Hey all, been playing my wizard for a bit and i happened to use the charm spell. What i want to know is, what does it do?? the guy i charmed (save was failed, so i did charm him) attacked me anyway... i was under the impression that charmed monsters dont attack...?

Couple of things spring to mind - firstly the creature charmed could be immune to mind affecting spells, in which case, on a failed will save, nothing would happen. Alternatively, you were using a Charm Person spell on something other than a "Person" - a "Person" is any playable race, plus Goblinoids, Monstrous, Orc's or Reptilians. If the target does not belong to one of these racial types, the charm would have no effect.

No to both, it was an escaped prisoner in the peninsula district. They are not immune to anything, and they are all player races.

Charming a creature gives you a +50 reputation bonus in its eyes. Reputation runs from 0 to 100, where 0-10 gives a hostile reaction, 11-89 a neutral one and 90-100 a friendly reaction.

Hostile creatures will try to attack you, neutral creatures will let you be, and friendly creatures may help you if you are attacked. However, their personal relationship to other individuals and factions also matters. Typically, a person will rate as friendly to all other members of their faction.
That means that if you face two hostile bandits, and charm one into neutrality, that charmed bandit will still try to protect his friend if he is attacked. And as his friend is hostile to you, he'll seek to get into a fight with yourself.

In short, the environment around the charmed creature still colours his actions.
I don't know what was the matter in this case as you didn't describe the situation but it might well be somewhat like this.

It could possibly be that legolas. I was fightnig a group in the peninsula. i was left with an escaped prisoner and a gang leader. I charmed the escaped prisoner while my minions were attacking the gang leader.

I've found the charm type spells to be terribly nerfed in NWN, and generally not worth picking up, or selecting as available spells..

It would certainly seem that way to me. Unless you can charm everyone, they dont seem to have any effect. Even when there is only 1, i charm them, they turn blue and then atack my henchman/minions anyways. Seems kinda stupid.

Yes, I've noticed too that I don't tend to go for those kinds of spells much anymore on modern AD&D games, unless its a low level ranger charm on an animal or something, but even that can go easily awry. (Big nasty Polar bear attacks party...)

*Warning...incoming moment of nostalgia*.

Ahh, back in the glory days of the Goldbox AD&D games when I first played Curse of the Azure Bonds, Charm Person was such a handy little spell in a fix especially at lower levels when you picked a fight with the barkeep! Twas great just to have someone extra on your side.
Then there was Charm Monster for the later level/non-humanoid bunch! It used to work so well on the Zhentarim patrols, at least for me. [img]smile.gif[/img]

*end of nostalgic moment*.

It was a handy spell in BG 1 and 2 as well, atleast for a while. Once things got to such ridiculously high levels that they made their saving throws without even thinking about it, charm person became a little redundant (read: useless)

There may be some limited use of the charm person spell with merchants. This was from around a year ago so I don't remember all the details and they won't give you free stuff, but I think either there was an NPC merchant that was either unfriendly and wouldn't deal with me that opened his store after a successful charm spell. Either that or I was able to get a better reaction score from the merchant and got slightly better prices. I forget eactly what happened, but I was able to do better in a merchant encounter. I have never gone back and tried to systematically see if charm person consistantly improves merchant outcomes though.