I've recently purchased Icewind Dale II and I'm having a little trouble wrapping my head around the ins and outs of 3rd Edition D&D rules. My (limited) experience with pen & paper was with 2nd edition, and that goes for the Baldur's Gate series, the first Icewind Dale and the numerous other computer games either licensed by or emulating Advance Dungeons & Dragons character creating. I have absolutely none with 3rd edition apart from a bunch of jokes in "Order Of The Stick" that I didn't get.

I have been playing and experimenting with the game, however, and I have studied the manual, a number of gamefaqs, and a couple of straight-up D&D sites, but I struggle nevertheless. I get the changes in AC and some of the other basic rule differences between IWDII and BGII, like making charisma important for sorcerers. I'm mainly having trouble with wrapping my head around skills and feats. I understand the concept behind them and how using them you can build, say, a swashbuckler type out of a fighter and/or thief rather than just choosing the class from a list. However, I am having difficulty putting them into effect. I particularly don't understand what to do with the skills for a fighter, since none of them seem really geared towards them, or when feats for an upcoming multi classing should be purchased.

It should be noted I have found some helpful info, including a post on this very forum that helped unlock at least one door. I should go thank him/her, but in the meantime, any recommendations of posts, websites, etc. that might help one better understand how to make the process smoother. Thanks.

Don't worry too much about skills or feats, just read the descriptions and take what you want, you can afford it, the game won't get messed up because of it, you just get little bonuses for more comfort.

About feats:
If you have a bard definitely take the "lingering song" feat. The rest is optional.
"Rapid shot" grants an extra ranged attack per round for non-crossbow users.

Skills and feats offer little unimportant bonuses, far more important are the character attributes, priests need wisdom, mages need int, sorcerers/bards need cha and any character who wants to do physical damage needs strength as high as possible, you'll face many monsters with many hitpoints and even some with damage reduction.

Don't make the mistake of multiclassing your spellcasters, low level spells won't be very powerful when you're supposed to be able to cast high level spells.

I like that answer. Thank you very much.