Hello, I'm new to this forum. I apologize in advance for any mistakes I might make, I am not English, I hope you will still be able to understand me.

I played Neverwinter Nights years ago and it had left me a beautiful memory. I bought it again a few day ago recently and I must say that I'm staying blocked at the character creation. My issue is that I would like to make an hybrid character and play freely the three campaigns with this character. I decided I would play a cleric because I would like to have a large healing spells panel. I too thought about multi classing my cleric with a paladin to benefit his auras, diplomacy, immunity against fear and longsword but I couldn't find any information to help me and I don't know the game enough to know if that's a good idea.

My questions are :
-Is the choice of a cleric/paladin viable for the 3 campaigns or is there another combination that could be more appropriate for my gaming preferences?
-I have seen that Epic class began at level 21, so when should I give the paladin his levels?
-Could you give me advice about the cleric's domains? I was thinking about healing of course but I'm open to other possibilities
-I wish to start Loyal Good but I know I will slip to Chaotic Good at some point, just like I always did before. Will this be a problem if I'm multi classing with a paladin for his bonuses or will I keep his already gained bonuses, if I manage to get to the required levels before?
-What techniques, aptitudes, should I use and which ones should I avoid?
-How can I optimize my ability points?

Thank you so much in advance for your answers. Have a good game!

I'm presuming we're talking about Neverwinter Nights 1, and not Neverwinter Nights 2. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Yes, this is a good character design. You should be Cleric 16 / Paladin 4 when you reach 20th level. This gives you the optimal base attack bonus while retaining very good spellcasting. Depends on what you want to do. I like the invisibility spells offered by Trickery, and War has a cool bonus effect. Healing is nice at lower levels since you get early access to better healing spells, but at higher levels it doesn't make much difference since you're going to have way more healing than you'd ever need anyways. Unlike pen and paper, Neverwinter Nights does not take away your Paladin abilities if your alignment changes, you only lose the ability to gain more levels as a Paladin. Just make sure you have at least 4 levels of Paladin before your alignment changes. As a Cleric, concentration is absolutely necessary. Persuade is also a very good one to have. I'd suggest:
Human
Strength = 16
Dexterity = 8
Constitution = 12
Intelligence = 8
Wisdom = 16
Charisma = 14

As you level up, put all your points into Wisdom. Use magic items to boost your other stats.

Thanks a lot for your quick and very helpful answer! And yes I was talking about NWN 1 sorry.

Can I ask you too, is a configuration cleric 16/ paladin 2/ fighter 2 could give me more martial aptitudes and still be viable? And which martial skills would be more appropriate in your opinion with a longsword and a shield?

And I'm also wondering, about the ability points, I would prefer to have at least 10 to each ability, I'm mostly thinking about the dialogues with intelligence and dexterity, with the roll of dice occurring during dialogues. How could I distribute them taking that in consideration ? Thank for your patience.

That would be fine. I'd recommend using the Champion of Torm prestige class instead of Fighter if you're going to go this route.

The biggest issue with the Longsword is that it has low damage compared to a Greatsword. You will want to focus on increasing your damage. The Divine Might feat is very good for that. Knockdown and Improved Knockdown are very useful for dealing with a single powerful enemy, while the Cleave and Great Cleave feats are useful for dealing with large groups of enemies. The Improved Critical feat is also very useful if you're specializing in a specific weapon. The reason dexterity is so low is because it's easy to raise to magic items. Dexterity rolls in conversations are very rare, and it will cause you more problems in combat at low levels due to the armor class penalty. Once you get a magic item that gives you a bonus to dexterity you will be fine (try to get +4 to bring yourself up to 12 dexterity. Any more dexterity than that is wasted)

I'd forgotten about the annoying dialog issue in the Neverwinter Nights 1 original campaign (it's very annoying that they did this, and totally unwarranted. 8-13 is considered the "average" range for a typical person). I can understand wanting at least 10 intelligence in that context, and it's difficult to find the points because this character is spread so thin. You'll probably have to take it out of wisdom, which hurts unfortunately.

Revised:
Human
Strength = 16
Dexterity = 8
Constitution = 12
Intelligence = 10
Wisdom = 15
Charisma = 14

You should note that you're *not* meant to play the three campaigns with the same character.

