I started playing the game when I was probably like 10 or so. Anyways, for the longest time I couldn't beat Sarevok. My brothers could but I never watched them actually do it. How do you beat this guy? I wondered. I'd fight him in melee and lose horribly. I'd cast magic missile at him (keep in mind this was the pre-TOTSC Baldur's Gate so it was before he was nerfed and he had like 90-100% magic resistance) and they did nothing!
Anyways, I'm not sure when I first beat him but it would have been a glorious feeling I'm sure
Didn't know that the thief's Detect Illusion ability is tied to the Detect/Disarm trap icon. When activated and your Detect Illusion skill is high enough invisible enemies are detected!!
@velehal Kivan's a very competent melee fighter. Admittedly you might have been melee heavy, but he's probably better than Jaheira as a tank and damage dealer.
I didn't realise for ages that you could scroll down the thief skills when leveling up, so my top for skills all had 200 plus, while the rest had none.
What?!
There are more than four skills? :O
I genuinely did not know this. I need to go check this for myself RIGHT NOW.
It did take me....several years of playing the game to figure that out, too.
I admit, I made the common noob mistake of using direct damage and healing spells. They aren't useless mind, but sometimes another spell of that level can do the job INFINITELY better...or you could just load up on wands for all your DD needs and use slots on spells you don't have wands for.
Thankfully, you couldn't erase spells in BG1 or BG2:SoA, so I learned early on that casting the spells from scrolls is MUCH more useful then erase/re-scribe cheese, and NOT to learn spells unless you're sure you'll actually use it. It's a tempting option, to be sure, but it burned me often enough I decided it wasn't worth it in the long run, vs having another cast of a spell available.
That's part of why my rest restrictions aren't really a big deal. I keep several cases of scrolls on hand (taken from enemies or bought from stores), on the odd chance an enemy saves against a spell I was depending on, or something else goes array.
Oh gods, the list is endless (the joys of playing a game meant for adults when your age is still in single digits) but what really stands out from my first attempt at Baldur's Gate
1. I treated everyone like a fighter. I'd equip my entire party with melee weapons and tell them to jump into the frey. The results were... memorable, if predictable.
GameplayJenny made that mistake too. Difference is she TRIED to learn how to cast spells...and sepite the tutorial telling her how to, point blank, she still couldn't figure it out.
The only D&D experience I had before BG2 was Planescape: Torment, so when I first created my character I did so with the assumption that I'd get 1 stat point per level up. Once I found that that I wrong, I had to start over because my stats were horrible.
I made many mistakes, I was 15 at the time and had no idea of ad&d rules, just learnt while playing, always wondered what the hell was the thaco, also at first I thougth that the armor class needed to be high instead of lower, you can imagine the result. Of course it looked strange to be stronger without armor, lol.
I made the typical mistake of treating everyone like a Fighter. I had a Fighter/Mage who was the first character I took through the whole trilogy, and basically played her as a gimped Fighter. She even spent most of the time in full armour (the Fire Dragon scale, because how could she not wear that?). I think I even had Edwin spending most of his time throwing daggers, and Crom Faeyr and the Flail of Ages went to Viconia, because she was a Cleric. Of course, since she was a cleric she was a heal-bot who occasionally whacked things.
Also , the only spells worth casting are direct damage. I was MMing my way to Victory as late as Abazigal.
I actually have no idea how I managed to finish the game.
The first thing I couldn't find out was why the game crashed on me all the time.
The second thing I didn't know was how to detect and / or disarm traps so I ran through the Nashkel mines with my warriars at the front, taking the damage - then I slept. Took me perhaps two in-game days to clear the mines.
I played BG2 for a long time (years, at least) before I found out what the "tab" button did. Heaven knows how many hours I wasted or items I missed because of that.
I figured my cavalier would work just fine with 3 int, which he did until he had a blind date with an illithid.
I used to always min my paladin's int. in BG1, until I realized it prevented you from using scrolls and wands.
