I'm currently playing through this game for the second time, using party members I didn't the first time around, trying to do as much as possible - which has gotten me thinking - what would be a good 4 party build, so that your TNO gets more XP? Obviously specialising as a mage.

I'm thinking if I were to do this, I would first ditch Morte. After doing some beginning stuff by myself, I would pickup Dakkon. Dakkon should be enough to get through some beginning stuff, although I'd probably have to leg it from combat here and there. Now this might be a weird choice, but I think my third companion would be Ignus. (I would obviously still meet all companions in order to get the XP from companion specific stuff). Ignus's Terror is a damn useful spell to have, however I would be prepared to swap Ignus for Vhailor. Vhailor comes in at such a late stage though, it would be a difficult task to get to him with only TNO and Dakkon.

Finally, I would get Nordom. He's a pain to get, but he's quite a powerful fighter. Hopefully TNO would be able to use high level spells much earlier on. In my current playtthough I've got level 8/9 spells but am only lvl14 with 1 lvl7 spell slot, just returned to Sigil from Curst.

So, thoughts? What characters would you take? What's the lowest practical number of companions you can use?

In the beginning while you don't get much XP and the XP requirements double with each level up there's barely any benefit in skipping Morte.

For a 4-man party, you have some options. Option 1 is to use the most plot-appropriate party with the most dialogue opportunities and closest connection to TNO. That'd probably be Dak'kon, Annah, and Morte, though swapping one out for Grace would be acceptable if one of the 1st three bugs you. They're all nice enough, but possibly less interesting if you already had them all on round 1, and Grace is mostly dead-weight in any battles you will come across (I love clerics in D&D in general, as well as in the other Infinity-Engine games in particular, but Grace doesn't even have a weapon and TNO can naturally regenerate.)

Option 2 is to use the less commonly used supporting cast of Nordom, Grace, Vhailor, and/or Ignus (I don't think Vhailor and Ignus would get along... at all.). This gives you the bonus of getting to use all of the sidecast, where in a usual 6-man party, these are the most likely to be 2 of the ones that don't make the cut, but the disadvantage that you don't get any of them until you're at least out of the Drowned Nations, so for the 1st third of the game, you're either solo or with party members you plan on ditching.

Option 3 is to go with the powergamer's party, opting for the 3 NPCs that will be the strongest partners for TNO to help trivialize battles. IMO, that'd be Dak'kon for sure, with Nordom and either Annah, Morte, or Vhailor depending on TNO's build and personal taste. Vhailor is easily the strongest meleer in the game aside from TNO, but you don't get him until the last third of the game. Morte is invaluable as a taunter to trivialize mage battles (even works against the ruler of the Modron Maze!) and as an early-game tank with way higher AC/resists than TNO would have. Annah's sneak attack is brokenly good later on if you like to abuse sneak attacks - I've gone through all of Baator and Under Sigil with just Annah and Thief!TNO, oneshotting everything we saw and then sprinting out of LoS to do it again. If that's not your thing, then dump her.

You probably wonder why I've downplayed Ignus so far. Well, I've always thought that having TNO be a mage was overrated. It may the most fitting storywise and stat-spread wise (having the super high int. score appropriate for mages adds more bonus dialogue options than having very high str/con/dex does), and I tried it for my 1st playthrough and at least one other, but most of the magic in planescape never impressed me from a mechanical standpoint. Having a level 30 mage be able to unload with meteor swarms is powerful (and a joy to watch), but so is doing over 90 damage per round as an unstoppable melee juggernaut with -10 ac and flawless accuracy, or being able to sneak attack at will (you only need to break Line of Sight to go into stealth/backstab mode not break the combat as a whole, so duck behind a pillar, pause, stealth, repeat) for 150 damage.

