Speaking of expensive, Elaura is focusing on raising her Appraise skill, so I think we should let her do the buying and selling because she's more likely to get better prices than we are. That and having one person keep track of the gold is much easier than everybody keeping a small amount that won't buy much. Just let her know if you need anything and she'll keep an eye out for it.
I'm taking ranks in craft alchemy so I'll be able to create potions as needed. I'm also going to take the craft wondrous and magical arms and armor feats so I can enchant our equipment later on. I won't be able to bless anything, but there's an NPC cleric we'll need later on for part of the story that should be able to do that. I can craft anything else we need. Also, Darrin (Tampamac) has said that he'll take the craft weapons and armor feats, so we'll eventually have nicer stuff that we won't have to pay the asking price for.
Regarding NPCs: I hate using them in multiplayer games because I like to just control one character at a time. When I'm playing a single player game, I can pause whenever I need to and take as much time as I want when making decisions. In an mp game, that's not always possible or fair to everybody else. So, I will not take along any NPCs that we do not need for a quest and will only use those that we do need for a quest for as long as we need them. The only exception to this is Shandra and that's only because she refuses to be left behind. She's a fighter so I'll slap some hand-me-downs on her and call it a day. I'm also going through the cut-scenes as quick as I can because we've seen them a few times and Elaura and I are more interested in the action than the story - I've gotten up to owning the castle and will probably finish the game before we get to that point. If you guys want, we can watch them instead, but we'd rather skip through them.
