GameBanshee Forums

As a die-hard fan of the BG series, I was struck yesterday by a bug in the game that really pissed me off. Please, if you know a way to fix this, tell me!

My main character (NG Bard, 9th lev) was about to level up to 10th after going above 160,000 XP. (I have TotSC installed so the XP cap is 161,000 if I know correctly.) What happened was he gained some HP (fine) but his pickpocket ability went all the way down from 90% to 25%. I never saw anything like that happen before. Is that due to some AD&D core rules that I don’t know of or simply an annoying bug that has to be fixed? (By the way, isn’t a Bard supposed to get a THACO improvement when reaching 10th level? Cause that didn’t happen either…)

This is all the more annoying since I’m very close to finishing BG1 and starting BG2 with my exported hero. But do I really want to start off with a 25% pickpocket ability instead of an almost perfect 90%? Or should I postpone levelling up to BG2 hoping that it will treat me better? (On second thoughts: it's possible that my pickpocket ability was really set to 10% (base) + 15% (for a dexterity of 18) = 25% but why should this happen at leveling up???)
Has anybody ever experienced something similar and solved it?

[QUOTE=fetye]This is all the more annoying since I’m very close to finishing BG1 and starting BG2 with my exported hero. But do I really want to start off with a 25% pickpocket ability instead of an almost perfect 90%? Or should I postpone levelling up to BG2 hoping that it will treat me better?[/QUOTE]
I don't know about the bug but regarding your thieving skills and importing into BG2, you should be given the ability to assign your points again because BG2 has skills that BG1 did not.

Bards don't assign skills.

I suggest levelling up, and just using gatekeeper to put your stats where they belong.

Make sure your lore is where it should be!

are you fully patched?

You can look if you have a .2da file in your override folder which sets the correct pickpocket values for bards. You can edit it with notepad for example. If not you can download one somewhere (should be included in ease-of-use for example).

Bards and thieves get a thac0 improvement at every odd level, so you'll have to wait until BG2.

[QUOTE=Cwell the fine]Make sure your lore is where it should be![/QUOTE]*Start nitpicking mode*IIRC you can't change lore in either Gatekeeper or Shadowkeeper.*End nitpicking mode

doh!

Bug fixed!

Thanks go out to everybody in solving this!

I got many helpful hints and some of them actually pointed to the fact that in BG2, pickpocket skills are set anew no matter what your final values were in BG1. And as a matter of fact, bards really do not get a chance to assign these values, it is assigned to them automatically ... so no trouble in BG2!

But I still had the problem of having to finish BG1 with a really low pp skill. The final solution came from Pa3PyX at the Bioware BG forum.
The best way to fix the bug (and all similar ones) is to edit the file "SKILLBRD.2DA" in BG's OVERRIDE folder (create the file if it doesn't exist) and copy and paste the following:

2DA V1.0
0
PICK_POCKETS
1 25
2 30
3 35
4 40
5 45
6 50
7 55
8 60
9 65
10 70
11 75
12 80
13 85
14 90
15 95
16 99
17 99
18 99
19 99
20 99