How do you play? Reloads?
Glorfindel
Member Posts: 65
I'm wondering how others play. It's been a long time since I've played and I find myself wondering how I would have the most fun. I've only just barely begun a new game.
I find myself wondering if I would enjoy a no-reload for NPCs that get chunked? Or some type of no-reload game. I don't think I'm so worried about encounters when I know I can just re-load. But it's been so long since I've played I don't remember how many times I re-loaded in the original. So I wonder if it's pointless to even try a no-reload for NPCs or something because I'm going to die so many times I'd run out of NPCs.
Thoughts? How do you play?
I find myself wondering if I would enjoy a no-reload for NPCs that get chunked? Or some type of no-reload game. I don't think I'm so worried about encounters when I know I can just re-load. But it's been so long since I've played I don't remember how many times I re-loaded in the original. So I wonder if it's pointless to even try a no-reload for NPCs or something because I'm going to die so many times I'd run out of NPCs.
Thoughts? How do you play?
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Last time I played Throne of Bhaal, I was romancing Jaheira and wanted to see her epilogue at the end, but she got chunked by a fire giant. I felt the pain of loss, but moved on and kept playing. The possibility of losses like that are what makes the game meaningful and exciting to me.
If party members die, I gather as much of their equipment as I can with the survivors and head for a temple. If that happens too often, I struggle with having enough gold throughout the game.
Making death meaningless and gold endless by reloading constantly just ruins the game for me, so I don't do it. Every reload I have to make just kills me inside. If I get more than five or so reloads in a game, I get such a bad taste in my mouth that I'd rather just start over from the beginning with a new character.
Even if sadness and despair are the best outcomes I can achieve, the experience of the journey is what has been most important to me as I play through the epic saga of Baldur's Gate.
I may reload if everybody dies or if my mage doesn't manage to scribe a valuable scroll.
Edit: You will find it hard to beat Throne of Bhaal with no-reload in my opinion ; I have a boss in mind that is especially hard.
1. I only reload if Charname dies OR if Imoen gets chunked. I'm holding on to Imoen not only because she's central to the canon but because I like her too much. She's the life and soul of my party I can't live without. Other NPCs are free game, though I might make another exception for Aerie once I get to Shadows of Amn.
2. I try to use autosaves instead of quicksaves, meaning that if I die during a quest/area, I'm going to have to do it all over again from the start. The idea is to rely as much on skills and as little on chance as possible. This adds an element of thrill to my dungeon crawls but can also be supremely frustrating, especially if 3 or more of my party members have died at the bottom of some God-forsaken well and I have to schlep their grayed-out asses and their equipment to the nearest temple. In the case of very big dungeons such as Durlag's tower, I usually give myself permission to start at the beginning of each floor rather than forcing myself to do the whole dungeon from the get-go.
3. I can still reload under some very special circumstances, such as when I miss out on an important/lucrative dialogue due to a bug or an engine hiccup. I also generally reload when I feel that the game has played cheap, such as when my characters walk into a trap I was deliberately trying to avoid due to bad pathfinding. But these occasions are once in a blue moon, thankfully.
(minor spoilers ahead if anyone hasn't played the game...) My latest runs are a Good Dwarven F/C, currently about to enter the Iron Throne HQ (NO reloads yet) and an Evil Elf F/M/T (thanks to the recent thread about triple classed chars). I had one reload here, because DUMBASS Kagain lost against Shar-Teel TWICE despite 5 healing potions!!! Terrible dice I guess, but I wanted to dual Shar-Teel to a thief and have a thief heavy party (Monty too). Kagain won after the reload so I sacked him, took her and got her up to 100% in set traps ho ho ho.
I still have a save from a 'no-reload' run with a Gnome F/I who rolled 100 for stats...however, I just don't see charname as a Gnome, so I'll probably never play that one further.
EDIT oh yeah and core rules, always core rules. None of this Max HPs malarkey. Makes every Level Up exciting...punch the air when you get max HPs!
I've lost xp for semi-screwed up quests and lost gold for trying to steal things with very little skill - oh well the cost of getting caught.
For things like quests xp or deaths of NPC it happens - thats what temples are for and if you screw up a quest well that happens too - consider it the cost for a newbie adventurer that your character is supposed to be.
For spells - I am 50-50 - for important spells that I think a mage needs I will reload (since the chance of getting it again is small) for other spells that might be interesting - I will take the chance.
Be glad that you don't lose reputation for the death of a NPC when other NPCs join or we'd run out pretty quickly, although it might be interesting to have that included - imagine NPCs that are weary of joining you because they heard you let your companions die - how would you convince them to join and what would it cost?
I'm a former NetHack player and still load up Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on occasion, so permadeath is familiar enough to me and I enjoy playing some games with that restriction, but I am not really all that great at BG and at the same time get quite attached to my party members, so when someone dies I generally just hit R and try again.
