Character Building Question

Ravager · Post by **Ravager** » Sat Sep 24, 2005 5:31 am

I was looking into the Temple of Elemental Evil character generation process and it says use 4d6 and discard the lowest roll. Add the 3 highest dies.

Scores with ability bonuses that total 0 or less and/or a group with no greater number than 12 reroll. That seemed fine until the game rolled the following stats:
9 (-1), 9 (-1), 13 (+1), 9 (-1), 7 (-2), 12 (+1)

That didn't seem to follow the TOEE rules though. The abilities add up to -3, so maybe I misinterpreted them? I would have thought that would be a condition for a automatic reroll.

This was with the unpatched game, btw. I updated the game a bit later on.

I was wondering if anyone could shed light on this.
TIA

Lord Plothos · Post by **Lord Plothos** » Sat Sep 24, 2005 3:23 pm

That description sounds like it was pretty much cut and pasted from the 3.5 Player's Handbook on how to roll your character. I believe ToEE does indeed generate four random numbers between 1 and 6, adding the highest of the three, but it probably ignores the reroll if you get bad scores, because you can just manually reroll anyway. Threre are places where ToEE and 3.5 part ways, and I guess this is one of them. In most but not all cases, the manual alerts you to the difference, but it looks like this was one of the departures that slipped through the cracks.

As has been said before (but bears repeating), Atari gave Troika like zero time to fine-tune the game (which is why the final level of the temple is all but empty, among other things). This automatic reroll may or may not have been slated to go into the game, but if not the description of this part of the process probably would have been axed from the manual, had Troika had more time. Anyway, there are no repurcussions for rerolling, so if you get scores like that, just reroll.

Ravager · Post by **Ravager** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 3:24 pm

That's the description on character generation given in the manual and in-game too I believe. Maybe it either follows the rules in a way I couldn't see or it was just a bug where it should have rerolled it.

Fortunately I wasn't trying the Ironman mode where you're forced to stick with the first roll. Though that doesn't seem to have any extra benefits either.

Thanks

Lord Plothos · Post by **Lord Plothos** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 3:29 pm

Yeah, I think there's some confusion generated by the fact that the game was intended to model 3.5, but diverged in various places. The manual and in-game help files seem to have been based on 3.5, with corrections where the game was known to diverge. Not all those places were faithfully recorded, with the result that the manual is sometimes a description of 3.5 and not of ToEE. All we can say is that with more time they may have fixed these problems.

As for ironman, it's not worth it. Just force yourself not to reset stuff to gain an advantage and you get the same experience. The game's too buggy to play ironman, where a single crash can hurt you bad.