I also used to max my characters' wisdom, thinking the "magic defense adjustment" was in effect (as listed in the handbook), plus I thought it benefited paladins in some way. It wasn't until I read the readme file for the first time and browsed around the internet that I found out neither was true.
One of my most memorable mistakes was the first time I rolled a "18/00" and said, "'00'? That must be the lowest 18 score!," and then re-rolled. D'oh!
I didn't know that you could reroll, ending up with a mage having really bad intelligence and constitution. I only used spells that dealt damage, and thought everything else in the spellbook was bad. I completely ignored the wierd "plus"-symbol that had appeared on Jaherias portrait. Took me a while to figure out that she had leveled up, and that you're supposed to do it manually through the character sheet. After having fought Daveorn, Dimension Door became the best and the coolest spell in the game.
I didn't know how to quicksave, didn't disarm traps, and didn't understand English well enough to follow the plot and thus knowing where to head next. Minsc was an asshole, me and my friends thought, because he attacked you after having joined the party! What a useless character. Obviously none of us knew what a "damsel in distress" was, and that you're supposed to rescue it. Strangely enough, BG was never as epic and awesome as back then, as a kid not knowing the fundamentals.
The game eventually crashed when i was fighting the Flaming Fist in their HQ, and after that I couldn't load the game anymore without an error popping up. I cried a little and uninstalled the game, thinking that the file would be erased forever. A year or so later I installed the game anew, on the same computer. The old save file was still there, and it worked. One of my friends had come over and saw how bad my mage was, laughing. I still remember him saying something along the lines of "This is the worst character I've ever seen". I had to start all over again out of sheer humiliation. From that day forward I became a very patient reroller. I also liked to read the game manual in the bathtub a lot.
I didn't know how to quicksave for a long time either. I did know enough to save often, but I saved every save as an individual saved game. Consequently, I would quickly amass about 100 or so saved games in just a few days of playing.
ah, starting the game back in the day, I was 12 years old when I first starting playing, and I had no idea, what an rpg game was, all I saw was that it was a game with spells and swords and monsters and stuff, and I instantly fell in love, thinking, wow, how could they make a game like this? it felt so real, so one day, the person that owned the game told me the basics, he said, lower AC is better, always use weapons that you are skilled with, this is how you cast spells, this is how you find traps and disarm them, and then wooosh, off I went, lots of good lessons were learned, lets see if I can recap on some mistakes I have made:
never had money, I spent countless gold at temples on healing and raising characters back from the dead ( I hate party members die very often, because the difficulty was on the highest but yet I had no clue) so I never had money, I remember the day when I bought platemail ( just platemail not fullplate) and the largeshield+1 both from bently, and I was like; Hell yeah, im INVINCIBLE now baddies
ability scores, had no idea what was going on with these or what importance it had, when I first started I wanted to be a barbarian type character so I was told as long as you have 18/91 or higher strength, you are good to go, i had no clue what constitution or dexterity meant, so i thought couldn't be important, and i knew what intelligence and wisdom was but i thought, meh im a warrior shouldn't need too much of that, and i had no clue what charisma was either, so here i was with 18/91+ str and around 13 or 14 in all other stats, good times, it wasn't until years later when i experimented what the other ability scores did, did i find out how much they affect your character, wowzers
reputation, had no clue what that was all about and the influence it had on npcs, i think back in the day i used, imoen, jaheria, Khalid, branwen and xan and me for my team ( or xzar for my mage before i could get xan) so anyways, i killed a couple of innocents had my rep drop to 4, thought nothing of it, then this group of random flaming fist baddies starting coming in about a month of game time later, and it was back to the temples to revive dead par-tay members and gold piece healing, but money was flying out so fast i couldn't keep up, and had no idea why these flaming fist kept coming after me
game saving, ah good ol' game saving, never knew about quick save, so i would do the old fashion go through multiple menus to save game, and the only time that i would ever reload would be when my main character died ( which happened quite often) but other than that i would never reload, and i was quite diligent on making sure the main character would live, and i had times when team mates exploded and i was like..... um, how am i going to get those guys back? so yeah, more good times