The original campaign is one character, levels 1-18.
Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark are meant to be played with a second character, levels 1-25+

You could play the original campaign and SoU with the same character, but it won't be much fun since you'll be much too powerful. Personally, I prefer to keep the Cleric single-classed or add just a single paladin level. This will leave you with 1 fewer attack, but you get it back when you cast Divine Power. What's more, because of a quirk in the game engine, that extra attack comes at full base attack bonus, making it much more useful than the Cleric/Paladins' 4th attack that almost always misses. (due to the -15 attack penalty for the 4th attack.)

As for stats: You definitely want to keep Int at 10, yeah. Even 12 wouldn't go amiss. Besides the dialogue issue, you want skillpoints in Concentration, Spellcraft, Persuade and perhaps Lore. (There are a number of points where having Lore gives you additional dialogue options or help with puzzles, plus it's a big convenience.) You can do without, but on a human you'll still need 10 INT to get the other 3 skills.

Dex, however, doesn't give any dialogue options that I can recall. If I've forgotten any, it can't be more than 1 or 2 and 10 DEX woudln't be enough anyway. There's no reason whatsoever to raise it above 8 if you need the stats elsewhere. (And you do need them elsewhere.) The key decision to make is whether you want your cleric to focus on offensive spellcasting or on melee buffing.

The melee cleric is a bit stronger, and probably suits your cleric/paladin idea better.

The spellcasting cleric is plenty strong enough, and a lot more fun in my opinion. Especially at lower levels.

It's all down to what you like to play. Want to blow some enemies up and then smash the remainder with a sword? Or do you just want to cast a whole lot of buffing spells and then smash everything? Both work. I prefer the first.

For the spellcasting cleric you should take domains like Magic and Air so you get lots of offensive spells (Call Lightning, Chain Lightning, Acid Arrow, Icestorm) and some useful extra buffs. (Stoneskin, mage armour.)
The melee cleric is better served with trickery, war, earth or good. Trickery especially makes you much more resilient because the Improved Invisibility spell it gives makes half the enemy's attacks miss. (But normal clerics can achieve the same thing temporarily with Darkness.)

For feats, the same division sort-of applies.
Spellcaster clerics want (Greater) Spell Focus: Evocation, Empower Spell (Also works great on Bull's Strength) and possibly (Greater) Spell Penetration. (Or you could just use your sword against magic-resistant enemies.)
Warrior clerics want Power Attack, Cleave, Blindfight, Knockdown, maybe Weapon Focus. Improved Critical is better.
Both want Extend Spell. You have great short-duration spells that are even better when they last twice as long.

A human cleric gets 8 pre-epic feats, so you could take some from each list if you want and do a bit of both. I recommend against Divine Might for clerics. It only really comes into its own once you hit 30 CHA and it finally lasts long enough to make up for the time spent casting it. Even with Eagle's Splendour, your cleric is unlikely to have more than 18 Cha. 4 rounds of +4 damage? Maybe 6 rounds if you wear a Nymph Cloak +5? Doesn't seem worth it.

Plus you already have so many great short duration buffs like Divine Favour, Divine Power, or even Prayer and Battletide. Between those and Greater Magic Weapon & Darkfire cast on your sword, damage will not be an issue at all. Even with a single-handed weapon.

Edit: Mixed up Divine Might and Divine Power. Gah. Why are there so many similarly named wholly different abilities in this game?

OK, well thanks to both of you, it helps a lot ! I think I'll stick with a cleric/paladin, it seems fun to me :).

This is actually untrue due to how Divine Power works (a Cleric spell). You want to wind up at 15 BAB as a Cleric, so something like Cleric 17/Paladin 3 would accomplish that.

Rohnir, it sounds like you're not very familiar with the NWN rules so I'm not going to lay out all the math for you right now -- though I can if you're truly curious. Just know that due to Divine Power specifically 15 BAB is better for a Cleric than 16 BAB. It would give you a few extra combat feats at the cost of Turn Undead (and thus Divine Might/Divine Shield). However, long term you could easily do something like 17 Cleric/2 Paladin/1 Fighter pre-epic...and then add on more levels in epic. For BAB only the first 20 levels count, it automatically increases after 20 rather than being class based.

