the rewards of his big win. However, you can still disagree with Gates' decision even in light of his success, because most people in that position fail and lose everything. It is a perfectly valid value position to say that it's not worth the risk, and to counsel against it.

Musk is probably the worst example on this list, because his legacy is still unknown. None of those companies are profitable yet, nor do they look like they'll be profitable in this decade. It's disingenuous enough to talk with 20/20 hindsight while ignoring the risk and uncertainty at the time, but another thing when the future of these companies is still uncertain at best. Musk is the kind of guy who is brazen to the point of recklessness, and his companies are positioned to either win big or lose big. At this point, I'm not sure which it will be, but it's going to be extremely interesting either way.

Also I'm somewhat puzzled about his comments about regretting going public. I'm no expert on venture capital but I know it comes with strings attached, and with the amount of capital Tesla needed... those were going to be a lot of strings. The fact that he couldn't find enough money on terms he found palatable doesn't at all surprise me; going public (especially with his celebrity factor) makes sense in that context.

Those same qualities can also be found in people who fail catastrophically. They are necessary to take the risks inherent in an entrepreneurial venture, but it says nothing about whether it's a good venture or not or if the entrepreneur is well-suited to lead it.

I take offense to your decision to call certain RPGs "REAL", and requiring them to be balanced so that every setup will work. The way I see it, any game that has the basic gameplay of an RPG is just as real as every other such game. (I don't count games like Ys as RPGs, because even though they have some RPG elements, the basic gameplay (including, for example, boss fights) is that of an action game.)

Thing is, that constraint does limit the design in some ways. It is perfectly reasonable for an RPG to have setups that simply do not work. For example, in Final Fantasy 5, an example of a non-viable setup (one that is mentioned in the maual) is to give a White Mage the Berserk ability. White Mages use healing magic, but Berserk forces them to attack and not use magic, which makes this anticombo not viable.

(Incidentally, there is actually one point, where if you use this setup on a certain character and give them a non-damaging weapon (like the Staff of Healing, which casts a healing spell when it hits), you will softlock the game, as a certain scripted battle won't be able to end. I would consider this a bug that could be fixed with a change in the enemy's script for the battle in question.)

I can not say anything you said is wrong. Even when I disagree, I find it a matter of preference.

"Bad attitude" for Einstein's expulsion was disagreeing with his teachers. Recently there was a TV show about his life called "Genious". Very fascinating.

I totally agree with your view on how some people can win and most fail. I am one on the fail side. But that was entirely my fault. I was one of the best IT managers in the world and blindly thought it was time to start my own company with my IT friends. Very soon I understood that being a BOSS has nothing to do with your computer skill but with your people and management skills. I could not find enough time on the field and customers slowly started to complain "we want you here, not your men".

Tesla and SpaceX are very profitable at the moment. I am not sure why would you disagree with that.

I believe there is always risk involved in investments and I believe it comes down to personal choice. Some people prefer to stay on the safe side and others love living on the edge. Still, I encourage people to take risks and create business after thinking through.