I created (but didn't save) a thief, and in the alignment selection, I noticed that Neutral Good was an option. but not Chaotic Good, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Why can't I make a Chaotic Good Thief?

(I checked this because I wanted to know if Ranger/Thief is a valid dual-class combination.)

As a side note, of course, will creating a Paladin/Thief (by hacking the alignment in the save file) cause any problems?

Of course, this whole Ranger/Thief idea (I checked and Pools of Darkness allows that dual-class for a neutral good character) has led me to some more questions.

1. Does the Thief's critical backstab multiplier multiply the Ranger's extra damage to giants? (If so, imagine the damage a Ranger 39/Thief 40 would do to a giant with a backstab.)

2. If they do multiply, do I need to worry about damage overflow? (It's possible this could occur if you somehow manage to do over 255 damage.)

3. Has anyone seen Delayed Blast Fireball do over 255 damage? Similarly, has anyone seen DBF do less than 40 damage when used at level 40 damage to a creature not resistant to fire? (The latter shouldn't be possible unless damage overflow occurs.)

Pool of Radiance is the only game in which you can backstab giants.

Paladin/Thief should work just fine (there's no particular reason why it should bug, and if it did, I'm sure by now the FRUA community would have encountered and mentioned the issue whilst creating modules with hacked classes, especially as race and alignment restrictions frequently tend to be the first things discarded during such alterations ...).

The only reason CG Thief isn't allowed is because that was the official pen and paper rule in 1st Edition (which even pretty much thought of NG Thieves as being something that should be 'rare'). Even pen and paper changed their mind on the topic with the coming of 2E, at which point the standard of "not LG" was established and remained the case also for 3E.

I've never seen damage overflow be a thing in the Gold Box games, even the first time I tried to play PoD (before I could find an internet guide but after I'd missed out on the opportunity to buy the Cluebook in stores, so I was basically playing blind and couldn't figure out some parts so my party actually did go all the way to level 40).

Indeed, the only times I've seen integer overflow be a notable thing are:

* Monster Hit Points in FRUA (a monster with 172+ HP will wrap around on Champion, and come to think of it would a monster with 171 HP exactly insta-die on combat commencement? Half of 171 rounded down is still 85, 171 + 85 = 256 which would seem to mean the mob would spawn in with 0 HP off the bat ...)

* Pooling > 65,535 gp total value (doesn't matter what denominations) in Pool or Curse seems to work fine at first, but buying something tends to result in most of the money evaporating into thin air after the purchase. It seems to work fine in the other games (probably a good thing, seeing how Monty Haul Secret gets ...)

* Curse has a rather bizarre bug regarding overencumbered characters; if a character is above their encumbrance limit (because they had a Strength buff cast on them that's worn off, and they looted past their normal capacity during the interim), attempting to SHARE any money spoils from a combat will result in them being awarded an absolutely insane amount of money (I've seen characters get over 65,000 jewelry as a result of this glitch). It's pretty clear the ultimate reason is that the game is checking to see how much more you can carry and sees it as an extremely large number (unsigned integer underflow) but I'm not entirely sure why it then actually gives you that much money instead of simply seeing it as "okay, you can carry your normal share" and giving just that ...

DBF should theoretically be capable of overflowing at level 40, as up to 280 damage are possible. However, assuming a binomial distribution and independence of the 'dice', the normal approximation to the binomial gives you a mean of 180 damage with a standard deviation of 10.8, meaning that 94% of the time your damage will actually be between 158 and 202...practically speaking, you never even get close to overflow.

You could theoretically backstab bugbears (which are 'giant class') in Secret, but there's kind of no point--they're pretty weak at that point.

Maybe I need to figure out how to hack the RNG if I want to test it. Of course, the problem then is that, IIRC, a roll of 20 on a saving throw is a successful save, and the save would need to be failed for this to work (unless the overflow occurs before the half damage, in which case DBF should do exactly 12 damage under this condition).

Of course, simply finding a way to manipulate the RNG would help. Have any such methods been found?

(For anyone confused about what I am talking about, RNG stands for Random Number Generator and is used by all D&D computer games whenever the rules call for a dice roll. In other words, playing with a hacked RNG would be like playing with loaded dice.)

Thing is, I would see CG as being a more likely alignment than NG for a thief. For that reason, if only one of the good alignments were allowed to be a thief, it should be CG. It makes no sense to allow NG but not CG for a thief.

(Also, is there any other way to deal 200+ damage?)

Cone of Cold and Lightning Bolt have similarly unlimited damage (however, they don't get the +1 bonus damage per die that DBF has, so they max out at 40-240).

Actually, the times I've seen 200+ damage occur the most have probably been in Dark Queen of Krynn, against Dark Wizards. These use the kitchen sink of protective spells and about the only things that reliably get through to them are Power Word Kill and Cone of Cold - the latter of which usually obliterates them in rather nuclear fashion as it's the "wrong Fire Shield" situation (FWIW, BTW, the highest possible damage in the game should thus be 560 - DBF maxed and thusly doubled, and it should be trivially easy to see if damage actually does overflow to low numbers - cast a Hot Fire Shield on a mage in PoD and whack them with your own top level DBF ...).

Yes, I've seen that--288 damage from a Cone of Cold. Realistically, it should have been 144 (twice 72, double full normal damage from a failed save), but looks like they screwed up and quadrupled the damage instead.