Drakensang Need help choosing party at house

I've read somewhere that you can allocate party members at your house in Ferdok, and Dranor is lounging around there, yet I can't seem to add him to my party?

I tried talking to him, but he just chatters on about some personal stuff.

Sorry if I'm being dumb here, but could someone just give me a quick pointer?

it's because you need first to free a slot in your party... or it's just a nasty bug.

Ok, thanks, of course you need to exchange him with someone else, but I cannot seem to get rid of the other party members either. Usually in other games you can exchange party members through conversation, or clicking on their slots at a designated exchange point.
If I try to engage in converstion with party members here, they either ignore me, or just say something non-comittal. ??

Ha I see, it's point not well done in the game until you discover how it works.

Select another character in your party then right click the character you want leave the party, mouth icon, select it and you start talking with the party member, and then can talk or disband him.

Hah, now that's the info I needed. I feel pretty stupid for having to ask, but anyway, now I know.
Thanks so much, Dasale.

Welcome, and don't worry I raged a bit on that too, just didn't rush post here.

That is at those sort of details that you see how behind NWN design there are people and team with a load of experience and that it's much less experienced team that was behind Drakensang.

Yes, lots of stuff is handled in a very complicated manner. Even looting is annoying. It also took me a while to find out how to exchange characters. I guess, in the beginning, I tried to let the char I wanted to wait in the house talk to himself, which obviously doesn't work.

All of this should have been in the manual, but SO much we take for granted in manuals (like spell lists) just wasn't there!!

Well, I got the download, so I only got my manual later, and for some reason the stupid thing won't print out of Adobe; -but anyway: here is another little giggle for you, caused by the non-specifity of the manual.

You know, the page showing the "status" icons, is not extremely clear either. When I started fighting those amoebas, and my dwarf first got the rotting stink, or whatever, it looked quite serious to me, because it looked like something very similar to the rotting gangrene your party members tend to get when fighting rats. And so I tried to heal it, and I tried to de-toxify it, none of which seemed to help.

So I trotted off to check the manual, and all it says is that soap works for this. (It doesn't say what the condition actually does)

So, assuming it's a rotting disease similar to gangrene, I leave the Temple of Hesinde, and my little party trots off to the marketplace, and I find that the Stoerrebrand or Nesbeck trader has a good supply of soap, but it's pretty expensive, so I don't buy a 100 units, I only buy 45, -hoping this will be enough.

Back into the fray again, my poor dwarf keeps getting this terrible condition, and after every single amoeba, I wash his face and behind nicely with Nesbeck's fragrant scented soap.

My other party members also start getting the stink, and it occurs to me to check exactly how this condition affects their stats.
Hmmmm - Charisma -2; are you kidding me? So I paid all this cash just to keep my party members smelling nice and fresh, and socially pleasing while they are fighting stinky amoebas?

Ummm..... duh! Sometimes I can be a real Dork, you know. I should've checked the stats first thing.

Heh.. - at least I got to see some humor in the situation....

Corwin said:

All of this should have been in the manual, but SO much we take for granted in manuals (like spell lists) just wasn't there!!

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There was a brief spell list in the German manual (not the complete description available trough tooltips in-game, just one or two sentences about what it does per spell), seemingly they cut it from the US version of the manual.

Well, actually I do not need the manual restating informations I can get on-line while playing the game (provided the on-line help is comfortable to use). So I don't see a need to inflate the page count of the manual for that reason.

Turjan said:

Yes, lots of stuff is handled in a very complicated manner.

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I'd say this is "cultural differences", too.

Not everything needs to be streamlined, imho.

To me, it rather reflects the overall TDE experience, imho.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I'd say this is "cultural differences", too.

Not everything needs to be streamlined, imho.

To me, it rather reflects the overall TDE experience, imho.

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I don't think so. A p&p situation is something completely different from a video game situation, and this has nothing to do with cultural differences. Looking at a lengthy animation each and every time you harvest some plant or animal parts is just repetitive and boring. This would not come up in p&p, as you hardly have ten fights in a row with 50 carcasses to deal with. And you would not say "Now I go to the next carcass and cut it up with my knife. And now I go to the next carcass and cut it up with my knife. And now I go to the next carcass and cut it up with my knife. And now..." It's just a nuisance.

