Naluo Sago: Non-Legit, Non-Enhanced, Non-Reload
OlvynChuru
Member Posts: 3,075
This is a no-reload solo playthrough of the non-enhanced Baldur's Gate Tales of the Sword Coast, and it is my first no-reload playthrough ever. For quite a while, I've been against doing no-reload playthroughs because of how tedious they are: every time you lose, you have to go through the boring beginning parts of the game again, like traveling through multiple large areas with pretty much nothing in them in order to get to the Nashkel Mines, where you can just plow through all the kobolds effortlessly. However, I managed to come up with a character that will make a no-reload playthrough fun and interesting, one that can potentially go through the game quickly but can also be killed extremely easily.
Naluo Sago is a fighter/mage/cleric. He has 20 AC and 20 in all saving throws. He attacks five times per round with -60 THAC0 and a two-handed sword that has 0 Speed Factor and thrusts for 20 flat piercing damage. Taking proficiency and strength bonuses into consideration, he deals 39 damage with each hit. He has 2 max HP and he can't level up, so that's all he's going to get. He can't equip a different weapon, and he can't wear anything that modifies his base armor class.
In some other thread I mentioned a character I made in BG:EE called Naluo Sago; this character is different, but it's the same concept: he can do amazing things but he dies easily.
He also starts with various spells at different levels available. He can only cast these spells, and only in certain quantities. Here are his spells:
Sanctuary 3x
Detect Evil 2x
Entangle 1x
Magical Stone 3x
Command 3x
Resist Fire/Cold 2x
Find Traps 1x
Mental Domination 2x (in the original game, this prevented the caster from casting spells during the duration)
Magic Missile 6x
Blindness 6x
Invisibility 1x
Agannazar's Scorcher 2x (in the original game, this only hit once for 3d6 damage; I made it do 18 damage)
Lightning Bolt 3x
Dimension Door 24x (I gave this zero casting time)
Cone of Cold 2x (in the original game, the farther away the target was from the caster, the larger the cone was; I made it so that the spell can be cast anywhere in sight)
He also knows the spells Animate Dead (cleric), Protection from Lightning, and Shadow Door, but he can't memorize them until later. Once Chapter 3 begins, he can cast Shadow Door once per day. Once Chapter 4 begins, he can cast Protection from Lightning once per day. Once Chapter 7 begins, he can cast Animate Dead once per day. Since he is always level 1, his spells won't be quite as powerful as they usually are.
He also starts the game with Boots of Speed. I made it so that the boots grant maximum movement speed. However, if you do that, there's a really weird glitch: in the original game, someone with higher movement speed than is obtainable by a combination of Haste and normal Boots of Speed will be unable to turn around. If you make them go backwards, they will moonwalk, even if you want them to go backwards across an entire map. What's more problematic is that, while under this condition, the character can only cast spells and use items on him/herself or on a target he/she is facing. Removing the boots gets rid of this. I actually thought that this was an interesting game mechanic, so I didn't undo what I did to the boots. It's not simply a matter of removing the boots whenever you want the character to cast a spell on an enemy, because in the original game bringing up the inventory screen unpaused the game.
So here's how it went initially: I was intending to play the game on the hardest difficulty, but there was a problem: in Gorion's death cutscene in the original game, Tamoko casts Flame Arrow on you, and although it normally only deals one damage, if you have 2 max HP and you take double damage, you're screwed (I think the original reason why you got healed before going out with Gorion was so that you wouldn't have to worry about getting killed in the cutscene if you had taken a lot of damage in Candlekeep). I had to lower the difficulty then turn it back up after Gorion died. I had wanted to have the difficulty be maxed so that everyone who would normally deal one damage would deal two damage and kill Naluo Sago in one hit, but I soon found out that a lot of enemies will still only do one damage to someone with 2 max HP. How ironic that a cutscene attack that isn't supposed to kill the player CAN kill a player with 2 max HP in one hit, yet a punch from an ogrillion cannot!
My initial save is after Gorion's death, so whenever I lose I will reload to that save. I don't want to reload to Candlekeep, because then I would have to watch Gorion's death cutscene every time. I took Imoen's Oil of Speed and ditched her. Here's what the character looks like, by the way:
One of Gorion's assailants just happened to drop a Potion of Heroism. It won't help much, considering that he already has -60 THAC0 and the potion won't even give him a single additional hit point.
