**** SPOILER ALERT *****

[i]Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, but some are unavoidable.
[/i]


Decided to try soloing the game to see how it goes. I've played with a small party before, but never all alone.
Made some good and some questionable choices.
A few dozen rerolls to get all stats between 13 and 17, no natural 18 though. :(

Started with 3 levels of paladin, to get weapons skill, good beginning bab and immunity to fear and disease.
Lay on hands was also nice early on.

Weapon focus guisarme, with cleave and improved criticals at later levels.

Then continued with Cleric levels. Domains Good and Law for obvious weapon enhancement reasons.
Though.. swapping one for earth would have been great, stoneskin is something I'd have liked to have. Many other viable domains as well.

Beginning.

Doing some busywork at hommlet, then off to moathouse. Killing one frog set me up to 2nd level. Remaining frogs and spiders from deklo grove and it was 3rd level time.

Off to velkwood bog, tough fight for 3rd leveler even, clearing the ground level, also areas at ground level of moathouse.
Getting a first cleric level, made possible to cast healing scroll in hommlet, do the remaining busywork, promise to marry and get a holy sword, also a second cleric level.

With a paladin3/cleric2, clearing the rest of the velkwood was much easier. Even the endboss.

After that the levels were getting in steadily enough and the fights weren't nearly as tough as before, or as tough as I'd expect.

I did use henchmen in two occasions.
For the ending of moathouse, I grabbed Elmo to lend a hand.
He died a valiant death, striking a blow for the forces of good.

Later, Furnok joined in long enough to open the smiths chest, which he could do with help of lockslip grease, gloves of dexterity and masterwork thieves tools.

Later.


Reaching 10th level pretty fast. Mostly the mobs offer little resistance to a character some 5 levels higher than expected.
Buffed up and went through fire tempe easily. Then also did the water temple without resting in between, which says something.

Hauling loot is a bother, even if only taking gems and magic items, though scrolls an potions are difficult to resist.

Equipped with:
Gloves of dex +4 (from nulb, can't craft better :( )
Ring of protection +5
Ring of freedom (or ring of major fire resistance)
Cloack of resistance +5 (with that and paladin bonus almost every save saves, evasion would be real nice though)
Girdle of giant strength +6
Mithral plate +3 (spell resistance)
Boots of speed

Buckler +3
guisarme +3 with, holy, axiomatic, flaming, mighty cleaving and fire bursting properties
(Dont know if they all stack, but he usually kills an ettin in one round, or 3 strikes)

Currently

At 20th level, can't craft anything useful anymore. At greater temple, ready to face the big mob.
Pretty sure I can handle the mob, but surviving the bad dude is problematic.
If that works out, the elemental nodes and the end boss should fall easily enough.

End

Turns out the head priest didn't have time to summon anything, going from healthy to dead in one attack of 3 swashes.
The remaining horde didn't have a chance at all.

Decided to skip the nodes and beeline to the end.
Not continuing with the added content either. Seems pointless with no levels to earn, and I doubt I'd have a chance soloing where an epic group is expected.

The final end boss did in fact put up a decent fight. The summons were quickly dispatched by my stronger summons, but she herself was all but invulnerable to their attacks. Had to tackle hand to hand, but that proved difficult with her tripping me practically every turn.

Decent fight though, wasn't enough so the world of Greyhawk is now safe once more.

Sounds like it was a fun ride. I enjoyed the read - thanks for posting about it.

wow that sounds like it was a challenge!

My pleasure. Actually it wasn't really.
I was curious to see how it would work out in ToEE, turns out it was much like in Icewind Dale 1.
Still not sure if there's challenge rating implemented and the XP penalties, but seems there's not.

Basically, in most D&D games going with fewer adventures isn't really harder at all, exept on 1st level and then later when needing the particular skills the party doesn't have. That's because the XP gained is divided between the party members, meaning my solo character got 5x the amount the characters in "normal" party.