i remember there was this one Halfling in the ulcaster area i believe saying that i could buy this mystical gem or some sort for 1000 gold and it would give me sweet powers, so it took me AGES to get that money ( thank you temples, making them nice and rich) and then i could finally buy to find that it was a turquoise gem worth 2 gp, good times, i was very naïve when i first played, i always took what npcs said for granted and fell for their tom-foolery
useless item buying, i thought for whatever reason infravision was a must have ability, and with no rep and cha the ring of infravision was a couple thousand gold, so i took all efforts to buy it, and once i finally bought i thought; Hell yeah, i finally have a magic ring and its going to make me kick butt in the dark, derp
thac0, no idea what that was, or had no idea how the battle system worked, all i knew was that two handed sword was my favourite weapon and i put all my weapon profs into large swords, and when i finally found the two handed sword+1 with 18/91+ str and had 3+ profs in large swords, i lucked out, and i thought i was a destroyer of worlds when i was chunking people, but at low levels i couldn't understand why i was missing so much, and i thought it was because on the screen ( from the reach of a two handed weapon) i was far away enough that it looked like i wasn't hitting, so i actually moved in closer thinking that would make me hit better, and i foolishly thought that solved the problem anytime i started missing, ah good stuff
i remember wand of magic missiles was my most favourite item of the game, because it made it so my fighter could cast a spell and do magic damage, and i felt that my fighter was such a boss because he could use a wand if he needed, it was only 1d4+1 damage, but that wand was a life saver
rings and necklaces, i barely if ever had magical ones, so i thought for whatever reason the more expensive the jewellery your character was wearing the better he would be ( perhaps in the eyes of npcs?) but regardless i would do it anyway, no doubt having a couple thousand gold in jewellery that i didn't even need, the fire opal ring was my favourite because sometimes a ghast would drop one and it sold for 250 gold
i remember the first time i had minsc on my team and thought, cool i found another fighter guy to use, and i saw that he had a two handed sword so i gave him the two handed sword+1 but didn't go get dynaheir, had no idea where she was or who she was, so days later ( 10 i believe) minsc goes hostile and starts chopping my team to bits, ah good times
scrolls and letters, i thought every scroll and letter that had anything to do with the story i had to keep for whatever reason ( gorion's scroll, bounty notices, letters from boss baddies) infact i remember the first time i ever reached sarevok i still had gorion's scroll on me, right arm
donating to temples, had no clue what that meant, so if i had like 571 gold, i would donate 71 gold and nothing would happen, and i thought why is this even in here? but sometimes i just donated randomly thinking that is would be good charma for my character to do so, and it would round off my money to make it look pretty
so that be my novel of rookie strategies that i used when i played for the first couple of years that i can remember off hand, good times those, playing it in that style just made this game so epic that i continued to play for years still being awe-inspired with each new character
scrolls and letters, i thought every scroll and letter that had anything to do with the story i had to keep for whatever reason ( gorion's scroll, bounty notices, letters from boss baddies) infact i remember the first time i ever reached sarevok i still had gorion's scroll on me, right arm
You know, I still do this, at least with the Gorion letter. Wish we had the scroll case back then too .
...Started a new game with a Monk in BG Tutu. Seriously, I always thought that he would get better but he was still weak in the final battle with the best gear I could get him.
i remember there was this one Halfling in the ulcaster area i believe saying that i could buy this mystical gem or some sort for 1000 gold and it would give me sweet powers, so it took me AGES to get that money ( thank you temples, making them nice and rich) and then i could finally buy to find that it was a turquoise gem worth 2 gp, good times, i was very naïve when i first played, i always took what npcs said for granted and fell for their tom-foolery
In the same vein, I used to buy those cursed potions of healing (the ones where the description would say, "the color looks strange somehow") and use them in the heat of battle, not realizing that I may be healing my party member but also cutting one of their ability scores in half. I probably used them multiple times before I finally discovered that they were also having adverse effects of my party members.
