I did an (almost complete) playthrough of PoR, CoAB, SoSB, PoD a few years ago, and I remember at one point I couldn't import all my characters because of a level limit, or a race or class that didn't exist, or something like that. I don't remember exactly what the issue was.

Is there a concise summary of the races/classes/levels/whatever that exist in all 4 games so that (now that I'm considering another playthrough) I can craft a party at the outset that can last? Here's hoping I can make it more interesting than 4 generic humans! :P

Do you use GBC - Gold Box Companion? I haven't tried doing this myself, but you may be able to trick the limitations by making your characters temporarily human for levelling purposes. On the GBC website it alludes to being able to do this.
If you can put up with doing this, I expect you can bring your characters all the way through.

You possibly can even change them to human for the import if it helps getting them imported.

Otherwise, not sure how else you can bypass the limitations.

I'm also about to start a run through :) Just made my party!

Good luck.

For now I mostly just want to know what the limitations ARE. I feel like I'd be able to build a party that'd work within them and be fun to play. All I really want to avoid is what happened in my last playthrough: going through 3 games and then like 2 of my 6 characters won't import into Pool of Darkness. It was a bummer. Made it all feel less like an epic D&D campaign.

As far as I know there is nothing like you are asking, all characters can transfer between games. I do not know why you experienced problems with this on your previous playthrough (assuming you were playing the vanilla games and not using GBC or mods or whatever). The problem I have heard of is not being able to transfer any characters at all (due to not knowing how to do so), not certain characters transferring but not other ones.

However, by the time you get to later games, nearly all of the demi-human characters will be weak due to level limits which are mostly around the level 5-8 whereas humans will get to levels 15+. Therefore human characters are probably the best if you want a party that can make it all the way from PoR to PoD. Single-class thieves are the exception since they have no level limit. The most viable multiclass for the full run would be a Dwarf F/T.

You're right, I spent some time last night reviewing the manuals and saw that they only expanded what's available in terms of class and level with each subsequent game.

This was 4 years ago so I may be remembering wrong. I'm guessing it was either: 1) a level limit that left a character useless, 2) refusal to import because a character was below PoD's "minimum" level (where it'd create a new character), or 3) a bug.

I wasn't using GBC, just a vanilla GOG install of all games. [edit: removed something about GOG not having cloud saves when I played before. Don't have a PoR cloud save, but I have SoSB and PoD saves. I'm going to see if I can investigate and figure it out.]

Ah, well. I'll at least keep the non-human level limits in mind when crafting a party, but I know that was a general AD&D 2nd Ed problem, not just these. Thanks, folks!

Okay, I only have access to SoSB and PoD saves thru the cloud. I thought that this was the import that went wrong, though. All 6 PCs are there, but what looks weird is that while most characters are a bit higher level in the PoD save, one is actually one level *lower* than in the SoSB save, and nothing in the rule books explain this.

It's a female human paladin (though if I have a paladin at all, she couldn't have been from PoR, so I must've swapped someone sooner, too) and appears stuck at level 13. She was level 14 in the SoSB save. Everyone else in the party is 1-3 levels higher (I never did finish that PoD playthrough).

I dunno, seems like a mystery lost to time. Looks like I ended up with a party of 5 humans and a halfling fighter/thief (who's losing half his XP to the halfling fighter level cap as it is). I wish I had more details, but thanks for the advice based on what little I have here! (Maybe I'll also just loosen up and plan to replace maybe 1 character when I import so I can use something level capped early and a paladin or ranger later. Obviously this is all just for flavor anyway.)

The story goes that Gary Gygax (the creator of D&D) didn’t really like the fantasy races, and wanted to give humans a definitive edge. Thus, low level limits for demihumans. This counters the ability to multiclass.

Demihumans are great on the first game. Use a single class Dwarf fighter and a Human cleric, and multiclass everyone else.

2nd game is where racial limits come into play. They are still useful, as multiclassing gives them utility.

By the 3rd game (Blades) the demihumans are severely handicapped. Best to use all humans & dual class.

Last game, demihumans are near useless, unless you want a challenge.

GBC has a feature that allows you to ignore racial limits when you level up in the GBC menu. This adds more flexibility for your party. There are still two must-have humans: a Paladin that duals to Cleric (Paladin weapons and full Cleric spells) and a Ranger that duals to Mage (can cast Mage spells in heavy armor!)

In Pool of Radiance, there is one case I know of where the level cap matters. A half-elf cleric can only level up to 5, whereas a human cleric can reach level 6. While this extra level doesn't allow access to a new level of spells, it *does* allow the character to destroy weak undead with their turn undead ability, which could save some time on some fights.

(Also, worth noting that human non-fighters are among the character choices that aren't harmed by the sexist female strength rule, though I would consider it justified to hack to get around that rule.)

Um...dtgreene. I'd just like to say a couple of things about the female strength maximums in the Gold Box games:

Before we get too hard on the Gold Box developers, I'd like to point out that that rule already existed in 1st edition D&D, which the Gold Box games were based on. (I would also like to add that I never liked that rule. I disliked it back in 7th grade, when I got the 1st edition Player's Handbook as a 13 year old boy. I was quite happy when 2nd edition D&D eliminated the rule.)

