Posted September 19, 2015
Character duplication is ridiculously easy in the Gold Box games (I did it by accident while playing around a bit with Pools of Darkness), so I thought I would mention some of the possible uses of this trick.
1. Lazy character creation: If you want two characters with the same gender, class, and race, you can just create one and duplicate him or her.
2. Divergent character paths: Create and level up a character, than duplicate that character. You can now dual-class the character and the clone into different classes, or dual class one and keep the other as a single-class character.
3. Optimal level ups: Create 6 copies of a character, load them into a town save, and level them up. Keep whichever one got the best HP roll, or keep trying until you get the best possible HP roll. (Depending on how level draining is handled, this could be combined with level draining (or, in the Krynn games, perhaps level loss from Knight promotion) to get more HP than the maximum normally possible.)
4. Back-ups in case of tragedy: Your favorite character just got killed/petrified/disintegrated/level drained? Just load a backup who is still alive in that character's place. (Interestingly, the manuals for the old Bard's Tale games actually suggest doing this.)
5. Item duplication: Especially good for ammunition and consumables. You can now use wands as your main form of offense (instead of saving them for more difficult battles) and don't need to worry about running out of magical ammo.
1. Lazy character creation: If you want two characters with the same gender, class, and race, you can just create one and duplicate him or her.
2. Divergent character paths: Create and level up a character, than duplicate that character. You can now dual-class the character and the clone into different classes, or dual class one and keep the other as a single-class character.
3. Optimal level ups: Create 6 copies of a character, load them into a town save, and level them up. Keep whichever one got the best HP roll, or keep trying until you get the best possible HP roll. (Depending on how level draining is handled, this could be combined with level draining (or, in the Krynn games, perhaps level loss from Knight promotion) to get more HP than the maximum normally possible.)
4. Back-ups in case of tragedy: Your favorite character just got killed/petrified/disintegrated/level drained? Just load a backup who is still alive in that character's place. (Interestingly, the manuals for the old Bard's Tale games actually suggest doing this.)
5. Item duplication: Especially good for ammunition and consumables. You can now use wands as your main form of offense (instead of saving them for more difficult battles) and don't need to worry about running out of magical ammo.