So, I played through Pool of Radiance, and wanted to transfer my characters to Curse of the Azure Bonds, but I've both read, and seen in game, that characters with 18 strength are bugged if transferred, as their strength score will jump to their exceptional strength number if it is modified by magic.
I have a few questions regarding this. My first and most important question is, is there any way to deal with this bug?
Will it follow the character, if I transfer them further, or is there a way to remove the bugginess from a character?

If nothing can be done, it may be better to just start over with new characters I suppose.

You can use the Gold Box Explorer to edit characters.

Well, I downloaded the explorer, but I'm not entirely sure what to edit. If I look at one of the .CHA files I want to transfer, I get something like seen in the attachment. I don't know what to edit, to get rid of the bug before I can start.

The closest instructions I could find were these: https://www.gog.com/forum/forgotten_realms_collection/gold_box_bugs/post5

Still....I feel very unsure what to do.

I haven't used the GBE myself, so I can't provide any details.

This bug annoyed me enough that I downloaded the Gold Box Companion and used its cheat menu to fix my characters by manually entering in the right values for their strength. Once I did that, I didn't use the GBC again. Most of its features seem related to cheats, and I have no interest in that, personally. Once fixed, the stats stayed fixed, and I never had problems again. You can also use other cheat programs, but most people seem to recommend the GBC. It sounds like you're unfamiliar with hex editors. If so, the GBC is probably a better choice for you.

Wait...there are two different editors?

It worked, thank you very much!

And now I've run into the bug where the Girdle of Dwarvenkind removes the extra HP from a character's constitution bonus permanently. Hmmm....maybe it was a bad idea to transfer characters. Do these bugs persist with the characters to Secret of the Silver Blades too?

Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, the same thing happened to me. I did the same fix as last time -- loaded the Gold Box Companion, manually adjusted my constitution and hit points in its cheat menu, then quit out of the GBC. Curse of the Azure Bonds was the only game that had problems with transfered characters.

In Pool of Radiance, my party was heavily multiclassed and mostly non-human. After transfering my characters to Curse, I replaced most of the non-humans with dual-classed humans. I tweaked my party composition a few times over the series after that point, but it was mostly stable. I think the best decision I made was to dual-class a 15th level ranger to mage. It takes forever, but it's definitely worth it.

A bit of a necro on this one, but I thought I'd mention it:

The problem is that in conversion the strength values aren't converted correctly: Each of the attributes has a base value and a current value. So if you look at the save file in a hex-editor you'll see and 18 strength represented as
12 12
The first 12 is the base value and the second value is the current value. The exceptional value gets it own bits after all the attributes are listed, so the attribute bits for a perfect character (human) would look like:
12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 64 64
When a PoR character gets imported, the exceptional strength value gets copied over the base strength value for the character. I.e. for a perfect PoR character the bits look like:
64 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 64 64
So, when the character gets a strength boost (e.g. from an an enlarge spell) and the boost wears off, the game replaces the character's strength with the exceptional value and things go haywire.

If you don't want to use the gold box companion and you're comfortable with a hex file. Just open up the .guy file for the character and change the base strength bits from the exceptional value to the correct value (IIRC it's at ofset 10 (hex)).

For the other games, make sure you remove any attribute boosting gear or spell effects before you export.

Thanks Wendigo, your necro wasn't useless :)

I've run into the same bug :

Although I made sure that all buffs had expired and that I had removed the STR enhancing gear before importing from POOL to CURSE, the imported characters were bugged and couldn't benefit from the ENLARGE spell.

Tried Goldbox explorer 1.2, probably couldn't install it the right way because I was able to explore the save files but not modify them...

Then gave a try to Goldbox Companion Editor. Problem is, the editor allows to modify only one value per attribute (not 2), and it seems that the one you can edit isn't the relevant one.

At last, I simply downloaded and HEX editor and, following your explanations, modified the only byte that caused trouble for each of my imported char.

Now everything works fine, and I can finally cast a level 8 ENLARGE on my elves (as well as the human cleric, for good measure).

Thx again !

I recently found a *much* simpler way of working around the bug.

Using a hex editor wasn't an option for me. I had already played through 1/3 of the game before I realized there was a bug, and the hex editing instructions I've seen seem to rely on you modifying the .guy file that is created when you initially set up your party. Thankfully I discovered an even easier way to resolve the problem: simply remove the character from your party and re-add them as a CAB character instead of a POR one. From then on they are treated the same as any character that was freshly created in CAB with no strength issues.

More detailed instructions in case they are needed:

1. (Optional, but recommended): In Pool of Radiance, unequip everything from your character before beginning the transfer to prevent stat-boosting items from permanently boosting the character's stats in CAB.
2. Export the characters from POR and import them into CAB.
3. Create your party using this character and any others you want. These can either be other POR characters or ones created fresh in CAB .
4. For safety, make a copy of your SAVE directory until you are certain that everything is working correctly (for Gog, this is in the cloud_saves directory). See step 11 if you want to be extra safe.
5. Once your party is set up, highlight the character you imported and choose "remove character from the party" from the main menu. Do not choose "Drop" or they will be gone forever!
6. Choose "Add character" from the main menu.
7. This is the important step to work around the bug: when prompted "add from where?", choose "Curse" instead of "Pool".
8. Select the character you just removed from the party. Because the game now recognizes that character as one from CAB instead of one from POR, the strength bug goes away.
9. That character now has their Strength bug resolved. Repeat the steps above for each character you imported from POR.
10. Check that everything is working correctly by casting a strength-altering spell on each character, ensuring that their strength is raised to the correct value and not to the racial maximum; then rest at camp for several hours until the spell wears off, and ensure that the character's Strength has reverted to the correct base value. If you have any strength-altering items in your inventory you can use that for the test instead.
11. If you want to be *extra* safe: in the Gold Box Companion editor, take a screenshot of each character's stats before carrying out steps 5-10. Then for each POR character you imported, compare all of the values in the screenshot you took to the ones that are in the GBC editor after dropping and re-adding. I don't know if it was related to this process or not, but I found that one of my fighters had his correct base HP cut in half after dropping and re-adding. I was able to easily detect & fix this using the GBC editor.

Note that if (like me) you had already started your game before encountering the bug, you can perform steps 4-11 at any time and it will still work with one small exception. If you are starting the process from a save in which the character already had their strength incorrectly elevated, you need to use the editor in Gold Box companion to manually change the character's strength back to the correct base value after performing all of the steps above. Dropping and re-adding resolves the strength bug, but it leaves whatever value is displayed on the stats screen in place.

Oh, something like this works ? Well done !

Also, just to "clarify" things about hex editing : if you want to edit "on the fly", you should hex the .SAV, not the .GUY : just look for the most recently modified files in the game folder after a save&exit (each character of each savegame has 3 files defining it, the .SAV file is the one where attributes are stored).