The situation during character change makes sense, but I guess the problem here is missing feedback. I did not notice that the character I wanted to dismiss tried to talk to himself (the "active" character tends to jump over to the one you want to dismiss). There was no message, and you had to find out the "how to" by trial and error. It has nothing to do with roleplaying when I try to figure out how the game engine handles this. The solution looks obvious, but it seems to be a stumbling block for many people.

The problem with the handbook is that, if you do not know DSA/TDE, you have no idea of the possibilities how to deal with specific situations in the game or what the range of possibilities is. You just have to find out yourself during the game, which is okay, but I am spoiled by the Baldur's Gate handbooks. The latter were a great read. Now I have to figure out that there are full mages, half mages, elven mages in different combinations. Nowhere does it tell you in which situations parry and dodge work. Does "dodge" still work if I carry a shield? And "parry" and "master parry" work in a completely different way? It would be nice to have this in a handbook.

Exactly, there are insufficient 'english' resources for the majority of us who are unfamiliar with the ruleset and more should have been included in the manual.

Turjan said:

<snip>
The problem with the handbook is that, if you do not know DSA/TDE, you have no idea of the possibilities how to deal with specific situations in the game or what the range of possibilities is. You just have to find out yourself during the game, which is okay, but I am spoiled by the Baldur's Gate handbooks. The latter were a great read. Now I have to figure out that there are full mages, half mages, elven mages in different combinations. Nowhere does it tell you in which situations parry and dodge work. Does "dodge" still work if I carry a shield? And "parry" and "master parry" work in a completely different way? It would be nice to have this in a handbook.

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Sadly, it's not a problem of this particular game, but of current times. Long gone are the days in which the manual explained everything you needed. Once upon a time manuals told you each class, each skill, each spell with full descriptions of how much damage/effects they did. They were thick. Eventually, they removed the details in order to sell the so called 'Prima Strategy Guides'. Nowadays you're lucky if a manual tells you anything more than 'Insert disc and installer should come, if it doesn't, run setup.exe', and those 'strategy guides' are what manuals used to be.

wolfing said:

Sadly, it's not a problem of this particular game, but of current times. Long gone are the days in which the manual explained everything you needed. Once upon a time manuals told you each class, each skill, each spell with full descriptions of how much damage/effects they did. They were thick. Eventually, they removed the details in order to sell the so called 'Prima Strategy Guides'. Nowadays you're lucky if a manual tells you anything more than 'Insert disc and installer should come, if it doesn't, run setup.exe', and those 'strategy guides' are what manuals used to be.

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Yeah, I can appreciate a good, thick manual, but I like even more what games like Drakensang do: the ability to right click on anything to get a good description about what it does. Sadly, this game isn't as robust with it's instructions as it probably should be, but it's always nicer when I want to know what something is, I can simply click on it to find out as opposed to having to go through a manual. Unfortunately, many developers seem to get rid of their manuals, but don't have any sort of in game replacement.

The question is why the English version doesn't come with the same documentation as the German one. We had reference chapters for spells, etc., and a pdf of the DSA Basic Ruleset 2008.

Gorath said:

The question is why the English version doesn't come with the same documentation as the German one. We had reference chapters for spells, etc., and a pdf of the DSA Basic Ruleset 2008.

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It may be something as crazy as another company having the rights to printed information about the DSA ruleset in the USA.
I just think humanity is outgrowing the concept of countries and borders.

Gorath said:

The question is why the English version doesn't come with the same documentation as the German one. We had reference chapters for spells, etc., and a pdf of the DSA Basic Ruleset 2008.

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Yes, no spell lists whatsoever.

But my complaint is not only about missing information, but also about the information that is there. It is not very concise. The manual is 50 pages long, but often I read a paragraph and then ask myself what the information content actually was. The language is very vague and not precise at all.

Me, I found almost everything I needed within the game itself, especially the descriptions of the spells (right-click or what it was) and the tool-tips.

I don't know much about the spellt within the 4th edition, so I had to rely on what I was reading there.

I had the advantage of having the ROA games vaguely in my memory (regarding the spells), but for the 4th edition they've changes sooo much it is almost like a restart for me.

I don't remember having read the spell list in the manual too thoroughly.

There's basic information in the game but it's hard to put it in context. For example, how many spells are there? Without a list, it's hard to know if buying a particular spell is useful or whether I would rather wait to get something else. I have a summon wolf spell (A Helpful Paw?) at the moment...how many others are there? Is this a powerful or weak summon? I put a bunch of points into this spell...how powerful does that make it now?

You don't need to answer these but they're the sort of things you can't really get without a decent manual.