Edit: we restarted from a load and it worked.

I'm playing BB:EE with a friend for the first time. When we should get Imoen, she never joined. I wondered it if was due to a setting or perhaps you don't get characters on MP games.

After the night of play, I watched a YouTube video and saw that yes indeed we should have received her into our party.

So my questions are:

Are we screwed?
Can we get her back?
What would cause an NPC to not join?

P.S. Technical details in case it's important:
I'm playing my GOG copy
He's playing his Steam
Everything else seems to work fine, but we do see non-synchronized activity often (like a guy's animation for attacking doesn't match when he does damage or someone will slingshot across the screen to catch up parodically)

the issue will be caused by lag... fyi the gog copy is buggy

Heya!

Does steam work better?

I don't own the game on Steam sorry, only Gog and Beamdog

I think the game itself is buggy. I had the original BG on cd back in the day. When using Winex/Cedega (whatever they call themselves now) on Linux, I used a cheat code to create multiple bags of holding. I then created items and put in the first bag until full. When that bag was full, I tried putting items in the second bag but it was already full. Turns out each bag duplicated the items from the first bag and deleting items from one deleted them from all.

Whether or not this is a bug is debatable, but it is a well known quirk of the game. Bags of Holding work much like stores that charge nothing for a transaction. There are multiple distinct items in the game considered a Bag of Holding, and some of them, like the Gem Bag or the Potion Case, restrict what you can store in them. In all cases, the item is not actually in the bag. It is in a store that can be accessed through the bag. For a given item code, every Bag of Holding from that item code will access the same store, and thus share the same items. Thus, if you find two Bags of Holding that have distinct storage, they must be different item codes, which happen to have the same name and graphic.

Arguably, this behavior is consistent with the explanation of a Bag of Holding. "The bag of holding opens into a nondimensional space ..." It does not state that each bag gets its own nondimensional space.

this is correct and there are 3 different bag of holding codes so you can have upto 3 bags of holding [actually holding different items] but only two of them can be found in the normal game... the 3rd needs to be added by mod \ code

p.s, yes the base game has bugs but my point is the EE v of Bg1, Sod and Bg2 on Gog has more bugs that are not in the Beamdog v

Yesterday, we had a great having session without one crash or strange glitch.

He played normally, but he restricted my ability to get into conversations (which seemed to be one crash point).

I also played in windowed mode.

We also had "no clicking" rule where it we're about to change maps, I take my hands of the keyboard.

Xfinity was also behaving yesterday, too. That helped a lot.