How does Multiplayer work?

[Cruddy]

Looking to finally play these games after finishing BG3 twice and want to hopefully do it with the same group, but I'm a bit unclear on how the multiplayer works even after some digging.

Is it a somewhat seamless experience? How does the game handle a PCs death, is it easy to fix, or an auto game over like Singleplayer would be? Do conversations with NPCs freeze everyone and force them to listen?

Anything else you could add would be great. Also apologies if this is in the wrong section.

[Hopper]

If you're one of the lucky ones that gets it to work, you'll be able to take the same characters through all of BG1, SoD, BG2 and ToB. But take one step at a time, because most BG multiplayer games don't last very long... or even get started.

Before you do anything, I'd run a test game to make sure that you can all connect to eachother's game and that everything runs smoothly.

This is what a multiplayer setup screen looks like.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3022480417

There can be 1-6 players sharing 1-6 characters, but I'd try to keep it to 2 players because more than that just gets messy. You can change which players controls which characters at any moment, though normally only the host can control the main character.

Make sure to click the little boxes with the cogs, they let you set which players can start dialog, pause, trade, etc. Many hosts forget to do this.

-It's game over if the main character dies. Pressing reload takes you back to the character setup screen and everyone has to press READY again.

-If any other character dies, they can't do anything unless the other players go to the trouble of resurrecting them, but that's a pain in the butt in these early games... And dying is extremely easy.

-Dialog pauses the game for everyone.
-Trading doesn't pause the game for everyone.

-Pausing is very important in these games, but you should really just leave that to the host because multiplayer pausing comes with a delay before you can use it again.

[Fallen JeStEr]

People have stated that they play over hamachi or game ranger. Never used it so I dont know how stable it is.

I can tell you the multiplayer through the in game system is not stable. You might be able to get a few hours out of a session with constant disconnects.