The only real downside to being an ogre is that you can't use handguns, only two-handed rifles (the explanation given is that their hands are too big) and that the best armors are either hard to find or need to be crafted yourself. And the only large smoking jacket in the entire game has to be pick-pocketed off of Bates's butler's back (or looted from his corpse). Oh, and people trust you about as much as they trust a half-orc, but they're generally far too intimidated to say anything about it directly to your face.

I knew about the handgun issue but it seems rather silly to pick a race known for its ridiculous strength for the purposes of firing a gun anyway. As for the trust issue, so far I've found it's pretty easily dealt with by simply being nice to them when they try to tell you off.

That point about armor might be a concern though. I did find some enchanted large armor in the chest at the crash site but eventually that will either get damaged or become obsolete and I obviously don't know the game well enough to reliably work around that kind of thing. On top of that, his magic affinity will probably never be good enough to make significant use of unlocking cantrip and I'm not really going to want to make him tech by going for lockpicking/repair. It may not be worth the extra work involved in dealing with all that just to have an easier start.

Decisions decisions. Well, if I don't decide to use the ogre in my first playthrough; there's always the possibility of a second one.

I have to say the only time I was getting points in inteligence was my last playthrough as ogre gentleman/scientist, otherwise never bothered to put more than 12, the number of active spells/summons can be easily achieved with high willpower and I don't remember a conversation that went wrong with average inteligence, usualy most talk was handled with beauty/charisma. But I really love the most insane characters - ogre gentleman scientist, orc ladyman/persuation master and dwarven mage :D

Similar situation to the OP, I've been dumping points into intelligence (playing some kind of character who was raised by wolves, or beavers, I can't remember). Your point re dialog options; I was under the impression that charisma was used for this, no?

Charisma and persuasion skill are more important, but it sounds like there are indeed a few intelligence checks for dialog options too. These are discussed in some of the other posts in this thread.

Armor can be repaired at blacksmiths and IIRC tech armorers for a fee. Of course, they won't even let you into their shop if your MA is too high (over 60 or so). The Repair master will fix things for free once you find him, regardless of your MA, especially if you get on his good side.

If you're going magic anyway, you can power shop the gypsies for a large Arcane leather armor, and take care of it as best you can. (Don't wear it while facing rock golems or fire monsters, for instance, unless you can attack them from a distance.)

Alternately, you can go for Repair expertise yourself. Expertise DOES require an IN of 12 (unless you start with an advantage in the skill, such as being a Dwarf or taking the Blacksmith's Apprentice background). But an expert can fix items with <100 HP an infinite number of times without further damaging them in the process; this includes leather armor and that smoking jacket I mentioned. (Items at or over 100 HP will lose 1% per repair, which usually works out to 1-4 HP, until they drop below 100 HP anyway.)

However, remember that Repair is a tech discipline, and will lower your MA or raise your TA; you may want to spend extra points on useful spells to counteract that.

The Unlocking Cantrip is useful, but far from the only way to open a chest; axes (and metal throwing chakrams) work just as well. Lockpicking's big advantage is that it's silent; the downside (for a magic user) is that it's tech.


Yes. Yes there is. And a third one, and a fourth... ;)

You're going to miss some things no matter what stats you choose. The game has different options for different kinds of characters, so trying to see everything in one game is fairly pointless.

Want to see something funny? Play a halfling, cast the Shrink spell on yourself, and try talking to people.

Well, tech is pretty much completely out of the question for either of the character choices I'm going with for my first playthroughs. The ogre can't do it because I'm not going to keep investing into INT for him and my elf is going to be a mage so it's best to avoid anything that would lower his MA.

I know that there are other ways to open chests than unlocking cantrip, it's just that it seems to be the best way for someone not trying to go tech. I'd imagine smashing open containers is at least as loud as the cantrip and would run the risk of damaging contents. I also don't know what effect that would have for breaking open shop containers. I tried it once and it just put all of the contents on the ground but I don't know if the game has refreshing shop inventories or where they'd go if the shop container was destroyed rather than just unlocked.

I also knew about the shop repair but I wasn't sure how much I liked the idea of paying someone to suck at repairing my gear and lower its max hp, especially as an ogre with limited access to good gear. That's interesting information about the repair master though. Is there any particular skill requirement to get him to do that (like repair for instance) or is it just a quest you can do to make a friend for free repairs?

I had been playing my ogre but I'm starting to lean back toward my mage now. He was about to level when I switched over to the ogre and since it would be lvl 5 he'd have the 2 points to get unlocking cantrip. Just out of curiosity, if I did that how much more power should I expect harm to gain from the 10 MA from getting 2 more spells? It's either that or grab another point in CH to pick up Sogg to make up for my mage's weakness atm but unlocking cantrip would certainly provide me greater utility.

As for the statement about using the other character in another playthrough, it's possible but I don't usually like to rely on that idea. I'm the sort of player that doesn't generally play a game through more than once which is why it was so important to me to figure out ahead of time if I'd miss anything from having low INT on my ogre. If I miss something in this playthrough, it's entirely possible i'll never see it since I may never play the game again...

That's fine, I expect to miss SOMETHING in any RPG but I'd like to minimize the amount of content that I miss for the reason I've already given.

1) The downside of the Unlocking Cantrip is that its success (not its CHANCE of success) is entirely dependent on your MA: it works if and only if yours is equal to or higher than the item's resistance to being unlocked. The only tried and true method is to bash it with a weapon; however, most weapons will sustain damage, having not been designed for such a task. (This includes your fists, btw.)

