Newbie Modding Questions about Multiclassing Paladins and Thieves

[Guest Sir Thomas]

After researching lots of modding possibilities and having taken a solo Fighter-Mage-Thief to the beginning of Chapter II on Core Rules, I finally plan to build my custom-made party of six and go through the whole of Icewind Dale EE for the first time ever.

The party design I have in mind for my first playthrough looks like this:

 

- Half-Orc Fighter / Druid (kit as Barbarian)

- Dwarf Fighter / Bard (kit as Dwarven Defender)

- Halfling Paladin / Thief (unsure about kitting yet)

- Elven Ranger / Cleric (use Archer kit and possibly Swashbuckler)

- Gnome Fighter / Mage (kit as Illusionist)

- Elf Fighter / Mage (kit as Necromancer)

 

As the group I envision tends to be rather powerful, I will try my first run on Hard / Insane Difficulty.

The question is: Are there any mods out there that allow me to create multiclass Paladins and Bards?

I checked out all of the content I could find on gibberlings3 and beamdog forums and I found some tools to allow multiclass kits:

 

- Something called "House Rules" (an older mod that even supports triple-class characters to have three kits)

- m7multikit mod (unsure if this is available for IWD EE or just BGI / II?)

- EEKeeper (BG I / II only?)

- near Infinity

 

As I have no experience with the above-mentioned tools , could someone give any advice as to which tools / mods I need to create my dream-team of six?

I am grateful for any advice - IWD EE is probably going to occupy me for a while (I plan to do EET once I finish).

If multiclass Paladins and Bards prove to be outright impossible, my alternative party would look something like this:

 

- Half-Elven Paladin (using Tweaks Anthology)

- Half-Orc Fighter / Druid

- Dwarven Fighter / Cleric

- Elven Ranger/Thief (I think this can be done with the Might and Guile mod)

- Gnome Fighter / Mage

- Halfling Bard (using Thieving skills for Bards mod)

 

The only thing I am unhappy about with this party design is that the thieving skills are so split up between two charcaters.)

Any comments welcome about how I should proceed? 

 

 

 

[subtledoctor]

Bards and paladins simply cannot be multiclassed, period, end of story, the  classes are entirely hard-coded. AFAIK even people using the EEex executable hack have not made multiclass paladins or bards.

Not only can you not multiclass paladins, but even if you could, paladins can only be LG and thieves cannot be LG so there would be no way to multiclass the two.

That said...

As it is a putative halfling paladin/thief... I have a mod that adds a halfing-only "paladin of Arvoreen" kit which, once you are in the game, switches it over to use the Ranger UI. So it is a "paladin" but with stealth instead of Turn Undead. It needs the sphere system to have the proper spells, but the included "vanilla plus" sphere system is very close to the unmodded game, while allowing this kind of 'ranger with paladin spells' kit to work. It wouldn't work as the party thief, though, because HiS/MS are the only thief skills it has access to.

I have another mod that converts bards into multiclasses... but it makes major changes to every aspect of the class. It puts some kits in the fighter/mage class and some kits in the mage/thief class. And it entirely replaces the bard songs with a custom song system that allows you to learn multiple songs and allows you to fight and cast spells while singing; but the songs are different from the IWD bard songs. So you could make a dwarven F/M Skald (if you enable dwarves to be F/M)... but you would have to be okay with all those other changes.

1 hour ago, Guest Sir Thomas said:

Elven Ranger/Thief (I think this can be done with the Might and Guile mod)

it is admittedly a bit of a hack-job that I made a long long time ago. Doesn't mean you shouldn't use it! Just don't expect it to be a perfect replication of a 2E ranger/thief - the game's UI will not allow that. This is basically a fighter/thief with some druid spell innate abilities.

Edited March 11, 2022 by subtledoctor