Is it worth importing characters from the predecessor? Someone told me that you get stripped of your old equipment. Do your characters retain their level?

Using your char from the previous game is the best non-cheating way to have great stats. If you were building a Fighter in BG1 with say, 19 STR, 19 Con, 19 Int (using all the tomes on one char), you could bring that char in and dual him from Kensai (lvl9) to mage, and you would have the best legitimate char possible. Of course, who would have thought of that? Nobody.

If you have played TOTSC as well, you can import a character up to 161,000 which is far higher than allowed if you start from scratch. Plus the story makes more sense. Agree about Kensai but there is a typo, should read lvl 9 to allow highest level of mage.

I imported a very nice fighter-mage dual class from TOSC after having removed the XP-cap and having typically avoided using most NPCs as anything other than baggage carriers... SO, yes... Importing your (good) characters from BG/TOSC is not such a bad idea. Hell, I spend months earning all those extra xp, like hell I'm going to give them up now.