Anyway, here's the first run:
Run #1:
Naluo Sago ran to Beregost, killed Silke and took her stuff, ran to Nashkel and discovered that Mark Daer'Ragh was feigning death. The annoyed Daer'Ragh summoned a crew of Phoenix Guards. I had Naluo Sago kill them all with a Cone of Cold, but I had forgotton that they explode when they die. An explosion got him, and that was game over.
There's more to come!
Naluo Sago is a fighter/mage/cleric. He has 20 AC and 20 in all saving throws. He attacks five times per round with -60 THAC0 and a two-handed sword that has 0 Speed Factor and thrusts for 20 flat piercing damage. Taking proficiency and strength bonuses into consideration, he deals 39 damage with each hit. He has 2 max HP and he can't level up, so that's all he's going to get. He can't equip a different weapon, and he can't wear anything that modifies his base armor class.
In some other thread I mentioned a character I made in BG:EE called Naluo Sago; this character is different, but it's the same concept: he can do amazing things but he dies easily.
He also starts with various spells at different levels available. He can only cast these spells, and only in certain quantities. Here are his spells:
Sanctuary 3x
Detect Evil 2x
Entangle 1x
Magical Stone 3x
Command 3x
Resist Fire/Cold 2x
Find Traps 1x
Mental Domination 2x (in the original game, this prevented the caster from casting spells during the duration)
Magic Missile 6x
Blindness 6x
Invisibility 1x
Agannazar's Scorcher 2x (in the original game, this only hit once for 3d6 damage; I made it do 18 damage)
Lightning Bolt 3x
Dimension Door 24x (I gave this zero casting time)
Cone of Cold 2x (in the original game, the farther away the target was from the caster, the larger the cone was; I made it so that the spell can be cast anywhere in sight)
He also knows the spells Animate Dead (cleric), Protection from Lightning, and Shadow Door, but he can't memorize them until later. Once Chapter 3 begins, he can cast Shadow Door once per day. Once Chapter 4 begins, he can cast Protection from Lightning once per day. Once Chapter 7 begins, he can cast Animate Dead once per day. Since he is always level 1, his spells won't be quite as powerful as they usually are.
He also starts the game with Boots of Speed. I made it so that the boots grant maximum movement speed. However, if you do that, there's a really weird glitch: in the original game, someone with higher movement speed than is obtainable by a combination of Haste and normal Boots of Speed will be unable to turn around. If you make them go backwards, they will moonwalk, even if you want them to go backwards across an entire map. What's more problematic is that, while under this condition, the character can only cast spells and use items on him/herself or on a target he/she is facing. Removing the boots gets rid of this. I actually thought that this was an interesting game mechanic, so I didn't undo what I did to the boots. It's not simply a matter of removing the boots whenever you want the character to cast a spell on an enemy, because in the original game bringing up the inventory screen unpaused the game.
So here's how it went initially: I was intending to play the game on the hardest difficulty, but there was a problem: in Gorion's death cutscene in the original game, Tamoko casts Flame Arrow on you, and although it normally only deals one damage, if you have 2 max HP and you take double damage, you're screwed (I think the original reason why you got healed before going out with Gorion was so that you wouldn't have to worry about getting killed in the cutscene if you had taken a lot of damage in Candlekeep). I had to lower the difficulty then turn it back up after Gorion died. I had wanted to have the difficulty be maxed so that everyone who would normally deal one damage would deal two damage and kill Naluo Sago in one hit, but I soon found out that a lot of enemies will still only do one damage to someone with 2 max HP. How ironic that a cutscene attack that isn't supposed to kill the player CAN kill a player with 2 max HP in one hit, yet a punch from an ogrillion cannot!
My initial save is after Gorion's death, so whenever I lose I will reload to that save. I don't want to reload to Candlekeep, because then I would have to watch Gorion's death cutscene every time. I took Imoen's Oil of Speed and ditched her. Here's what the character looks like, by the way:
One of Gorion's assailants just happened to drop a Potion of Heroism. It won't help much, considering that he already has -60 THAC0 and the potion won't even give him a single additional hit point.