On the plus side, breaking open containers does no harm to the contents; but items scattered upon the ground will tend to disappear in a day or three. (Protip: this doesn't happen with the chests located in inns, or in the rat-infested warehouse in Tarant, making them ideal places to store excess loot.)

I'm not sure how this would work with shopkeepers, since if you bother to smash their stash, they usually attack you and end up dead, and in most cases you become a wanted fugitive in that town.

2) The repair master's quest is the culmination of a unique item you found at the crash site. If you never picked it up (or if you abandoned it or sold it off) go back to the last place you left it and get/buy it back.

3) Most spells scale with higher MA; it's usually a minimum plus a percentage (with 50% at tech-neutral and 100% with an MA of 100). Again, how that translates for the Unlocking Cantrip is item-dependent and can't be generalized.

Sogg's best use is as a sword arm and pack mule; he has no real backstory, and his dialog options are limited to knowing where the nearest tavern is. If you get him, don't be afraid to dump him if you need the spot for someone better or more interesting.

4) This game is designed from the get-go for multiple playthroughs. Each skill mastery is its own quest. Techies can do some things better or easier than mages, and vice versa. The low-IN dumbspeak option is worth playing through once in its own right. There's a "secret" side quest that maxes you to near-godlike strength. The evil storyline eventually takes you in a completely different direction than the good one. Your followers (especially the ones with an actual speaking voice) have the potential to interact not only with each other, but with certain important personages you'll meet along the way. (Virgil and Magnus are an early example, but there are over a dozen other combinations.) Etc., etc., etc.

Ok, for some reason GOG isn't letting my other post go through so i'll try a cut down version with only the questions I asked in the text of the other post...

What happens to items sold to a vendor and/or their refreshed stock if you destroy a vendor container?

Do gypsies have a shop inventory hidden somewhere on the map or is theirs just unreachable?

If you dump a party member, what happens to them? Can you get them back? If so, where would they be?

There was a great deal more to this post when I first tried to reply but it just entered a processing loop when I tried to post it so if this gets through it will have to do.

1) I'm honestly not sure. I've never destroyed a chest without also killing off the vendor. I'll have to try that.

2) Again, not sure. You could try killing them and then searching the body... but then every other gypsy in Arcanum will refuse to sell to you and/or attack you on sight.

3) Most of them return to where you first found them. The exception is Sogg, who wanders off to the geographically closest tavern.

4) More than likely, you miscounted, overlapped or otherwise messed up the quote tags. I've learned to copy long and involved posts to my clipboard just in case, where I can open them in Notepad and figure out where I screwed up.

This is a good tip for beginners. The warehouse in Tarant is the perfect place to establish an unofficial hideout where you can store all your excess loot. It's not super important for magick characters, but tech characters are almost certainly going to want to keep lots of odds and ends around for item crafting. You can even leave NPCs there.

I always wished there was a more elaborate story about the warehouse.

I actually made that consideration for the quote tags in one of my attempts to get the post to go through and just replaced them with quotation marks once so there wouldn't be any tags. It still didn't work. I copied the whole thing over in its original form and saved it to my desktop but I guess it doesn't really matter that much.

It was probably because of my attempt to split up the quote and respond to parts of it directly which I vaguely remember having a problem with before on GOG's forums. That doesn't really explain why removing the quote tags entirely still made it impossible to post but whatever. I guess I got too used to being able to easily split up quotes on other forums.

Yeah, that was a great bit of information there. I haven't been to Tarant yet to make use of that part of it, but I've already started using inns as temporary storage. I did start to wonder about it when I got to Dernholm though since he specifically said the CHESTS in the inns which the Dernholm inn doesn't have but I'm not planning to leave anything there once I'm done with the place anyway since it's rather out of the way.

EDIT:

Holy crap, magic really is OP. I just went to some maze I was told about in Dernholm that was filled with higher level creatures that could easily 2 shot me in melee and cleaned it out with relative ease, going from lvl 6 or 7 to lvl 11 before I was done. Harm spam ftw.

On that note, I found something in the maze called nature's wrath helm and I was wondering what its drawback was. It has the background to it saying it's hexed but it isn't very descriptive about its effects. The only thing I can see on it that looks negative (and this is highly dependant upon your interpretation of the wording) is where it says "Critical: Entangle." Does that mean when you get critically hit you become entangled? That's about the only interpretation I can see that would make it negative because if it means you entangle things when you crit them then it's just another positive effect.

For now I'm just going to put it away (both for RP and cautionary reasons) but I'd like to know how bad its drawback is if anyone can tell me.

According to the official strategy guide, "Upon critical hits, you and your party become entangled." What it doesn't say whether it's the critical hits you make, or critical hits made against you. Either way, being entangled (as with the Nature spell Entangle) is a bad thing: it forces you to stay in one spot until the spell wears off, and reduces your action points (fewer attacks in turn-based, slower attacks in real-time).

if you want to rob a store without killing the shop owner, what you do is you take the weapons from your non-magical companions (works best with Sogg) and have them attack the shopkeeper with bare hands and take their fatigue down to zero. if necessary, use a healing potion on them if their health is almost 0.

then, kick them repeatedly until their health is nearly 0 and their faitgue is in the negative. then, you can rob the store while theyre down, and the guards will not come after you as if you had committed murder.

usually, if you come back a couple days later, the shop owner will be healed, but will run from you and say "dont hurt me!" etc.