Six:
"The game of Diablo I has three major problems: 1) There's only the weakest of storylines holding it up. 2) It's too easy. 3) There are only 3 classes of characters (or 6, if you have Hellfire and enable the 'hidden' 2)."
*shrug* Yay, pointless jabs! Alrighty.
The game of Baldur's Gate I has three major problems: 1) It lacks random items and random dungeons. 2) The plot is altogether too linear. 3) It uses an ostentatious number of game CDs, making it very impractical to play.
"Another kit is the Beyond Naked Mage, who refuses to wear ANY equipment at all--unless he finds an item with at least 1 curse on it."
To go off topic: Technically, the item must be completely cursed. An item with a beneficial enchantment and a cursed enchantment is still unusable because of the beneficial enchantment.
Now, to the portraits. I really don't see what's so wrong with Coran's portrait. He's got that weird tattoo/mask thing going on, but so what? Monty, IMO, looks a good deal worse. And Kivan's probably hiding a goiter under that hood of his, hence the 8 CHA.
Faldorn's pic is a far greater offense than Coran's, if you ask me. 15 Charisma and yet STILL she looks like the she-Gremlin in "Gremlin's 2." Those nails. That hideous expression. She probably makes that face so often it got stuck that way. Shar-Teel is almost as ugly, yet her CHA is 4 points lower. (Though it could reasonably go lower still.) And then we've got Viconia with her 14 CHA. Now *her* pic is a crime - especially for an elf! - though they made up for it very nicely in BG2. (Oddly, though, she became the prettiest BG2 female despite some others outclassing her in the CHA department.)
But Charisma isn't all about looks. Coran seems to have quite a bit of personal magnetism - reflected by his background and the people he interacts with. This could (at least partially) explain his 16 CHA. Then we take Kivan's 8 CHA. He strikes me very much as a loner. So it makes sense that, being a loner, he lacks the leadership skills to have high CHA.
I still can't explain Faldorn though, aside from the Druid's prerequisite CHA. [img]tongue.gif[/img]
-Lem