Oh let me add that the reason I picked those three classes is that there are plenty of group spells that will help out the group, they can all at least wear reasonable armor at higher levels, and I think would generally be able to hunt the same monsters fairly easily.

I wanted to add an Empath into the mix for me to play, but based on what I've read it might limit the hunting options of the entire group alittle too much. Thoughts?

Good combination, with three people!

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Some thoughts for you, in no particular order:

I think the Ranger has the least in the way of group spells, but his nicest one, Mobility, is other-cast and has cumulative duration, so during down time back in town you can have him goosing up the durations on the other two.

The Paladin does not need to be using a Shield, in order to have his shield-boosting spell take effect. My own hunting pair--of Paladin/Ranger--I have the Ranger using sword+shield... but the Paladin uses a 2Hand weapon, and just runs the spell to boost his partner.

Since both the Ranger and Paladin are considered in the Spirit realm, they can train in a common Mana Control comparatively inexpensively. This will let the two of them pass mana back and forth--like if the Paladin is wearing heavy armor and not casting as much, for example, his mana can be used by the Ranger to whistle up vines and suchlike--more conveniently.

The Bard should concentrate on a) Spell Research in his base list, for the group songs, and b) ranks of Mental Lore:Telepathy to boost things like total Song duration (while you're out in the field) and b) the benefits from the Songs (boosting the group's AS with Kai's Song, for example).

With three of you together, you'll see goodly numbers of creatures. If you want to be a self-sufficient group, have someone who can Disarm Traps and someone who can Pick Locks. (I think the Bard probably has the lowest training costs for those skills, but maybe not.) Note that these NEED NOT be the same person... one of you could Disarm, another could Pick.

Ignore whack jobs like me who espouse the concept of spellcasting Bards... until he gets to 30th level. Then, pick up the holy text and start preaching chapter and verse right along with me.
(Translation: you can turn it into a completely different game, for a Bard, once he hits 30th level and gets a darn good room-effect damage spell now-with-possibility-of-hitting-only-a-single-target-too.)

I could never make peace with a sword swinging ranger myself. It just didn't seem rangerly to use a sword, so I always avoided trying one.

I recently decided to give it a go and chose archery for my ranger. I almost quit right after I rolled her but I stuck to it, wrote a few macros to make it easier and I love it! I never thought I would enjoy playing another profession as much as I do my sorceress but this ranger....I just love her!

She is pretty kick butt too, seems to get more and more crits and one shot kills as she progresses.

Cordaleigh's mum.

Okay okay, you got me there. Still I was thinking more wood elf type ranger. ;)

Hey thanks for all the input and the welcomes! I started thinking about Gemstone randomly one night and, to be honest, I'd typically only done solo adventuring before with a few duo hunting trips that never seemed to work very well.

I'll be teaching them the ins-and-outs of the game for the most part the first time we meet up to play on our laptops in the same room to make it easier.

Do people think that I should install all the "bells and whistles" right away or should I try and get them to spend the first night (no doubt hunting rats) with just a basic stormfront setup? They seem interested enough I at least want to show them what it was like before you had maps that follow you around on the screen and macros to, more or less, instantly take you anywhere to anywhere else. I just hope I don't scare them away!

As to the Empath thing, I'm guessing that that bone shatter spell isn't a real substitute for a Sorc. It looked neat; I hadn't paid any attention to any of the changes in the last 10 years, so I'm winging it.

The basic setup of three semis seems like something that no one had said anything bad against and that it would even be sound, so I'll probably recommend that to them.

One question on the current rules: If I revived my 40 something Ranger from before on another account and used him to cast maxed out mobiles on the party, then just log him off, would that be against the rules? I seem to remember that you couldn't really use characters on other accounts to do much other than hold stuff.

If that is kosher than we could use a Rogue instead of the Ranger. We'll probably only get in about 3-4 hours max a week of playtime (maybe double that if we setup a second weekly session) and I don't want to have to spend our first hour each time finding necessary spells from around the community.

>Do people think that I should install all the "bells and whistles" right away or should I try and get them to spend the first night (no doubt hunting rats) with just a basic stormfront setup?

recommend spending a few months with just StormFront and learning the actual game vs. learning the 3rd party software.