DProject: I was thinking of dividing some the most useful skills among the fighters: One can do the searching, another one can disarm traps, and third one open locks. My IWD2 rogue was mostly good for these things, but wasn't very helpful in battles. Besides, those three skills were the most essential anyway so maybe I can have the elements in my party, yet still maintaining full attack force, by having a rogue who's a poor combatant out of the picture entirely.
Coelocanth: You can't do this in IWD 1. The rule set doesn't have skills like in the 3e rules of IWD2. If you want to take care of traps and locks, you on;y have two options:
1) use a character that has Thief levels and build up their traps and locks skills.
2) use spells (Clerics get Find Traps and mages get Knock - there's also the possibility of finding a FInd Traps wand), but I don't like wasting spell slots for those spells when a Thief (or FTR/Thief, which is even better) can do it.
A FTR/Thief (Dwarves can take this as a multiclass option, so that could fit in with your party concept) can be a pretty decent secondary melee fighter.
Oh...ooohh...that was news to me. Then I guess I'm going to go the FTR/Thief route with one of the dwarves, at least then I'll also get to see if multiclassing messes up my head too much. I don't think I'm going to like to rely on spells when it comes to thieving skills, I think natural skill is much better; I think I'd be casting search spells all the time otherwise. Thanks for the heads-up! How much do you think I should put into Fighter and how much into Rogue? Advance them hand in hand so that both rogue and FTR are the same level all the time? Or should I first get FTR to a certain level, then continue completely with the Rogue class? Bear in mind, I'd rather have him a decent thief and a good warrior who can hold his own, than the other way around. (I'm mostly concerned about locks if I had to pick just one area of expertise...Traps/Search/Pickpocket aren't too important...or did you mean a Rogue automatically knows something about each of those if he has leveled in that class?)
