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In case no-one's ever done one, here's a quick How-To, or FAQ, on what difference Stats make when creating a standard Human Fighter for Icewind Dale (expansion not used in test).

Strength is the most complex, and the most important, so I shall start here.

Any Strength Stat will effect your Carry Weight and Open Doors Stat.

Strength of 9 = Carry Weight of 50 and Open Doors of 12
Strength of 13 = Carry Weight of 90 and Open Doors of 30
Strength of 16 = Carry Weight of 150 and Open Doors of 45
Strength of 18/01 = Carry Weight of 220 and Open Doors of 60
Strength of 18/97 = Carry Weight of 320 and Open Doors of 75

So that's fairly straight forward, makes sense. Where it get a bit more complicated is with the bonus Stats. These are the stats which increase Damage and THAC0. There are zero bonuses for any Strength of 15 or less.

Strength of 16 = Damage +1 and zero THAC0 bonus
Strength of 17 = Damage +1 and THAC0 +1
Strength of 18/01 = Damage +3 and THAC0 +1
Strength of 18/66 = Damage +3 and THAC0 +2
Strength of 18/71 = Damage +4 and THAC0 +2
Strength of 18/97 = Damage +5 and THAC0 +2

I'm not sure of the precise moment when the percentage points change the stat, but this gives a clear indication of why some people go re-roll crazy for their Fighter stats.


Dexterity is the next most important stat as this Stat will effect your Armour Class bonus and your Missile and Reaction Adjustments. If you have dexterity of 14 or less you will not receive any bonuses from the Dexterity Stat:

Dexterity of 15 = -1 to Armour Class (or a +1 bonus if you think of it like that)
Dexterity of 16 = -2 to Armour Class and +1 to Missile and Reaction Adjustments
Dexterity of 17 = -3 to Armour Class and +2 to Missile and Reaction Adjustments
Dexterity of 18 = -4 to Armour Class and +2 to Missile and Reaction Adjustments

So you can see why people like to roll enough Stat points to be able to max out both Strength AND Dexterity.


However, Constitution is something that cannot be entirely ignored by Fighters. There's little point being a perfect fighter if one single Critical Hit from a Goblin knocks you dead! So the Constitution bonuses start from:

Constitution of 15 = +1 Hit Point per Level (on top of your natural roll)
Constitution of 16 = +2 Hit Point per Level
Constitution of 17 = +3 Hit Point per Level
Constitution of 18 = +4 Hit Point per Level

So a constitution of 18 would guarantee you a minimum of 5 hit points per level, even if you had the worst Snakes Eyes luck in all of Vegas. Or, look at it this way, that's 40 bonus Hit Points over 10 levels!


Charisma is also important, especially if your Fighter is the lead character (and likely will be if s/he's a Tank) as Charisma will improve your shopping prices and bring all those cool weapons, armour, spells and potions quickly into your backpack. The Charisma Stat is really quite brutal and, like the Carry Weight and Open Door Stats, is effected by nearly each number you choose:

Charisma of 7 = -4 Reaction Stat
Charisma of 9 = -1 Reaction
Charisma of 10 = 0 Reaction
Charisma of 13 = +1 Reaction
Charisma of 16 = +4 Reaction
Charisma of 18 = +5 Reaction

So, really, think twice before dumping Charisma to minimum for your lead tank, it could slow you down more than you think!


Finally, there is Intelligence and Wisdom. This is an interesting and awkward one! for any bonuses to be gained from these Stats the two have to be COMBINED. There are zero bonuses for 18 Intelligence and 7 Wisdom and there are zero bonuses for 18 Wisdom and 7 Intelligence (well, you get a Lore Stat of 1, which is equal to zero as far as Lore is concerned). HOWEVER, if you COMBINE these two stats correctly you can get your Fighter to have anything up to an opening Lore Stat of 21, more than enough to save you thousands of gold pieces if you don't have a Mage, Bard or Theif tagging along.

It IS complicated, but this is what's needed (it makes no difference which of the two stats has which number but both stats work together to give the result):

One 15 one 9 = Lore of 0
One 10 one 15 = Lore of 6
One 14 one 15 = Lore of 6
One 16 one 10 = Lore of 6
One 17 one 12 = Lore of 8
One 15 one 15 = Lore of 11
One 18 one 10 = Lore of 11
One 16 one 16 = Lore of 11
One 15 one 16 = Lore of 11
One 17 one 16 = Lore of 13
One 17 one 17 = Lore of 15
One 18 one 15 = Lore of 16
One 18 one 16 = Lore of 16
One 18 one 17 = Lore of 18
One 18 one 18 = Lore of 21

Phew! Bet a lot of people didn't know THAT one!