I started to play BG1 7 years after it came out, by that time I was 7, and I didn't know a crap about english, but my earlier experience with Diablo ll wasn't so bad, so I installed to 2 disc OS version, I thought Druid were guys that mix things in cauldrons, that Paladins where Holy Fighters (they are but...) that only had pros, also the Bard were barbarians-like and, I realized THAC0 was better when lower the while in Baldur's Gate in my first run of BG:EE (In BG1, I deduced that AC was better when lower, because if it looks better, it gives better protection, so that was right...). The first time I played BG:EE, I selected "Find Familiar" and "Identify" as lvl1 spells, and I thought Multi and Dual-class where the same, I equipped EVERY SINGLE CURSED ITEM, because I didn't knew a crap (hehe, just that word got stuck!) about them and I was equiping unidentified items all the time. The only class that I got right was the Ranger, because of Majesty's Ranger Camp (yes, I played Majesty before, while and after the I played original BG)
Oh the experience of my first Fireball in BG1! My party burned...
I'm still surprised I actually managed to finish my first playthrough with Charname (fighter), Imoen, Jaheira & Khalid and Xzar & Montaron without an all out fight!
@Sed in bgee I had an instance where as soon as I got Khalid and jaheira, all 4 of them started the all out scrap, and I thought, wow, that was a little short lived, good job on your part making it all the way
Semi-related to the main topic, but mostly, I still laugh at myself for this:
After years of playing Baldur's Gate, I started up Dragon Age: Origins. Every time someone went down during a fight in DAO, I reloaded my game--didn't wait for combat to finish. Took me forever to realize THEY GET RIGHT BACK UP AFTER COMBAT IS OVER. >.<
Semi-related to the main topic, but mostly, I still laugh at myself for this:
After years of playing Baldur's Gate, I started up Dragon Age: Origins. Every time someone went down during a fight in DAO, I reloaded my game--didn't wait for combat to finish. Took me forever to realize THEY GET RIGHT BACK UP AFTER COMBAT IS OVER. >.<</p>
Might be best to do that anyways to avoid the injury.
Semi-related to the main topic, but mostly, I still laugh at myself for this:
After years of playing Baldur's Gate, I started up Dragon Age: Origins. Every time someone went down during a fight in DAO, I reloaded my game--didn't wait for combat to finish. Took me forever to realize THEY GET RIGHT BACK UP AFTER COMBAT IS OVER. >.<</p>
Like in KotOR, those games are very, very easy when you compare them to BG or PST.
Also, when I started playing BG:EE, after READING THE WHOLE MANUAL MONTHS BEGORE ITS RELEASE, I engaged in melee all the time, a thing I found funny is that the only similar thing between your first and your ninth run is that you engage ALL THE ENEMIES IN MELEE, in the first one, because you don't know a crap, and the ninth one, you are so OP you engage difficult enemies in melee because you have -10AC+3APR, and to avoid wasting MM to kill glibberings, but in BG2, when you see a low level enemy you use PW:Kill so you can focus on dealing 200 points of damage to the 75-damage-each-hit-boss before he gets near your party.
scrolls and letters, i thought every scroll and letter that had anything to do with the story i had to keep for whatever reason ( gorion's scroll, bounty notices, letters from boss baddies) infact i remember the first time i ever reached sarevok i still had gorion's scroll on me, right arm
You know, I still do this, at least with the Gorion letter. Wish we had the scroll case back then too .
There's only one scroll I manage to surely have in the final battle: Protection from Magic Scroll, give it to somebody like Dorn and see wonders.
