...If you don't max out stats, then yes, multiclass character will have an advantage by being qualified for all their classes, thus having better stats. I may be a crappy designer myself, but I hang out on a forum with the best modern designers, and I know math. When I look at a sudoku puzzle, I don't go "uhh, i think 5 goes here", I think "if I run this set of procedures against each line and box in a loop, it'll be solved; since a computer can do it, manual search is a waste of my time and I'm not going to bother".

The way stats are exposed in the game means I'll never accept it as a fair challenge that is worth my time, because, when I start approaching the game as a challenge in which I need to think and to plan ahead to win, the utility function always points to "reroll". Part of the solution to "play a game the best you can, without Modify" is "reroll until you get the most points in every relevant stat, it's an investment that'll keep delivering huge payoffs for the rest of the game". That's the correct solution, but it's also unfun. "Your party is as powerful as your patience" is a shitty rule, and I'm not going to play with it.

My first party ever had both, I even remember their names. They did well in Champions, but by Dargaard, they weren't pulling their weight at all. Knights on the other hand kept on rocking and had AC down to -31 when suited up in sword and board mode in DQK (worse with the Dragonlance).

Skeletal Knights are wimps. The real problem are heavy hitters which can't be easily neutralized with timely fireballing: death knights, iron golems, asparagus and the dickwolf.

Just memespeak.

Oh, sorry, I take the trollface back then. I don't doubt you won with lower stats, I just thought that particular party was yours.

Here's my own party in the final battles of Pools of Darkness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypkwKnHhlOE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne3d6sp_t3E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu25mpNokN0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aur1WM7iCV8

Sound is bugged, so I recommend turning it off.

My favourite party composition for PoR is 5x F/M, 1x Cl/M

I always create an entirely new party when moving on to CotAB, because otherwise I find it too easy because my party is so overpowered at the start (My multiclass characters in PoR have over 100,000XP at that point).

My girlfriend (and later wife :) bought me the original Pool of Radiance for the C64 the week it came out in UK in 1988.
She was going away for two weeks and thought that the game would keep me busy :D It did!!!
Over the years I played it (and all the others) several times on PC.

POR is the only game in the Gold Box series where the number of monsters in battles is proportional to the strength of your party.
So there is not much point in starting out with a superhero team: you would have to face dozens and dozens of kobolds in the slums in each encounter and it would take ages to get through them.

I found that out when I finished the game (PC version) for the first time and then restarted it importing my "end" characters:
In the first slum encounter there was a sea of kobolds filling the screen!

None of the other games does that AFAIK.

It's been a long time since I played the Krynn games, would you mind elaborating on the part I highlighted above? Is that when the Knights begin to gain CLW spells?

Out of curiosity, did your wife ever play Pool of Radience?

Using area spells like Fireball might help against large numbers of weak enemies.

By the way, Might and Magic 2 did something similar; the higher your level, the more enemies you fight per random encounter.

Yes. Contributing factors are the availability of Solamnic Plate and Hold Person becoming useless.

(I won Champions with an all-knight party once, named them for the Spice Girls.)

That FAQ has a lot of "Mix Max Everything or the game will screw you" advice. IMHO It goes too far. Just recently I played through Pool of Radiance with a party of 3 x Fighters, and 1 Thief, Mage & Cleric. All human. I did reroll their stats until they got a natural 18 in their prime stat, and whatever the rest was I kept it. The only min-maxing I did aside from that was to max out their starting hitpoints since having 50% of your starting party go down in one hit is a bit too masochistic for my taste.

I was able to successfully beat the game, and it wasn't the end of the world if a party member died during a boss fight and I had to resurrect them. I was getting nervous toward the end of the game, since you see a lot of people suggest that if you don't min max everything, you'll lose. I saw somewhere a guy who swore by a 6x Elf Fighter/Thief/Magic User party due to it's raw numerical superiority and how much you could level them. Most guides tend to suggest have a few Fighter/Clerics or Thief/Magic Users to augment the casting power of the pure Clerics or Magic Users. But at the end of the day I did just fine with my basic human single classed party. So don't sweat it.

Worst case, maybe the min maxers are right, and you load up Gold Box Companion late game to "fix" your party. But I'd at least go in trying to play like a normal person. Don't rob yourself of that experience.

I wish more games had such anti-munchkin measures.

It always cracks me up when someone has thought they were very cunning in MM2 and had grinded the Cuisinarts until they are level 100+ and then they complain about the unfairness of facing 255 enemies in every battle. :-)
Well said!

I always play with unmaxed (but not weak) characters, and the only part where I had trouble was with the final battles in the DOS version Pools of Darkness (Amiga version is easier since the Ring of Lightning Immunity works), and I edited up my characters' DEX to 18. STR and CON are relatively unimportant compared to DEX, since DEX governs the all important (in the really hard battles) initiative.

Also I might add that by only playing a few of all the classes available, you don't get the full player XP from completing the game. ;-)

There are still ways to make MM2 easy without power leveling. With the right items and fountains, it is possible to have a low level party where each character has thousands of HP and some characters can cast powerful spells.

It's tricky, but the Cuisinarts can be killed without winning any other battles first. (It's easier if you decide to recruit Aeriel (who requires winning one easy battle to recruit). Also, even Ancient Dragons aren't so bad when you have temporarily increased levels and thousands of HP.

I prefer not to metagame.

Same here. I'm getting ready to start up a game of PoR using the characters from Baldur's Gate. A little hard since there are no druids in any of the games, no Rangers in PoR and no Dual Classing until CotAB. So I've made a couple of changes to make sure everything goes well. The major changes were Jaheira as I had to make her a Fighter/Cleric, Minsc is a pure Fighter, and my Ranger/Cleric is a Fighter/Cleric as well. Imoen and Khalid are unchanged and Dynaheir is a regular Mage as there are no specialty mages in the Gold Box games.

I'll have to use GBC to get past racial level limits and to tweak Minsc's stats once he is remade as a Ranger in CotAB, but otherwise, no extras allowed (e.g. reloading for better HP, tweaking stats beyond BG values, etc.). Should be interesting. =)

Flynn

Yeah, such custom parties can be fun.
Had a blast with a Lord of the Rings party in Icewind Dale myself. Only one hobbit, though.

I wish you a speedy recovery.

Why?