Anyway, hope that's helped some people get to the information they want quickly and easily


Edit: I found that no stats altered opening Saving Throws.

LastDanceSaloon wrote: Edit: I found that no stats altered opening Saving Throws.

There's a rumour that halflings and dwarfs get saving throws bonuses per some number of constitution points.

LastDanceSaloon wrote: Bet a lot of people didn't know THAT one!

I personally find game manual's tables more understandable

Yes, I'd love to hear about class specific saving throw bonuses. As far as I can tell the only way to get differences in saving throws is by race and class choice rather than stat selection.

Re: Manuals

1) The majority of people with a disc wont have one.
2) It's against copywrite law to copy and paste manuals so probably against site policy to even provide a link to a page that does. Hopefully my explanation is vague enough to be legal but informative enough to be useful!

Let's find out:

Check replacementdocs.com

Check on the disk for a .PDF of the manual.

Low chances of getting it, but you missed the 18/00 STR stat. +3 to hit & + 6 damage, 400 carry weight, 45 % bashing chance for doors.

Which brings me to this: you sure about those open locks percentages? They don't match the tables.

Ah, 18/00 = 100 and not 0

Now that's interesting information!

In my current game my Dwarf has Strength 18/90something and when I put a ring +1 Strength on him he went to 18/00. I immediately thought this would be less than 18/01 from a purely logical perspective and took the ring off him without even checking the stats.

Thanks for adding that, Gawain!

As for the percentages, that's what my game screen says!

& thanks to sigma for posting a link to the manual, I feel sure that will help some people out!

I've never seen a PDF manual on the disc, but I guess there must be some out there!

The bash/open locks percentages are wrong. I checked on my character's screen, and it follows the tables as per the manual. Bottomline: 18/00 tops out at 45%, 5% less for each STR interval, IIRC.

I've no idea what screen you're looking at?

These stats are for Icewind Dale.

This link shows you a Human Fighter I made up about 2 mins ago:

[ATTACH]4464.vB[/ATTACH]

Says quite clearly Open Doors 60. and that's just at 18/31.

I have HoW installed, and it shows the values as per the table. It shows 30%.

Well I did say in the first line of my first post that the Expansion was not used in the test.

So there you go, we've all learned something new, the Hearts of Winter expansion also adds meanie restrictions to your Fighter's safe-cracking skillz!

Thing is, the IWD manual states the same values as HoW (and the BG's, for that matter) in the tables. It would seem strange that they had rewritten that aspect of the Infinity Engine just for IWD. I'm more inclined to think of this as a bug than a feature.

Can anyone else check this out? Bashing isn't the most important skill, but I'm intrigued now.

I'm not really sure why my individual disc would take it upon itself to completely re-write the Open Door percentages for Human Fighters, that seems a bit of a stretch even for a bug. But weirder things can happen in PC gaming I suppose.

Take my current game for example...

Here's a little bug which might be of great importance to someone:

One of the game's best random drop locations is in the Hall of Heroes mausoleum in Dorn's Deep. Where you have to kill the litch multiple times through two rooms before finally putting his phylactery into the correct crypt chamber.

Through these two rooms one will be presented with approximately 35 treasure chests, some of which contain multiple items and many of which contain heavy items. This is before one even collects any dropped weapons from any summoned Skeletons or Guardians etc.

Even with 4 characters with massive Carry Weight potential and plenty of free back-pack slots I still couldn't take it all back to Kuldahar in one journey. Practically all parties of varied characters will have this problem here, there's just too much of a good thing in this section.

So, for once, I decided to take all the crap items back first, then come back for the real goodies, hoping to march onwards without a second trip back to Kuldahar (using a cheatedly summoned/created/deleted/summoned again Illusionist to, one-by-one, identify all the magical items).

But...

OMG...

When I returned to the crypts I noticed one of the magical helmets had, magically, turned into a random boring potion.

This was the only one I specifically noticed as helmets are rare and very noticeable in Icewind Dale but I did get the sense that it was not the only item effected.

I hadn't removed/touched any items prior to going back to Kuldahar, I had just looked in the boxes to see what was there in order to 'leave the good stuff till I came back'.

So that's a crock you might want to avoid!


Another point of interest I've noticed about this section is that it's the last time one's thief is likely to be of any real use and the point where one's mage really starts to kick-ass. Onwards from here and there are no boxes of interest that need opening and barely any traps of note, but plenty of occasions where it's hugely beneficial to have one's tanks boosted by lots of Improved Invisibility slots etc.

So another great piece of advice would be to have one of your characters start as a Mage/Thief. The thief aspect for the first two thirds of the game and then the mage aspect for the last third. Having one of each, or a pure one of either really is a waste of team space and will create huge sections of inactivity for either.