With his shooting becoming steadily less effective, Restless decided it was time to switch to item use as his primary means of combat. Thus there was no real concern about doing lots of travel any more. First though he was keen to do at least one more shooting encounter - and headed to find Drizzt. A potion of magic blocking protected against both his charm attempts and Restless switched to a sling and used a cloud giant strength potion to boost his damage with critical hits to 12. When that ended he switched to frost giant (10 damage) and then stone giant (also 10 damage net of Drizzt's physical resistance). The final potion lasted just long enough to see the back of the drow.
Temple donations took reputation back to 12 before Restless headed for the coast. A fireball and a few magic missiles killed some worgs to get another reputation point before a potion of clarity and wand scorchers accounted for 6 sirines - that allowed Restless to get to level 7/7. He just dodged the golems in the cave while collecting their treasure. The tome from there, plus Buckley's Buckler, allows constitution regeneration - so reducing the need to pay temple healing in future.
The Cloud Peak Mountains yielded some more reputation to push that up to 20, along with the charisma tome (allowing friends to get charisma to 20). The fire wand did most of the killing there.
Looking for a bit more money, Restless went in search of Bassilus. The cleric ignored damage from the wand of frost to complete his rigid thinking spell, but Restless had stepped back out of sight before that hit and was able to wait out the effect. Back at High Hedge Melicamp failed to survive, but Restless bought various scrolls and potions and recharged the fire wand. He then spent a while in bringing various stashes of equipment together before using several potions of genius - to both learn scrolls and identify items to save paying for that. During that phase Restless also fire-bombed the Red Wizards to get the Ring of Energy as another damaging alternative.
A quick trip to Watcher's Keep saw a number of enemies die in fire, while Riggilo was treated to a first use of the wand of paralysation. By that stage Restless was at the XP cap, so intended to complete the rest of BGEE in one session in order to keep the XP earned over the cap. A PFM scroll allowed Restless to get the tome as well as kill the ghost and do some extra looting. A PfP scroll was added to deal with the basilisks on the roof (he used his sword there as the bonus for attacking enemies without a melee weapon helped counter his fatigue).
Ulgoth's Beard happily took all Restless' money in exchange for a few more scrolls and fully charged wands of frost, paralysation and monster summoning. Then he finally started dealing with the encounters in Baldur's Gate. That provided enough funding to buy desirable potions and scrolls and allow another binge of learning spells. I accidentally chose the wrong dialogue option with Yago and he disappeared, but otherwise things went pretty smoothly - or so I thought at the time ...
With most of the encounters completed I decided to do a bit of inventory management - including collecting together items previously stored at Durlag's Tower and Beregost. I also nipped over to the coast to hand over a cursed ring there. While doing that I noticed a message briefly appear in the corner of the map along the lines of "you've been poisoned" and realised that one of the few things left to do in Baldur's Gate was complete the poison quest. I hastened back there, but collapsed on arrival.
Progress up to that point was easier than I expected and I don't think it should be too difficult in principle to do a full no-reload without resting. SoD should be easy as you can get a helmet near the start that cancels fatigue penalties and there are huge amounts of resources available in that game. BG2EE wouldn't be as easy, but you can get to quite a high level with little travel in order to minimise fatigue penalties and rely largely on fighting abilities to make progress. Use of things like wish resting and spell trap should then make the later game perfectly manageable while concentrating on spell use.
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With his shooting becoming steadily less effective, Restless decided it was time to switch to item use as his primary means of combat. Thus there was no real concern about doing lots of travel any more. First though he was keen to do at least one more shooting encounter - and headed to find Drizzt. A potion of magic blocking protected against both his charm attempts and Restless switched to a sling and used a cloud giant strength potion to boost his damage with critical hits to 12. When that ended he switched to frost giant (10 damage) and then stone giant (also 10 damage net of Drizzt's physical resistance). The final potion lasted just long enough to see the back of the drow.
Temple donations took reputation back to 12 before Restless headed for the coast. A fireball and a few magic missiles killed some worgs to get another reputation point before a potion of clarity and wand scorchers accounted for 6 sirines - that allowed Restless to get to level 7/7. He just dodged the golems in the cave while collecting their treasure. The tome from there, plus Buckley's Buckler, allows constitution regeneration - so reducing the need to pay temple healing in future.
The Cloud Peak Mountains yielded some more reputation to push that up to 20, along with the charisma tome (allowing friends to get charisma to 20). The fire wand did most of the killing there.
Looking for a bit more money, Restless went in search of Bassilus. The cleric ignored damage from the wand of frost to complete his rigid thinking spell, but Restless had stepped back out of sight before that hit and was able to wait out the effect. Back at High Hedge Melicamp failed to survive, but Restless bought various scrolls and potions and recharged the fire wand. He then spent a while in bringing various stashes of equipment together before using several potions of genius - to both learn scrolls and identify items to save paying for that. During that phase Restless also fire-bombed the Red Wizards to get the Ring of Energy as another damaging alternative.
A quick trip to Watcher's Keep saw a number of enemies die in fire, while Riggilo was treated to a first use of the wand of paralysation. By that stage Restless was at the XP cap, so intended to complete the rest of BGEE in one session in order to keep the XP earned over the cap. A PFM scroll allowed Restless to get the tome as well as kill the ghost and do some extra looting. A PfP scroll was added to deal with the basilisks on the roof (he used his sword there as the bonus for attacking enemies without a melee weapon helped counter his fatigue).
Ulgoth's Beard happily took all Restless' money in exchange for a few more scrolls and fully charged wands of frost, paralysation and monster summoning. Then he finally started dealing with the encounters in Baldur's Gate. That provided enough funding to buy desirable potions and scrolls and allow another binge of learning spells. I accidentally chose the wrong dialogue option with Yago and he disappeared, but otherwise things went pretty smoothly - or so I thought at the time ...
With most of the encounters completed I decided to do a bit of inventory management - including collecting together items previously stored at Durlag's Tower and Beregost. I also nipped over to the coast to hand over a cursed ring there. While doing that I noticed a message briefly appear in the corner of the map along the lines of "you've been poisoned" and realised that one of the few things left to do in Baldur's Gate was complete the poison quest. I hastened back there, but collapsed on arrival.
Progress up to that point was easier than I expected and I don't think it should be too difficult in principle to do a full no-reload without resting. SoD should be easy as you can get a helmet near the start that cancels fatigue penalties and there are huge amounts of resources available in that game. BG2EE wouldn't be as easy, but you can get to quite a high level with little travel in order to minimise fatigue penalties and rely largely on fighting abilities to make progress. Use of things like wish resting and spell trap should then make the later game perfectly manageable while concentrating on spell use.