When I make reference to the "Ring of Bandits", many of you will immediately know what I'm talking about; that stupid Random Encounter wherein your little Level 1 party is instantly surrounded by a ring of 10 or so bandits, all armed with bows, as they go to or from the Friendly Arm Inn. Well, I had just begun a new game, and things were going well, until THIS. A-GAIN.

Now, I know (or at least, I've read) that if you're careful about when you're traveling, you can avoid this encounter; it's supposed to only happen between Hours 20-23, if the half-way point in your travel time lands in those hours. Maybe I was too quick to leave when the Hour hit 20, because halfway between the Friendly Arm and the crossroads south of it, this encounter happened at Hour 0. And it *shouldn't* have.

What's worse is, if it were Xzar and/or Montaron who'd been killed, I would have been just fine with that.
But no. It had to be *Khalid*. Armored-up, helmet-wearing, 13-HP Khalid, and he goes from Full to Dead in a blink. I honestly thought one of those bandits had *critted* Khalid, until I remembered that he was wearing a helmet (which prevents crits in this game). Maaan.

Guess I'm restarting *again*. Sometime. Yay. Thank you so much, game.

What I want to know is, can anyone point me to a mod that *removes* this encounter entirely? At least, until the party is Level 2? Now, I'm all for the presence of danger at every turn, but a good DM just doesn't pull *this* kind of crap so early on a 1st Level party. And above all, I'm just tired of dealing with it, and with having to (attempt to) tap-dance around it.

I love this game to pieces, I really do.
But there are times when I want to *punch* it to pieces instead.

One thing you could do is the following:
1. Enable cheats
2. Enable cheat keys
3. Use Ctrl-Y on each of the bandits to kill them (you can do this while the game is paused)

This should allow you to get rid of the bandits (or just some of them, if you prefer) without having to actually fight them fairly.

(I figure that, since you're at the point of willing to use a mod, that a cheat would be OK in this instance.)

The area transition waylays have nothing to do with hours. It's just a flat % chance, and between Coast Way and FAI it's a 5% chance to get waylaid by bandits.

Never had that encounter so you are just plain unlucky:-)

Why restart? Why not just reload, travel somewhere else? There's a reason the game auto-saves before you leave an area. Are you playing some iron-man style game?

That encounter is *nasty* at low levels. Lots of stuff in this game that gives you a game-over screen, especially in the first few hours of play. But that's no reason to give up on a playthrough entirely.

If you ARE playing some kind of iron-man no-reloads game, I would recommend avoiding the roads that bandits are known to haunt. I mean, that makes sense from a roleplay perspective. You're trying to travel south, your group is weak and underequipped, you know that murderous bandits haunt the roads. So. Avoid the roads.

Pretty much. I generally dislike save-scumming. A couple problems with that:

1) From a role-play perspective, there's no reason *not* to assume the wilderness is just as bad (especially considering what's just happened to Gorion). And nearby Larswood and Peldvale *are* just as bad, if not more so (both within and between zones). Sticking to the roads is actually the *safest*, except for when the party rolls a 1 on d20, rocks fall and they die.

2) Cutting through nearby wilderness - even through the (presumably) safer area between the crossroads and Candlekeep - also takes a great deal more travel time, giving you less time to get things done before Xzar and Jaheira both start pressuring you to hurry it up to Nashkel already.

Eh. Whatever.

You don't need Khalid. You can solo the game if needed. Besides other possible companions there's also the option to resurrect him at a temple.

Your choice, of course. On the one hand, all the redundant NPCs the game provide do let you play this way, and it's more fun to take your blows than to just rely on quickload. On the other hand, the game-ends-on-protagonist-death mechanic and all the save-or-lose spells/effects and the sheer randomness of the game engine can make this an exercise in frustration.

I googled it a bit and apparently modding this is difficult.

I did find this walkthrough that lists the exact chances of an ambush occurring when leaving each area.

It is as you say, though: there's almost always a chance of rolling that 1 on the D20, and getting in trouble.

I'd personally amend my playstyle to either ctrl-Y or reload ridiculous random encounters, just to keep the game more fun. You can still play no-reloads in all the "real" areas. But other than that I don't think there's a solution.

SPOILER ALERT:


If only the sequel didn't assume Khalid was part of your party long enough to be captured and killed by Irenicus!


- END SPOILER -

Reminds me of my last playthrough of Fallout 1. Ian was killed in the fight to rescue Tandi from the slavers, and everyone else - Tycho, Dogmeat, Katja, and all four Followers of the Apocalypse scouts - all got killed in the Cathedral, leaving my character to head into the Vault beneath it alone.

And it was AWESOME.

If only more of the non-canon NPCs of Baldur's Gate were peppered in before obtaining the "final" party of Imoen, Khalid, Jaheira, Minsc and Dynaheir. Then I could more freely leave the corpses of friends and allies in my wake. (Which is a good thing? ;)

I don't remember editing the travel encounters to be all that difficult. Sammy is talking classic. But it's been a decade and change, so I don't recall the details.

I'll fire up my old computer next week and see if I still have the Weidu mod. If so, all you would have to do is go in and tweak the numbers for the specific encounters. (As I recall, the specific change I made was to nerf low level encounters and butch the mid- to high level ones, which might be just what you want anyway.)

Those encounters are easily dealt with, if you have a mage. Sleep. Summon Monsters. Done.

Don't let your foreknowledge of BG2 harm your BG experience. If someone dies dismiss him at a temple and assume he has some other friends who come to see and revive him.
There is some time between the end of BG and the start of BG2 where you could have met him again and all those characters which reappear in BG2.

Why don't you use Auto-save?

Played BG1 countless of times and never faced this encounter on my way to Nashkel. And once you leveled up a little bit these encounters are pretty easy. You must have been really unlucky.

It happened to me many times. Even yesterday but my party was level 3 so i took them down easily. If I die, I just reload and the encounter is not there. Ofcourse as an unwritten rule, always save before traveling.

I find it funny that no one suggested this yet: if a random encounter is really too dangerous for you, you still can flee ;)

I know it’s not easy when you’re surrounded, but you just need to cut a way through one or two bandits with your fighters (Khalid & Montaron), using your druid (Jaheira) and/or mage (Xzar) spells to keep the others at bay just long enough to have your full team reach a border of the map. Don’t try to kill all of them if you don’t think you can win the fight, it would end up in tears.

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That’s what I usually do too.
By sticking to the "vanilla" party in all your games, you would miss on some great companions.