As such, I'd only recommend Ignus if you ignored him the first time around and want to experience his warped, fire-tastic response to things, and only recommend building TNO as a wizard if you didn't do it in round 1 and want to try something different. Having an intelligence of 15 is enough for almost all the important int-check dialogue lines, the wisdom-based dialogue options are almost always better anyway (never ever ever gimp TNO's wisdom), and you can use cranium rat charms for the few exceptions, like helping Dakkon with the Circle of Zerthimon. Building TNO as a mainline fighter (or thief) with 17-18 starting strength and using tattoos and/or the level 7/14 class upgrades to bypass the 18/xx gap straight to 19+ str means that you'll be infinitely more effective early game (near-guaranteed hits on thugs and the like for 10+ damage) and still around the same effectiveness lategame, as your single-target damage and survivability far surpasses that of a mage, whose only advantage is pulling crowds together and clearing them out at once with one or two meteor storms.

That dragged on longer than I thought, sorry for that. TL;DR: Dakkon is made of win and you can get him as soon as you bust out of the Mortuary. Morte's taunting and tanking makes early game easy and makes late-game plot more meaningful, but is less vital if you want to add some fresh blood (no pun intended) into the party. Whoever you didnt use in round 1 would make fine party members in round 2; I've gone as far as soloing the game with only TNO, and it's totally doable (actually the easiest playthrough I've ever done once I got to the Clerk's Ward), so don't worry about two-manning it early if you choose to hold out with just Dakkon until you reach the Clerk's Ward and more options.

Good post, interesting points about early game choice. My first run was, for memory, Morte / Annah / Ignus / Dakkon. 2nd playthrough (still in progress) has been Morte / Vhailor / Dakkon / Grace / Nordom. So I've used all the characters, just some not all the way through, yet.

Also good point about Ignus/Vhailor not playing nice, didn't think of that. Morte's taunting is definitely useful for the mage battles, although there would only be two significant battles (getting nordom and trias), so I would probably still skip him.

In my first run I did exploit Annah's thief skill in some sections, noteably the house full of bandits when going to the alley of lingering sighs (might've got that name wrong). I didn't realise she could become so powerful in late-game though.

Grace is a definite skip for me, since I've done it before without her, and still had clot/blood charms aplenty.

What's the max level actually? Since I'm quite close to entering the fortress of regrets in my current 6party run, yet am only lvl14. Can't remember what level I was when I got there on my first play.

For your solo TNO run, what class were you? Did you have to skip anything or make any significant compromises?

Think I got to level 22 or thereabouts in my first (and so far only full) playthrough. There is a massive boost in XP in the Fortress, but I don't recall at what level I entered there. Probably higher than 14 though. Completionist and al that :P

The max level in the game is 99, I believe. This is thoroughly impossible to reach without epic cheats, though. In any case, you would only get to around 50 before you reached 25 in all stats (the max the system allows) and further leveling yielded almost no result aside from +5 hp. That too is impossible to reach unless you play solo, and take advantage of every point of XP possible (or grind a lot). Don't worry if you're nowhere NEAR that level when you reach the Fortress. In a team of 6, you probably wont get past 20 before you enter, even if you did every quest and did all the juicy side dialogue. The game is balanced around that powerlevel, and if you DO reach level 30-40 before you enter the Fortress, it won't be an epic struggle so much as an epic slaughter.

