What does the word “scum” mean in this case?
I’ve only sometimes gotten character points when going up a level. How does that system work, apart from multiclassing?
Save Scum = Save your game, try something, and reload if you get an undesirable result. In this example, keep reloading until you get +10 HP or whatever. Reload if you get +1 to +9 or until bored.
Oh, absolutely ! I grok that. But that’s my point.
I came into this game fresh off Baldur’s Gate where, for some asinine reason, while resurrection spells and whatnot are very much a thing in the game world, and you’re going to shell out a lot of cash into them for your buddies unless you save scum every harsh fight ; your main character isn’t allowed to die. One bad roll, one missed save-or-die and BAM, game over screen, don’t even have the time to check out exactly what just happened.
So that sucked.
Bearing that in mind, in PST I was initially extremely conservative with my Nameless. He hogged all the good healing items, all the best armor tats, etc.. until I finally broke out of that mold and realized it didn’t matter. Everyone else it’s important to keep alive, since they need the Nameless to rez them. The Nameless himself can zerg all day, he’ll be just fine. One more scar. Big deal.
Back then, when that seminal truth hit 18 year old me, I was blown off my socks. I don’t know if they did it that way specifically to tweak their noses at their own past selves coding Baldur’s Gate in a frustrating fashion or something like that, but it’s very clever. Just one more subtle way PS:T tells you “this game is not like those other games”. And it also opens a whole new range of suicidal tactics. You can actually use the touch spells this time around ! 
That being said, if I replayed it today I’d probably still save scum those first 5-6 fighter levels to get at least the high average (or, if PST had the same difficulty slider as BG, turn it down to super easy for the level ups and learning unique spells, to get max HPs automatically) out of convenience. Get a decent buffer, that you don’t just get one shotted by a lousy backstab or magic missiles. But past 50 or so HP, heh, not worth the effort. I might for Morte & Dakkon still though, since they’re the designated tanks and Dakkon can’t dream of ever getting a good AC.
Yeah, I don’t worry about people who cry ‘save scum’. I have my own views about when I’m earning my progress through the game. For something like Baldur’s Gate, I feel that if I’m willing to re-roll until I’m god-like, that tedium is the price I pay. If I save-and-restore for days worth of gameplay to make it possible to pickpocket everybody without getting caught, I have paid a terrible price that others are not willing to pay. The game is built with a certain effort-vs-reward curve in mind, and I adjust it to my own.
Just the same, my ethos is to play the game using only the adjustments built into the program at first run-through. Subsequently, on replays I can use hacks. Further replays allow more egregious hacks. Of course, for something like Baldur’s Gate I only go through replays every three or four years, so each time I find that the effort-vs-reward curve in my human heart usually requires me to start again at the no-hack level, except for that time I went through with the Simultaneous Romance mod so that I could see where all those went without having to play through three goddamned times.
I have never successfully replayed Planescape: Torment. I find it ponderous. I just can’t recapture the experience of playing it through the first time. But I must. Someday.
Now that they’re looking to remake Baldur’s Gate for modern platforms, I hope they’ll take that engine and redo Planescape: Torment, because it’s hard for me to persuade modern gamers who don’t like such huge pixels to experience what is still in my view the closest the video game medium has come to matching the status of the novel.
I try to play games without mods the first time around, and then mod if I think I want to. I’ve bookmarked the patch site.
I don’t insist on getting the full 9 or 10 HP for fighter level, I just want more than 4 HP. And I DEFINITELY want more than 1 HP, which is what I was getting in the Mortuary, in the first run. Yeah, Nameless regenerates, but hell, I hate dying and waking up on a slab. Somehow, I managed to die in Ragpicker’s Square the first time and couldn’t find my way out of it. Didn’t have the money or the skills or the items.
All in all, though, I’m having a VERY good time with this game. Some of the older games are worth replaying. Others, of course, are not.
They said they would, provided their remake of BG was commercially successful.