Comments
Anyways, I'm not sure when I first beat him but it would have been a glorious feeling I'm sure
Thankfully, you couldn't erase spells in BG1 or BG2:SoA, so I learned early on that casting the spells from scrolls is MUCH more useful then erase/re-scribe cheese, and NOT to learn spells unless you're sure you'll actually use it. It's a tempting option, to be sure, but it burned me often enough I decided it wasn't worth it in the long run, vs having another cast of a spell available.
That's part of why my rest restrictions aren't really a big deal. I keep several cases of scrolls on hand (taken from enemies or bought from stores), on the odd chance an enemy saves against a spell I was depending on, or something else goes array.
Also , the only spells worth casting are direct damage. I was MMing my way to Victory as late as Abazigal.
I actually have no idea how I managed to finish the game.
The second thing I didn't know was how to detect and / or disarm traps so I ran through the Nashkel mines with my warriars at the front, taking the damage - then I slept.
Took me perhaps two in-game days to clear the mines.
I also used to max my characters' wisdom, thinking the "magic defense adjustment" was in effect (as listed in the handbook), plus I thought it benefited paladins in some way. It wasn't until I read the readme file for the first time and browsed around the internet that I found out neither was true.
One of my most memorable mistakes was the first time I rolled a "18/00" and said, "'00'? That must be the lowest 18 score!," and then re-rolled. D'oh!
I didn't know how to quicksave, didn't disarm traps, and didn't understand English well enough to follow the plot and thus knowing where to head next. Minsc was an asshole, me and my friends thought, because he attacked you after having joined the party! What a useless character. Obviously none of us knew what a "damsel in distress" was, and that you're supposed to rescue it. Strangely enough, BG was never as epic and awesome as back then, as a kid not knowing the fundamentals.
The game eventually crashed when i was fighting the Flaming Fist in their HQ, and after that I couldn't load the game anymore without an error popping up. I cried a little and uninstalled the game, thinking that the file would be erased forever. A year or so later I installed the game anew, on the same computer. The old save file was still there, and it worked. One of my friends had come over and saw how bad my mage was, laughing. I still remember him saying something along the lines of "This is the worst character I've ever seen". I had to start all over again out of sheer humiliation. From that day forward I became a very patient reroller. I also liked to read the game manual in the bathtub a lot.
never had money, I spent countless gold at temples on healing and raising characters back from the dead ( I hate party members die very often, because the difficulty was on the highest but yet I had no clue) so I never had money, I remember the day when I bought platemail ( just platemail not fullplate) and the largeshield+1 both from bently, and I was like; Hell yeah, im INVINCIBLE now baddies
ability scores, had no idea what was going on with these or what importance it had, when I first started I wanted to be a barbarian type character so I was told as long as you have 18/91 or higher strength, you are good to go, i had no clue what constitution or dexterity meant, so i thought couldn't be important, and i knew what intelligence and wisdom was but i thought, meh im a warrior shouldn't need too much of that, and i had no clue what charisma was either, so here i was with 18/91+ str and around 13 or 14 in all other stats, good times, it wasn't until years later when i experimented what the other ability scores did, did i find out how much they affect your character, wowzers
reputation, had no clue what that was all about and the influence it had on npcs, i think back in the day i used, imoen, jaheria, Khalid, branwen and xan and me for my team ( or xzar for my mage before i could get xan) so anyways, i killed a couple of innocents had my rep drop to 4, thought nothing of it, then this group of random flaming fist baddies starting coming in about a month of game time later, and it was back to the temples to revive dead par-tay members and gold piece healing, but money was flying out so fast i couldn't keep up, and had no idea why these flaming fist kept coming after me
game saving, ah good ol' game saving, never knew about quick save, so i would do the old fashion go through multiple menus to save game, and the only time that i would ever reload would be when my main character died ( which happened quite often) but other than that i would never reload, and i was quite diligent on making sure the main character would live, and i had times when team mates exploded and i was like..... um, how am i going to get those guys back? so yeah, more good times