I do try not to deliberately abuse the function, e.g. by trying to do something that works less than one percent of the time and reloading until it works, or redoing a fight until things go absolutely perfectly. But when it comes time to level up or memorize spells, I will turn the difficulty down, and overall I'm not afraid to hit the magic button of butt saving. I'm not as worried about "super max hard" difficulty as I used to be and find having won the trilogy on insane with SCS, Tactics, Ascension, etc. installed in the past to be accomplishment enough.
Those of you who are more hardcore than I have my utmost respect, however.
It's a luxury I think I earned, after 18 years of playing it
So reloads are one thing, but there are other things that make the game fun. I like having a super stat player, with a 90+ roll, min-maxed to a degree, but with nothing below 9. I like my special char to be somewhat special, so i don't think thats cheesy at all. Others like the challenge of taking mr average all the way. I think I could do that if my guy was a bard, or some other charisma heavy character.
The major element for me is character specific roleplay. My current run is a Cavalier. I use his detect evil ability quite liberally, leading him to attack and kill all evil NPCs on sight. Usually if someone is walking up to talk to Charname i try to cast it before the dialogue kicks in. I also try to have him always keep his word. He tried to get the bounty on Prism, the artist who stole emeralds, and ended up killing him. It seemed morally wrong to me, but that was the lawful thing to do so thats what charname did. He probably should have killed Barge(?), the Nashkel guard capitan, too. But he took him to the temple instead.
It actually never occurred to me to not reload. If a battle doesn't go my way, I have a quick save right before (hopefully) or a bit further back. A low levels, it's pretty easy to accidentally get overwhelmed and annihilated.
It would just irk me if I was doing a long dungeon run and having am integral party member die (such as a healer), then subsequently losing other party members on the way due to increasing difficulty when the party falls apart.
Maybe I'll cheat in a bag of holding so I leave a party member dead until raised without being mad that I can carry nothing else.
I always console-in a bag of holding, because I don't find inventory management to be fun, and it just saves me time running back and forth between whatever dungeon I am working on and the nearest vendor. I often find myself reloading after a successful fight, just because I think I could have done better, or beaten it with more style. I generally avoid save-scumming (that being repeatedly trying the same improbable action over and over again until it finally succeeds) because that doesn't really feel like playing the game to me. If you're just going to reload until the dragon fails its save against Finger of Death, you may as well just save time and Ctrl-Y the darn thing.
Speaking of cheat keys, I don't think I could play without Ctrl-J to move around already cleared areas, anymore. Even with Boots of Speed, my precious free time is just too valuable to spend watching my character trudge across Nashkel for the 13,000th time. Also, I use Ctrl+K instead of the clunky party arbitration interface.
I always mod-out spell scribing failure, because I see no redeeming value in that mechanic in a PC game. It had its place in PnP--where the DM could choose to drop another scroll on you if he felt you deserved it, and where there were orders of magnitude more alternatives to fill your spellbook--but in a game like BG, where you may only ever find one scroll of a really important spell (looking at you, Knock), it's just too punishing.
Basically, I know what parts of the game I enjoy, and I choose to focus on those, and ignore the aspects I find annoying or tedious. BG is a single-player game, so I don't have to care about what anybody else thinks about my playstyle--all that matters is that I am having fun. So if I want to cheat in order to make the game more enjoyable, I will darn well do it.
Since Ajantis is a Paladin, I don't like the idea of having him use a bow. I picture him wanting to charge straight into battle and fight monsters sword-and-shield style. Any rules you use for him?
That aside, I don't see a problem with Ajantis using a bow, many knights throughout history practiced archery as well as melee. They wouldn't fight a duel or a tournament bout with bows, but for warfare it was different.
That and having to play a huge part of the game again due to a dumb mistake seems rather boring.
I don't reload on hp rolls and just get enough potions to achieve 100% learn rate when scribing scrolls. I mean, those pots of genius and mind focusing are there to be used.
Though don't listen to me, I have a horrible playstyle. I never reload and NEVER raise anyone. My characters all end up as green shit on the Wall of the Faithless.
For me, a paladin should be able to use any type of weapons as long as it gets the job done of removing the evil monster so weapon selection for a paladin is not a problem. If the game had a lance for mounted warfare that would be so great for a paladin. I usually try to give a paladin if I get him early enough at least one type of polearm to use in order to fight dragons even if BG doesn't have any.
Its hard to imagine a paladin standing right beside you as you randomly loot houses and inns and not be pissed about it - they are lawful good after all.
If I bring a paladin along - I play him like a paladin - if you want to rob a house keep the party outside while the thief goes in by herself to get the job done - as long as the paladin cannot see it or participate in anyway - having one should one in the party is quite good.
Although if Ajantis had better stats I might bring him along but there are better choices for a tank but then again if you are playing an entirely good party where evil NOCs are not allowed then I Ajantis is really your only tank assuming your PC is not one.