As for playing the Gold Box games themselves, I admit that such low strength levels can be limiting for warrior classes. However, there ARE workarounds. The best one is the Enlarge spell, a first level magic-user spell that, once the magic-user reaches 4th or 5th level or so, bestows great strength on the recipient (though it can even be useful before then). Furthermore, Enlarge has an extremely long duration, 10 minutes/level. (You can cast pretty much after leaving camp.) It is true this is difficult to implement for the first two magic-user levels or so in Pool of Radiance, when magic-users pretty much need all their 1st level spell slots for Sleep, but it becomes very effective somewhat into the game. Another workaround I know of is Gauntlets of Ogre Strength. These provide 18/00 strength to the wearer, can be used by any class, and appear in many Gold Box games.

Further, as you yourself noted, you probably hack your characters' scores fairly easily using Gold Box Companion. (I haven't tried it yet.)

Although it is fact that males can reach strength unobtainable naturally by females (generally speaking, and this isn’t a gender debate invitation), the thing that didn’t translate into the video game is that it doesn’t matter. D&D didn’t necessitate min/maxing. Most males don’t reach max strength limits in RL, and most fighters in D&D didn’t roll 18 strength. And it was perfectly fine. Your 14 ST fighter and his 17 ST wife are both going to hit the unarmored Wizard - far more important was the saving throws to spells while trying to close the gap!

If you look in the manual, the reason it gives for allowing editing is so you can recreate your favorite pen-and-paper characters. It didn’t even dawn on them that players would just max out stats! Nor that your Axe loving fighter would switch to a sword with a better + simply because you can hit easier. It was a different time.

Yes, it’s a sexist rule, and one that was significantly more profound in the video games.

Just one thing I want to know: Can you use GBC to eliminate the female strength limits?

You can use the Editor to change the stats to whatever you want. The changes will remain whether or not you use GBC thereafter.

I'm thinking that one could go further and try to hack the .exe to remove the limits. By hacking the gender, it appears that the order in which stat caps are stored is the male strength limit, the female strength limit, and then the male exceptional strength limit.

Case in point: Setting a character's gender to "2" in the save file, then modifying the character (which works as long as the character's XP is exactly the same as a new character's), will allow you to raise the character's strength to 100. (Note that this is not as good as it sounds, as high strength scores aren't programmed to give any bonus; don't know the exact useful limit but I an pretty sure it's not more than 25.)

By the way, gender "2" is displayed as "COPPER" in-game.

Interestingly enough, Solasta: Crown of the Magister also allows you to edit your stats, though it's not the default setting (you have to go into point-buy mode (IIRC) and click on a check-box to remove the limits).

Also, back in 1e, I don't think they even had weapon proficiencies back then, or they may have been an optional rule. In particular, there's no notion of a fighter choosing to prefer swords or axes. To be honest, I think the game is better without weapon proficiencies.

Role-playing preference, like in pen-and-paper. When I first played the computer games, I had a Fighter who used a 2-handed Axe (based on a character I played, who was an unhinged maniac, but considered a good guy; he would have chopped up innocents if they talked to him wrongly, but because they viewed him as a hero, they always gave him utmost respect; so he chopped up villains because of minor slights, further perpetuating the hero myth). As tempted as I was to use the +3 shield and +-whatever Longsword, I decided, no, this Fighter is devoted to the tree chopper.

But by the time I was playing Eye Of The Beholder 3, I was full-on min/maxing in computer games, while still being fine with less-than-stellar stats in pen-and-paper sessions. Weapon of choice would be whatever gave the best THAC0 and/or damage. I rarely used two-handed weapons on fighters because the AC from a shield was more valuable.

The point I was making is that in pen-and-paper, it's common to have male fighters well below 18 strength. So it didn't matter that females couldn't obtain the highest strength, because very few males did, too. In the video games, however, where the focus is much more on the mechanics, the limitations are... well, limiting.

For the case of a character who prefers a specific type of weapon, in a tabletop RPG the GM (or DM in D&D's case) can simply choose to give the player suitable weapons, alleviating many of the issues with the weapon proficiency mechanic.

In a CRPG, however, the weapons found do not generally cater to the player. (Well, Dungeon Hack at least only gives you weapons your character can equip, but that game has random procedurally generated dungeons, which is not the case with most D&D games.) Therefore, the choice of which weapon to focus on is rather blind. For example, the game designers could have included an enemy that can only be harmed by certain magical weapons, and none of those weapons are axes.

Also, one issue with D&D, particularly in the CRPG setting, is that stats are more or less fixed at character creation. This means that, if the player makes a mistake there, it will affect the player for the entire game. This is in contrast to many other CRPGs where such a mistake may be fixable. (One of the reasons I like the way SaGa games handle character growth is that it's generally possible to fix mistakes later. For example, if your agility is too low to hit an enemy, just give the character an agility-based weapon and fight for a while, and the stat will increase quickly.)

To put it another way, having below max strength in a CRPG wouldn't be so much of a problem if the stat could increase over the course of the game, as it can in the majority of non-D&D CRPGs.