After all the not-great to piss-poor experience with game, I went back the Baldur's Gate, and started a second Solo Poverty playthrough.
I made the first with a Sorcerer/ess, who is currently residing befor Abazigail. What means like 3 more battles, butI'm just doubting it, and got bored - you know the feeling.
This one is a Medic/Thief. Yes, I'm starting the movement of removing racism and biggotry from RPG again. Sue me. Point is, I'm kinda enjoying this character. With a ton of stat-requirement and min-maxing my chances, s/he has 3 charisma, so it is interresting to see what NPCs even if their life depends on it won't hire an ugly hero. The other fun thing is to use all the unused spells, like Barkskin, Shillelagh (which I still can't write down w/o looking up the spelling) etc.
The Solo Poverty Challenge by the way can only be taken a very selected few character.
Obvioulsy no character who is not a caster can do it. And the caster must be a pure caster to get access spells asap, and in large quantity. The only exception from this might seem to be the monk, although with its piss-poor conditions that'd likely fall back to South Park-style WoW-exping, exp-cap obviously removed (set to 8,000,000 of ToB). Its problem is Spellhold, where you MUST cause some ranged damage to get rid of goblins on pillars, and monk has no such ability, not even from HLAs.
And thieves' only real and above all lethal power is laying traps, what is not possible in every situation.
This leaves Sorcerer/ess, Medics, and Tree-huggers.
Hippis though get the short end of the stick with their spell-selection from the three. They have poor casting conditions (Call Lightning only works outside), sluggish casting speed, terrible stat-requirement (charisma as not-dump-stat?!? Good luck rolling.), questionable spell-advancement (they get their first summon/meatshield/attack power at 7,500 exp when Medics get at3,000!), and they can't multiclass. Their only advantage can be the Summon Elemental Prince HLA, but you have to reach there first.
Now Medics have the issue on theother hand, that they don't realy have a progress in High Levels. Not many abilities, no repeatable selection. They are also slow casters, and the class' biggest advantage, namely items that can buff them to outshadow pure fighters-without-whirlwind does not play in Poverty (aka. no use of any items). So it seems the ideal setup is running a Medic/Thief. I find 19 STR very useful for combat and bashing doors (and other locks), so I go with Half Orc, though for Shorty Saves you might choose Gnome, like this guy did:
And on GoG's board someone pointed out a technicality. Mages in theory can start each section of the BG-trilogy separately. This means they can pre-pick a lot of spells, thus might not have to rely on scrolls to have a partitura.
Well, none tried that, and without looking up what this selection can be, I simply mention it.
But might turn out like Sorceress, which is far away from being overpovered w/o Robe of Vecna and Amulet of Power (aka. the items which lessen casting speed), and have to have a very specific set of spells to succeeed:
Latest spell list:
lvl 1: 1) find familiar 2) magic missile 3) (identify) 4) prot from evil 5) prot from petrification
lvl 2: 1) knock 2) melf's acidic arrow 3) mirror image 4) resist fear 5) (blur)
lvl 3: 1) ghost armor 2) melf's minute meteors 3) skull trap 4) - 5) -
lvl 4: 1) improved invisibility 2) stone skin 3) spider spawn 4) - 5) -
lvl 5: 1) spell immunity 2) (prot from electricity) 3) sunfire 4) (cloudkill) 5) -
lvl 6: 1) death spell 2) prot. from magic weapons 3) true sight 4) improved haste 5) (true sight)
lvl 7: 1) mordekainen's sword 2) limited wish 3) (khelben's warding whip) 4) - 5) -
lvl 8: 1) pierce shield 2) abi dhalzim's 3) (simulacrum) 4) -
lvl 9: 1) chain contignency X) dragon's breath X) summon planetar 2) wish 3) time stop 4) improved alactricity
In brackets are spells I did use, or consider a good choice for later but actualy could (have) live(d) without it to that point, so can be changed. "-" means on that slvl I did not use any more spells from the selection, so can be inserted any from the tier. As this is/was a prototype character, Shadowkeeper was used to prevent me from the need of constant re-starting. Medics and Druids don't have this problem as they get access to all spells of their levels.
An additional note: I considered quest rewards as quest items, and tomes/manuals to be unanounced quests, and their use for quest purpose to consume them. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I thought that was ok, and as a price I included Identify to my spell-selection, so there.
My Medic/Thief does not use this ~exploit.
And before I forget, here is the Basilisk Area of BG1, so you don't have to waste time exploring. Blue means random monsters (gnolls and such), purple is the adventurer-group, grey are the basilisks (including Mutamin's group).
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