i remember there was this one Halfling in the ulcaster area i believe saying that i could buy this mystical gem or some sort for 1000 gold and it would give me sweet powers, so it took me AGES to get that money ( thank you temples, making them nice and rich) and then i could finally buy to find that it was a turquoise gem worth 2 gp, good times, i was very naïve when i first played, i always took what npcs said for granted and fell for their tom-foolery
useless item buying, i thought for whatever reason infravision was a must have ability, and with no rep and cha the ring of infravision was a couple thousand gold, so i took all efforts to buy it, and once i finally bought i thought; Hell yeah, i finally have a magic ring and its going to make me kick butt in the dark, derp
thac0, no idea what that was, or had no idea how the battle system worked, all i knew was that two handed sword was my favourite weapon and i put all my weapon profs into large swords, and when i finally found the two handed sword+1 with 18/91+ str and had 3+ profs in large swords, i lucked out, and i thought i was a destroyer of worlds when i was chunking people, but at low levels i couldn't understand why i was missing so much, and i thought it was because on the screen ( from the reach of a two handed weapon) i was far away enough that it looked like i wasn't hitting, so i actually moved in closer thinking that would make me hit better, and i foolishly thought that solved the problem anytime i started missing, ah good stuff
i remember wand of magic missiles was my most favourite item of the game, because it made it so my fighter could cast a spell and do magic damage, and i felt that my fighter was such a boss because he could use a wand if he needed, it was only 1d4+1 damage, but that wand was a life saver
rings and necklaces, i barely if ever had magical ones, so i thought for whatever reason the more expensive the jewellery your character was wearing the better he would be ( perhaps in the eyes of npcs?) but regardless i would do it anyway, no doubt having a couple thousand gold in jewellery that i didn't even need, the fire opal ring was my favourite because sometimes a ghast would drop one and it sold for 250 gold
i remember the first time i had minsc on my team and thought, cool i found another fighter guy to use, and i saw that he had a two handed sword so i gave him the two handed sword+1 but didn't go get dynaheir, had no idea where she was or who she was, so days later ( 10 i believe) minsc goes hostile and starts chopping my team to bits, ah good times
scrolls and letters, i thought every scroll and letter that had anything to do with the story i had to keep for whatever reason ( gorion's scroll, bounty notices, letters from boss baddies) infact i remember the first time i ever reached sarevok i still had gorion's scroll on me, right arm
donating to temples, had no clue what that meant, so if i had like 571 gold, i would donate 71 gold and nothing would happen, and i thought why is this even in here? but sometimes i just donated randomly thinking that is would be good charma for my character to do so, and it would round off my money to make it look pretty
so that be my novel of rookie strategies that i used when i played for the first couple of years that i can remember off hand, good times those, playing it in that style just made this game so epic that i continued to play for years still being awe-inspired with each new character
Seriously, I always thought that he would get better but he was still weak in the final battle with the best gear I could get him.
My party burned...
I'm still surprised I actually managed to finish my first playthrough with Charname (fighter), Imoen, Jaheira & Khalid and Xzar & Montaron without an all out fight!
After years of playing Baldur's Gate, I started up Dragon Age: Origins. Every time someone went down during a fight in DAO, I reloaded my game--didn't wait for combat to finish. Took me forever to realize THEY GET RIGHT BACK UP AFTER COMBAT IS OVER. >.<
Also, when I started playing BG:EE, after READING THE WHOLE MANUAL MONTHS BEGORE ITS RELEASE, I engaged in melee all the time, a thing I found funny is that the only similar thing between your first and your ninth run is that you engage ALL THE ENEMIES IN MELEE, in the first one, because you don't know a crap, and the ninth one, you are so OP you engage difficult enemies in melee because you have -10AC+3APR, and to avoid wasting MM to kill glibberings, but in BG2, when you see a low level enemy you use PW:Kill so you can focus on dealing 200 points of damage to the 75-damage-each-hit-boss before he gets near your party.