I posted a muddled message, sorry all. I meant to say that the penalties for dual-wielding are different, and it isn't clear why to me.
@Gule - those are penalties for dual-wielding, but you are right about BAB etc. The human ranger is strength based, and the halfling is dex based with weapon finesse.
@pfreaker - yes, the human ranger was wearing chain mail when the penalty was -7 / -3. It changed to -1 / -1 when she had studded leather armour - also not right, but oh well
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@Darvin - yes, you're right - the human ranger was in medium armour, so no dual wielding in action here. Again my bad, I was meaning penalty and not AB.
I'm trying out two different takes on dual-wielding, one strength based and high AB, and one dex based and high sneak attack. The high AB is at around 8 / 8 (only -1 / -1 penalty for some reason), and the dex based rogue is at 6 / 6. The advantage of the strength-based toon is that they can use heavier armour and a sword instead of dual-wielding when the situation calls for it.
Darvin: There appears to be some kind of unusual penalty at play here. The fact that the human has differing attack bonus on main-hand and off-hand attacks indicates the ambidexterity feat isn't in play, so the two-weapon fighting feat probably isn't either. With the short swords that gives a -4 penalty to main-hand attacks and -8 to off-hand attacks. After taking the baseline +5 attack bonus, that should be +1 on the main-hand attack and -3 on the off-hand attack. That means there's another -4 penalty in play here. A strength score of 3 would do this, but I can't imagine that the character is this weak. The halfling is in a similar position, but it does appear that ambidexterity and two-weapon fighting are in effect. This means only -2 penalty to main-hand and off-hand attacks. However, with his +4 base attack bonus and +1 size bonus to attack that should still be +3/+3, meaning there's a -5 penalty somewhere. Again, a strength score of 1 could impose a penalty this steep but that just doesn't seem like something a player would do. Regardless of how these numbers were arrived at, these characters are incredibly poor warriors and desperately need to increase their accuracy. By 6th level, you really want to be somewhere around +10.
Unfortunately two weapon fighting is quite underpowered in IWD2 and there's basically no reason to ever use it over two-handed weapons. If you have your heart set on it then the Fighter does the job best since the weapon specialization feat synergizes well with TWF, but it drops off dramatically at higher levels since it's just not worth taking a -2 to all your attacks for one extra attack. It's really typical of the early run of 3rd edition; no one seemed to have any idea how strong anything
should be and people by and large weren't spreadsheeting the raw numbers (which would have told you right away that two weapons is strictly inferior to two-handed weapons in most circumstances). But that's 20/20 hindsight, and IWD2 got some things right, in particular creating an environment where the Monk is actually decent.
