Icewind Dale the Second, Part the First

Time for me to brave the challenges of the only Infinity Engine game I've never played, Icewind Dale 2. It was going to be just one post (after the first installment, I fully expect the sequel to be a linear dungeon crawl with little or no roleplaying to speak of) but as IWD2's quirks prompted more general observations, I'm splitting it.

 

I'm also taking the opportunity to step outside my comfort zone by avoiding my usual chaotic neutral elf wizard/druid main character.

 

While I'm at it, I might as well build a beefier party than I normally would, and keep it Lawful and somewhat pious.

My Jungian Shadow's now a Halfling Monk instead of backstabbing rogue

plus Job, a Gnome Cleric of Ilmater

Pokey the Halfling Ranger

and finally, as insurance against my own incompetence, mighty munchkin Beef Supreme, a Dwarf Fighter halberdier with maxed STR/CON

 

So I'm doing this with 5/6 party size, cross-class thief skills and no arcane magic. No, I have no idea why they're all little people. First couple of characters worked out that way so I ran with it. I also hear you ask: why Ilmater? Because having never played a party like this, I fully expect to suffer. (I also imagine them intoning as they march: "endure; in enduring grow strong")

Well, let's see how far my little lollipop guild gets.

Nice touch starting out with quarterstaves and needing to scrounge around Targos for basic gear. Few cRPGs manage to properly showcase your humble beginnings in order to offset your later splendour. Even when you start getting +1 gear, it's a piece here and there, not full outfits for your whole party.

 

I start dying immediately after the tutorial until I figure out the correct strategy with my current group is to faceroll everything. Ignore careful positioning and mow down goblins / orcs / ogres as they come. Since even my squishies are as tough as my normal groups' malnourished meat shield, enemy archers pose little problem and once he gets rapid shot, Pokey can easily drop a spellcaster or two if needed.

Reminds me of arguing about Neverwinter Nights 2 with actual D&D players accustomed to kvetching about overpowered spellcasters. I pointed out that my NWN2 weapon master could do everything my druid could, but simply by standing there autoattacking instead of worrying about spell combos. Repetitive fights against constant streams of enemies combined with plentiful magic weapon drops and mountains of freebie consumables made fighters the easy-mode option over spellcasters in these mid-generation cRPGs. Taken to its logical extreme in Diablo-clone action"R"PG button-mashing, the pattern was not overturned until Dragon Age: Origins, and even then more as a result of the spirit warrior prestige class, an epic-level Tenser's Transformation letting mages give themselves fighter advantages.

Anyway, first few levels aren't much trouble, except for fights in large open spaces with fast or teleporting enemies, where my melee-heavy group just can't control the field. You know, the "have entangle or die" fights. Also, maaaan, entangle freakin' hurts when you use DEX as your dump stat; side-effect of playing squishy groups in the past has always been a half-decent reflex save across the board. On the flip-side, cutting through all the gratuitous damage sponge bugbears, trolls, ogres and giants (a.k.a. grunts, Grunts, GRUNTS and GRUNTS) goes a lot faster than for my usual slingshot artillery squads.

On the other hand, here's a recurring problem with D&D adaptations:

Taking 45 damage at level 5-6 is devastating. Taking 45 damage from one random mook's one autoattack while fighting a dozen such mooks a dozen times in a row is just stupid. It's not testing your preparedness, just your willingness to grind. When even mail-clad Job the cleric with his 20 CON (i.e. beyond maxed) gets 2-shotted in a single round, not by big badass bosses but by trash, by all means tame your damn randomizer! Or better yet, admit that randomizer was never meant to work under the overcrowded conditions of a Forgotten Realms themed Doom mod.

 

It's also why I've always ignored starry-eyed fanboy nostalgia for these... classic, but hardly ideal old dungeon-crawlers. Icewind Dale gets praised for its difficulty but that difficulty consists of either wasting hours upon hours of your life picking up dropped gear and trudging back to town every few fights to resurrect fallen comrades or mashing quicksave every step and quickloading whenever the crits go against you.

 

Do you think this was a difficult fight? Reload, re-cast buffs and I waded through it effortlessly. If the exact same player using the exact same characters in exactly the same way has even odds to triumph or be forced to reload, you start losing the function of players at all. Might as well throw randomly-generated NPCs at each other and take bets on which way the dice will swing. Without a GM to adjust to player tactics, any D20 adaptation which isn't simply too easy (e.g. NWN, KotOR) will demand such strict min-maxing as to deny player choice or turn into a reload game. The D20s were obviously never meant to roll autonomously.

Anyway, fights have been getting predictably easier instead of harder heading into the next act. Spellcasters are still underpowered and my plate-mailed max-HP munchkins can shrug off or soak physical attacks, Shadow's stunning fists of shortling fury keep one enemy per fight locked down and the infinite free resting trivializes any damage short of death itself. I'll wrap this up some other day, but for two last notes as I square off against Sherincal:

1) As so often when video games try to moralize at me, I find myself wanting to join the villains.

2) Don't tell me I'm fighting a random mash of monsters. An army of several kinds of monsters is interesting. It could open up strategic options for campaign progression and provides dramatic tension between its constituents. An army of every kind of monster on the other hand just sounds like you ran out of ideas and defaulted to leafing randomly through the monster manual in an ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny. One of the elements which elevated Planescape: Torment's plot and setting above the usual video game tripe (and allowed it to stand the test of time so much better than IWD) was its narrower, more coherent focus on a few major figures' past and present interactions, even couched as these were in the most expansive re-imagining of D&D gimmickry.

 

Continued here and here.

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edit 2023/03/13

No, I have no idea why I originally misspelled Jung as Yung. I have it right in other posts. Eh, the guy's probably used to it after all this time. Maybe "Yung" is a Freudian slip of some kind? I'm sure someone's written a dissertation on it.