Not sure what you mean by martial skills -- do you mean feats? Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, Knockdown, Power Attack, Cleave, Great Cleave, Blind Fight, Toughness, Improved Critical -- all of those and more work well. Since he's human, as long as his Paladin and Fighter levels never get two or more apart he'll be fine. And going Champion of Torm would cost him a feat (the level one feat, to be specific). Untrue. Two-handed weapons like the Greatsword in NWN actually suffer from a severe flaw -- at higher levels they do not give enough extra damage to be worth losing a shield. I would not recommend using a Greatsword as a first time player -- shields are simply too powerful.

This is *doubly* true as a Cleric -- so many Cleric spells give a flat damage increase that doesn't take into account whether you're using a 1H or 2H weapon.

Rohnir -- again, I can lay out the math on this but it'll probably be very confusing for now. This is potentially a reasonable starting spread -- you have several options, really. Personally, I'd just drop Charisma (technically to 8 but if you don't want people to think you're ugly in the OC you'll need at least 10 -- another stupid system as Cha doesn't impact physical appearance) -- it's really only going to be useful if you want to go Divine Might/Divine Shield...and you're already going to be wanting to put points into Wisdom and Strength (Wisdom will need to be base Wisdom, aka non-gear/spell/etc Wisdom for spellcasting, can get up to 12 Strength from gear). Which won't leave much room to boost Charisma for those feats.

There are some other quibbles I'd make but they're more sheer optimization things rather than really impactful stuff. This is what I was referring to up at the top of my post, to be clear. And emphasizing this for good measure.

Except that the second quoted bit should read "Divine Power" and not "Divine Might."

In any sane language those two expressions would be pretty much synonymous, but D&D is neither a language nor sane, so they refer to completely different abilities. So uh... oops, and sorry for any confusion I caused.

MM and I are referring to the 4th level Cleric spell "Divine Power," a spell that for a short while (2 minutes at level 20, double if extended) will make your attack bonus the same as a fighter of the same level and (usually) give you an extra attack if your Base Attack Bonus is 15 or lower. (It's actually more complicated than that, and has a couple more effects, but this is close enough.)

This spell is one of the strongest in the Cleric's arsenal, and enables him to match a fighter's combat prowess at higher levels, even if he isn't multiclassed.

Fixed. The hilarious part is the original quote reads "I recommend against Divine Might...Plus you already have so many great short duration buffs like Divine Favour, Divine Might...," and neither of us noticed.

If you're using a sword and shield combination, you might want to consider Bastard Swords or Katanas. I'm currently playing a Swashbuckler / Thug type with Weapon: Proficiency Exotic and it works pretty well with all the Cleave skills and Weapon Focus stuff stacked on "katana."

Bastard swords and katanas are nice weapons, sure, but not worth spending a feat on.

A bastard sword deals, on average, 1 point of damage more than a longsword. By late game, your average damage should be 40+. 1 point more or less really isn't going to make much of a difference.

Now, if you play a single-classed cleric and want access to better weapons than maces and morning stars, then it can be a very good idea to take weapon proficiency: Exotic instead of Martial. (Though on the other hand, the far greater number of martial weapons in the game can mean you will find better magic weapons you can use with the martial feat.)

However, the OP is making a cleric-paladin. That character already gets Martial Weapon proficiency for free. No sense in spending another feat on the exotic feat.

Indeed. This may/should be changed in many custom modules, but it's the way Sir Iguana describes in the official campaigns.

Katana can be good in HotU, that's for sure... it's possible to find two early Kaga-To +3s (on-hit Daze) in Undermountain I, so you can dual-wield them. In Chapter 3 you can also find two Sword Saint Legacy +8s for 2d6 Sonic (and Rizolvir can add 2d6 acid to that - not many weapons can have two damage mods). There's also Radiant Death +12, but it's innate mods aren't as good and it's WM only.

Top Bastard Swords come late in HotU, unfortunately. Scimitars are nice, the Scimitar of Speed (perma-Haste) findable in Undermountain I. I'm not sure about Dwarven Waraxes, but I seem to recall one with Vorpal.

Didn't say it was, but I like the on-hit Daze and it's probably the best katana drop before Sword Saint Legacy because Daze is the only mod, meaning you can add lots more useful mods on top from Rizolvir and the Black Pearl, keeping Daze until you upgrade to a katana that can have two dmg mods. Not in something as facerolly as HotU, which is what I'm talking about. Yep, long swords are great. Pretty common knowledge... Again yes, long swords are great. No it doesn't.