Anyway, here's the first run:
Run #1:
Naluo Sago ran to Beregost, killed Silke and took her stuff, ran to Nashkel and discovered that Mark Daer'Ragh was feigning death. The annoyed Daer'Ragh summoned a crew of Phoenix Guards. I had Naluo Sago kill them all with a Cone of Cold, but I had forgotton that they explode when they die. An explosion got him, and that was game over.
There's more to come!
Post edited by OlvynChuru on
2
Comments
It was annoying to have to watch the Beregost movie every time Naluo went to Beregost in a run (the movies cannot be skipped in the original game), so this time he went south in order to go around Beregost. In order to avoid getting killed by dagger-throwing skeletons and other hazards, he cast Sanctuary on himself in each dangerous area. Eventually he will have to go to Beregost, but in a lot of these runs he will end up dying before he has to. The same went for Nashkel; Naluo went to the carnival in order to start Chapter 2 without triggering the Nashkel movie. Then he went straight to mines.
I could tell that the game REALLY wasn't designed with Dimension Door in mind. In the original game, the only thing preventing you from entering the mines without permission is the trio of guards who you can't push out of the way. However, you can cast Dimension Door to teleport past them and enter the mines unauthorized!
Naluo ran straight to the second area of the mines; he didn't agree to return Kylee's dagger. In the second area, he cast Sanctuary to sneak past the kobolds, but in the original game NPCs could still talk to you while had Sanctuary up (not when you were invisible, though), so the doomed miner got shot down by kobolds while Naluo went to the next area.
Now here's where things get tricky. Naluo can't simply sneak through this whole area because the bridge over the gorge in the middle of the area has two traps, and on the other side of the bridge are three kobold archers who can easily kill him. It's worth remembering that Naluo is not a thief; his only way of dealing with traps is to teleport past them with Dimension Door, and that breaks his invisibility. So I was pondering what to do while he was standing near one of the traps, but by this point his Sanctuary had worn off. One of the kobold archers came along (they like to wander around) and shot him for 1 damage. Naluo ran away, hid behind a corner, and cast another Sanctuary. The kobold followed, making it easy for him to kill it.
Now he was out of Sanctuary spells, and he needed to rest. He cast Invisibility on himself to protect him from any kobold archers that would wake him up. He rested, and a kobold archer woke him up! He killed it, but now he had no hiding spells left at all. Here's where one of my old resting tricks becomes important.
I made Naluo rest when he was standing on the marker that would let him go to the previous area. If he got woken up by kobold archers that would otherwise kill him, he could quickly go to the previous area and get another shot at resting. Luckily I didn't need to do this, as he managed to rest safely for 8 hours.
I still had no idea what to do to get past the traps. For lack of a better option, I had Naluo teleport past the traps and hoped that there were no kobolds on the other side, and luckily there weren't (they must have wandered off). So he cast Sanctuary and sneaked past all the enemies until he reached the exit to the area, teleporting past the traps that were there.
In the next area, he had to rest immediately to replenish his sanctuaries. He was able to rest for 8 hours, then he sneaked into Mulahey's lair. I tried to make him fight the few melee kobolds that were there by having him hit one, run away, then repeat the process until he had killed them all. It worked with some of them due to his great speed factor and attacks per round, but when he attacked one of the kobolds, for some reason he did a fake attack instead of a regular attack (I didn't expect someone with 5 attacks per round to do a fake attack), then the kobold stabbed him for 2 damage. Game over.
Run #3:
Once again, I had Naluo Sago go south, but in the High Hedge area I forgot to have him cast Sanctuary. A dagger-throwing skeleton did 2 damage to him. Game over.
Run #4:
I did most of the same things that I did in the second run to get up to the third area of the mines, but I wasn't so lucky there this time. I had Naluo Sago teleport past the traps over the gorge, and there were several kobold archers waiting for him. They shot him, and it was game over again.
After testing some strategies in the area, I discovered that the arrow traps in the mines only do 1 damage to Naluo. Now that I know that, I've come up with ways to get past that area reliably.
However, that will have to wait until next time.