<font color=skyblue>I am finally getting around to playing NWN and its expansions. I am now ready to enter level 2 of Undermountain. I was able to open both possible doorways down to the second level, but have not decided which one I will enter yet.

I am playing a Ranger/Rogue/Shadow Dancer and the amount of Secret Doors in level one astounds me! I have entered more secret doors than mundane doors in the past two days!

What was your opinion of HotU compared to the previous two games when you played them? For me, it is better than the previous two because I get to go straight to solving the mysteries of Underdark and worming my way around down there in a very hostile enviroment. The other two games had too much non-critical time or quests that I wish were over too quickly. I love snooping about in Halastar's lair...and maybe that is Ziroc's fault because his mod is so fun to delve into.

Also...the beginning of the entrance of Undermountain has a goblin who approaches you and if you talk Durnan into taking him in, you'll heavily regret it. This little freak would whine and complain during the time that I was trying to read what items that sexy cleric of Sune was identifying for me, and it got to be too much, so I ended up killing him to shut him up. Was he important for anything? [img]smile.gif[/img]

</font>

Well, HotU isn't a particularly good campaign, but it's still miles above the stock NWN campaign or that other, utterly forgettable, expansion. I can't even remember it's damn name.

All the charm of NWN's for me comes from MP games. I never did finish Shadows solo, me and one of my regular gaming buddies at the time wrapped up the save game he had running.

I did play through Hordes, looking for cool scripts and such. It was required of me at the time, as the builder where I DM wouldn't play it, so wouldn't know about the cooler stuff. I found it to be ok, and I still use chapter 1 to strip chars from Z's mod, when I'm going to use them in other campaigns...Personally though, I wouldn't play through it again. Not like I hated it or anything, but online play is the only way to go.

<font color=skyblue>True enough, but I HAVE to finish these expansions now that I have some time on my hands. Its a personal thing.</font>

Oddly, I thought SoU was tons better than HoTU. It was small, compact, but good. Nice original D&D story in there. For HoTu, it seemed they listened to the kiddies more gave 'em evil choices etc. I imagine for them it was fun but that's not real D&D.

I still believe the main point to Hordes was content. Epic levels, scripting, crafting, etc.

It was. It added quite a bit. Story was very commercialized though. I felt like I was playing a console version.

Considering the MP aspects of the original, and Shadows, you're not far from wrong, since Hordes was primarily a SP campaign.

Primarily? I believe multiplayer is completely impossible in HOTU. :(

HOTU is the best [img]smile.gif[/img] . I really enjoyed that but SOU is good to start simply because of (spoil) Deekin

I played through HOTU in MP. It can be done with a bit of fuss. The cutscenes dont work properly, otherwise its fine. IIRC we had to play the end of chapters 2 and 3 in SP and then do some exporting/importing of characters in the beginning of chapter 3.

XP gains will also be a bit smaller. I think I was at level 13 after SoU in MP (compared to lvl 16 when I played solo)and didnt reach that high a level in HOTU. It's not that much of a deal towards the end though, as an extra INTELLIGENT companion more than makes up for losing a 3-5 levels, and the benefit of each extra 20+ level is relatively smaller than it would be earlier in the game...

Still I used LETO to make us start HOTU at level 16. I'm not that fond of classical dungeon crawling so I found chapter 1 the least enjoyable part, and it can be quite challenging if you are too low a level...

Hmmm, Hordes starts you out at lvl 15.

15 then, my memory is rather sketchy as it is almost a year since I played it:) We played through SoU first and ended up around level 13, and then I edited the characters to have the same experience as the pre-made Hordes characters that come with the expansion.

I found some oddities in XP distribution in NWN MP. One player would (inconsistently but the gap tended to grow over time) get more XP than the other, and it wasnt that the lead person always got an extra XP for kills giving an odd number of points.

I also recall the first time we tried NWN MP (abandoned since one of our PCs couldnt handle it) and seeing the higher level character get MORE xp due to some sort of stupid henchman penalty rule punishing low-level characters with higher-level allies). Didnt notice that in our later ventures as we both were semi-tanks of equal level.