For my solo TNO run, I played as a fighter who started out as a glass cannon with 18 wis (for max leveling speed and dialogue options), 18 str, and the rest in int. 18 starting str means that as soon as I scraped 300 copper together I could buy a +1 str tattoo and get a MASSIVE damage/tohit boost by bypassing all of the 18/xx points. From there, I pumped all my new points into dex and con (until each hit 18), and enough int to hit 15ish. 18 dex is almost the maximum bonus you can get (+4 AC), and 18 con gives you +4 hp/level, which rocks. 15 int, as I mentioned above, is enough to get the significant majority of "smart" dialogue options. Early early game (level <7, before I went to the Dead Nations) was a bit of a gamble because a bad string of hits from some thugs could lay me out cold, and I had to do a fair bit of hit and run at times to keep from having more than one or two attacking me at once. I got as much quest XP as I could, and played it safe; once I toughened up enough that I wasn't in danger of being three- or four-shotted by punks, it was much easier. Also, while I never traveled with any companions, I did occasionally talk to them to get some plot dialogue and character-building dialogue XP and then dump them again. Ex: free/talk to Ignus, learn from him, and leave him in the tavern, and take some people to see Mourns-for-Trees before leaving them to rot in the Hive and talking to Mourns again for the quest completion XP. TNO was playing similarly to the Practical Incarnation: use them as far as they are useful, then cast them aside as soon as possible.

I didn't skip anything meaningful due to challenge, though some parts that I usually do very early (like the mausoleum battle in the NE Hive) I waited a little bit on. Similarly, I avoided talking to the thief-type Hive denizens until after I came back from the Drowned Nations, because I didnt have enough starting dex to catch them pickpocketing me, and waiting until later let me get that dialogue xp once my stats rose enough. Once I got to Lower Ward, I really solidified as a character, since pumping my entire fortune into one character meant I could afford a full suite of maxed out tattoos and arbitrarily large numbers of healing charms very early. Having 5 proficiency in your weapon of choice with at least +8 AC from rings/tattoos alone means that you're a total juggernaut. Later on, the quest XP in Curst/Carceri is MASSIVE when it all gets concentrated into a single character (like, level up after every quest), and I know that by the time I was in the Fortress of Regrets, I had reached that point where all 6 of my stats was hard-capped and leveling lost meaning. Also, I had apparently died less than 10 times throughout the game, because the Fortress was pretty empty (it actually gets more and more crowded the more often you died in the game, due to plot of how your immortality works). The only significant challenge, as usual, was the (hard) Modron Maze when attempted in the mid-upper teens instead of 20s. When you get a spawn of 4 Hard bots, they will curbstomp you almost no matter what your stats are.

Didn't know that. No wonder I was running for my life non-stop in that place then, because I died a lot of times in the game trying to complete some tasks, and figured, hey, i'll just wake up on that slab again, so may as well take down those nasty foes one at a time.

Have a save going in PST as well, where I invested a lot into constitution early on. Prefer a 6-people party though, because PST is all about dialogue so I want to play it the way it's intended.

Have only completed the game once (and what a game!!), but given the style of the game, it should be more interesting a second time through when I don't remember all the tiny details.

It's a fantastic game though, with the best story in any game, past or present. Wish more people knew about this diamond.

It is in fact possible to reach level 99 using any party without cheating. The Modron Maze and Undersigil can be farmed for experience indefinitely, so if you're super-patient you can level up a huge number of times legitimately. There's no reason whatsoever to do that, though. But it IS possible.

As for the solo mage, once you get to level 11 it's possible to solo the game with Missile of Patience alone. You can't get that spell without cheating on a "pure" solo run, however, as you need Dak'kon, but there are other alternatives available that are very strong. The mage armor items can make you unbelievably durable, and with 6-8 fighter levels (or just LOTS of mage levels) your THAC0 is tolerable as well, so you can knife people no problem if it comes to that.

Ah, yes. My "hitting 99 legit is impossible" comment was more a reference to the fact that after getting pretty much every bit of xp possible through a "normal" run before you embark to your final destination, you'd be farming mindlessly for untold hours. You can do it, it just ceases to have any purpose. Unlike some of the hardcore final fantasy games where the secret final bosses are so outrageous that you need to have max everything to survive the first hit (Nemesis et al. from the Calm Lands arena in FFX, I'm looking at you...) there is no practical function whatsoever to grinding that high in post-game Torment.

Missles of Patience is phenomenal, but soloing RPGs as a wizard under a Vancian magic system always seemed tedious to me (yet backstab hijinks and such don't. Odd...).