The village elder looked weary; two nights of attacks had taken their toll. “How is morale?” I asked him.
“Aye, much better now, stranger, thanks to your efforts we have a chance. The weapons are ready, and those you persuaded to fight with us should make a difference.”
I nodded. “With my spells and the blades of my three companions, we’ll be a match for anything. Nothing for it now but to wait to nightfall and the inevitable onslaught.”
The elder hesitated a moment. “Aye, nothing for it… unless… well…”
“What?”
“It’s just… you mentioned there were another three of you back at the camp outside town?”
“Oh, yes. A golem, big bugger that, dead handy in a fight, and a bard who’s pretty nifty with a bow, and a shape-shifting mage.”
“Right. Um. And they’re happy at the camp there, are they?”
“Blimey, no, they’re desperate to get into the action, raring to have a crack at the dark forces threatening this town.”
“But… they’re not actually going to come and help?”
“Oh, gotcha, I see what you mean. No, my hands are tied, it’s the Thedasian Working Time Directive, no party member is allowed to adventure for more than forty five hours over a rolling seven day period and that lot have done their quota, the Union would have my arse if I tried to get them down. Plus it’s night-time, see, they’d need to be on time and a half, and with the downturn in the economy caused by the fall in house prices what with all those demonic creatures stalking around the place, we just haven’t got the operating budget.”
“Oh. Still, never mind, I can’t imagine we’ll face wave after wave of relentless attackers in a situation where it would be really, really useful to have some extra bodies fighting on our side. Waiting for nightfall it is!”
(sometimes fixed party sizes in RPGs don’t make much sense…)
I completely agree with this assessment. Of course, I only had four characters when I did this, but if I had more, I would have loved to have them for the fight.
I wonder if someone can create a mod allowing you to have as many party members as you can fit on your screen. I think that will be pretty damn awesome.
I am assuming you are talking about the Redcliffe undead assault. How many NPC’s did you manage to keep alive during battle? I kept everyone alive, except one. But that bastard I just couldn’t get to in time no matter how I tried to do it.
Yup, it was the Redcliffe attack, and I lost one of the NPCs too. Managed to keep him alive for a while with healing spell spam, but he just seemed to be prime target for everything…
I agree. And because I really can’t think of any encounter in the game where more damage/healing/crowd control isn’t useful, my suggestion is to petition Bioware to remove all extra characters until we’re left with a static party of four. After all, making sense on every minor quibble is so much more important than variety and re-playability. If they don’t agree, I think we should boycott them!!
Yeah, I’m not a big fan of party limits, either, but….
I made the mistake of fiddling with the party size limit in Neverwinter Nights 2. Apparently, all the extra spell effects and animations caused my video card to overheat and die. Not a mistake I’ll be making again ;^)