I sometimes get weapons and armor from battle. But I don't know how to tell which are stronger or weaker.

Armor is easy. Check the AC stat as you equip/de-equip it. You want to do this even if you know how good an item is. If armor doesn't make your AC improve at all, it's almost certainly cursed.

Weapons are much harder. Some will affect your stats like "acc" for accuracy. However nothing will tell you the base damage, and other factors like if it has special powers etc.

You could try attacking with it a lot of times and record the numbers and average them. Or you can do what I do and look them up in the cluebook.

Thanks :3

There is a table of stats for all items in the clue book. I think it's included in the download from GOG. If not it should be available on recplacementdocs.

It's included in the extras pack. I recommend using it, since you can search for a specific item to minimize spoilers.

The canonical way to tell whether a weapon is better is by comparing selling prices at shops (expensive ones are generally better) but this is really annoying, so I decided to "cheat" a little by just looking up the stats in the cluebook.

Me too. Generally this is the only kind of "cheating" I do in CRPGs. No save scumming, walkthroughs or online maps for me, but having no in-game way of telling what items really do is just too annoying.

I think the cluebook may have been included with the original game anyway. In which case, it seems almost expected that players would want to look up the items.

But, many of the other things in the cluebook are definitely spoilers, so it's nice to have the searchable PDF to skip over those.

With returning to D&D after some decades, I've become something of a PDF-wizard, out of necessity.

If it would be useful, I'd be happy to cut the item pages out of the cluebook to create a less-spoily PDF. Or alternatively I could just cut out the megaspoily puzzle answers.

Nah, that's okay :3