Avernum 1 - Ditch 1 character?

[Tango]

I've seen a few places say that the first thing you should do is ditch one of your characters. What's the point in that? One would think 4 > 3, so I'm not sure of the logic of dropping your second character. Why should players run the game with only 3 chars?

[Failedassassin]

You get more experience, the less characters you have. That's my guess.

[S M Adventurer]

My opinion is that they probably said ditch 1 of your characters so you have a space in your party's roster to take in an NPC. NPCs are typically stronger than your party, so having one in your party helps a lot. Note that for most

NPCs you need to have your reputation at a certain level and/or complete a quest before they will join you.

 

As for any other reasons for ditching one character, I don't really see anything else. Some people play singleton parties in the Avernum trilogy and delete the other characters.

Besides more experience for each of the three characters, that's really it.

[Alorael at Large]

The most common party optimization trick is to dump your first slot character, who is presumably a melee fighter, for Jay. He's a fighter in Silvar, he'll join you for 100 gold, and he starts at level 3 far better than any character you can produce at level 3.

 

—Alorael, who considers Andrew in Cotra a reasonably good deak as well, but only if you rush to get reputation without getting experience, and only if you want his stats. He's not quite the no-brainer that Jay is.

[Tango]

Ok, that makes a ton more sense. The experience I don't really care about since more xp per kill means you gain levels faster. I don't much care about speed as long as I can do it EVENTUALLY.