Some games have challenge ratings for enemies (IWD2), meaning if you're higher level, you get less XP, and some games (NWN and NWN2) have level scaling, meaning higher level characters (or larger parties?) get more difficult battles. Looks like ToEE has neither.

To me, Z is not the greatest challenge of the game (though she should be). Instead, it's the confrontation with I and C that can be the hardest combat. I is pretty hard, but C is insane, FAR more difficult than Z. After being able to solo the game, I've taken challenge in soloing against C. Fortunately, Co8 has improved all three over the years.

Let me tell you, a decade ago, killing vanilla C solo was fun, but not all that impressive. Killing C much later solo was very hard and very satisfying. Killing C solo a few years ago, and doing so WITHOUT the sword was an underwear changing experience!

I don't know what C is like today... even harder I imagine. But if anybody wants to look for challenge then do as I did. Solo the game with no reloads until you get to C, and see if you can do him. No cheating, no console, only average stats... try testing your skill and see how far you can go.

Pretty cool idea! Nice job on following it through to the end. I did a couple of test characters with a similar build, just to try it. It is surprisingly easier than I thought (still hard), probably because of the exp all going to one person.

I did bump into a curious problem. I took 2 levels of Paladin, then 2 levels of Cleric, (ok maybe going to 3 Paladin first for fear & disease immunity would have been better). When I tried to go and level up to Paladin again, I couldn't. I wasn't fallen, either. I'm not sure if I missed an obscure leveling rule or what.

I gave a Dwarf Cleric the Earth realm, but I never did see Stoneskin as an option. I didn't play too far in, though.

And I liked the idea of using a guisarme, because too often I get counter-tripped when tripping. Supposedly, you can drop the guisarme to avoid the counter-trip, but I certainly couldn't figure out how, and wonder if you even can in ToEE.

Fun stuff, anyways!

Paladin has some additional multi-classing restrictions: all your Paladin levels must be taken successively. If you ever take a level in another class, you are permanently barred from leveling up as a Paladin ever again.

IIRC:

All paladin and monk levels must be taken in one shot. Once you level in another class, these become locked.

The manual should tell you when earth priests get stoneskin.

Dropping a weapon on failed trips works in D&D, but not TOEE.

Dang, that sucks. I could picture it being very helpful in solo, since you could attempt a lot of trips. Switching to another weapon, (or picking up the old one), wouldn't be hard if you didn't need to move. It would just use up your move action... Er well I guess it would prevent a full round action, but still useful on occasion.

It's funny, I was about to say I couldn't find my manual, since I do have a physical one from the retail box, from 100 years ago. Then I realized... oh yeah... gog has PDFs online. How neat is that?

Even if a digital game you get somewhere doesn't come with a manual, it shouldn't be that hard to find one online. I suppose for some of the really old games it can be, so yeah, it's really good that GOG includes them.

And don't overlook Trip. It's a powerful ability for a warrior. Get Trip and Whirlwind and you're a slicing-and-dicing nightmare! Trip + Whirlwind + Great Cleave = game over. Get surrounded by a bunch of foes and you'll think the game is stuck on an infinite loop, forgetting that your turn was over long ago.

The powerful thing about Trip is that not only do you limit the attacks of opponents with multiple attacks per round, but you get an AOO when they try to stand up. Combat Reflexes may help there. That makes Trip far more useful than Disarm, which is garbage IMO.

Great thread, thanks for this info. I haven't played in awhile, many different games/rules since, so I'm wondering the best attributes to focus on getting the highest for this lvl3 Paladin/Cleric build at character creation?

I have a Paladin I created awhile ago. Unfortunately, my Co8 7.6 was giving me issues, so I went to re-dl it and found that 8.1 is out now. At the moment I'm waiting for this install to finish, and assuming it doesn't delete all my premade characters, I will post the stats of my already created Paladin .... when created originally I'm sure I knew what i was doing for a Paladin build, my concern is that these stats will also be good when I switch to Cleric.

Install is taking forever. Will post as soon as its done.