Is there any place that I can stash things in PST? I’ve tried putting items in various containers, but when I check back, the items are gone.
I find the barrels around the marketplace in the Hive are good places to stash things.
The one thing I will say that’s annoying about the game is that it’s very bad at letting you know what items are actually useful and when they’ve outlived their usefulness. (E.g. The book in the mortuary that tells you how to defeat the giant skeletal warriors serves only one purpose, and that’s to tell you how to defeat the giant skeletal warriors. In fact, you don’t even need the book if you have a high enough int, and you get more XP for not using it. The book is also worth a significant amount of coin. However, it’s description implies you might want to hold onto it. The description is wrong.)
HA! I was wondering about that book, specifically. I’d been lugging it around ever since I got it, thinking that it might be good for a spell caster. And the coin is quite a lot when you first get out of the mortuary…not that I really seem to need a lot of coin right now. Right now I’m buying scrolls and tattoos, with the occasional healing charm thrown in.
Indeed. I played it long time ago, so I can’t remember what are the stats required for dialog, but you sure want them.
Talk with people, talk with your followers. Pay attention to what they say. Even when it’s not necessary to complete the game, it’s important for immersion. And understanding what’s really going on.
Some informations aren’t easy to find (I remember a very significant one that could be obtained only by asking the right question to the right person after having done the right thing and even then only if you also interacted with the right follower). Again, it wasn’t vital to complete the game, but it was a significant revelation about where I was standing.
This game had for a very long time been the only one where I felt real strong emotions, like the ones you can have watching a movie (more recently, “the witcher” had a similar impact). All my “woooh!” moments in Planescape happened as a result of dialogs, not actions. And the finale wouldn’t have had the same impact if I hadn’t previously paid attention to what it implied.
Could you put the specifics in a spoiler?
Problem is : if you’ve already played the game once, you will know where the story is going. As already mentioned it’s a bit like a novel. Playing without good dialog stats means that you will read the novel with many paragraphs or chapters striken out, limiting your enjoyment. And the second time maybe you will read the whole story, but you won’t be surprised by the course of events.
It might be too late for you, but I definitely recommend to anybody else envisioning to play the game to make sure they have good dialog stats for their first game to fully enjoy it.
I was thinking about bringing a tatoo to the tatoo shop for information, asking Da’Akon to translate for you, noticing that he deliberatly doesn’t translate everything and asking him about it later
I also remember a quite minor event in your past that you won’t know about unless you happen to do I can’t remember what in I can’t remember what order (this is really minor game-wise, but I nevertheless recommend not to read the spoiler because it’s telling about who you are and you don’t realize that early in the game).
That you killed and gutted one of your followers just to hide some piece of information in his entrails
Also something that I think will make the ending (the most common one anyway) much less significant if you didn’t care much for the dialogs during the game.
Warning : BIG SPOILER
If you didn’t pay much attention to all the comments, descriptions, accounts of the forever war during the game, the end loses its signifiance and the sense of doom that comes with it.
“Don’t trust the skull.”
(If you’re selectively clicking the spoilers, I’m quoting the top one in Post #53)
Eh, I got stuck in the area after the Drowned/Dead nations segment (didn’t pick up a tool, I found out), so I restarted, with 17 or 18 W and I, and dumped the rest of the points in Char. Annah STILL doesn’t want to do the nasty with me, though.
Speaking of Annah, if she pickpockets, it doesn’t affect the alignment of Nameless, right? Because I’ve been dumping her thief points into Pickpocket, and I’ve reached an area where a five finger discount would be very nice indeed.
And for someone who claims that she’s not personally interested in Nameless, she’s sure got her knickers in a twist about having the succubus around.
I don’t think so. She should pickpocket and backstab to her heart’s content. She makes a thief TNO a bit unnecessary. And most of the characters are fighters, although TNO at least can equip more weapons. The two mage characters don’t make mage TNO obsolete, though.
Annah is inconsistent that way.
So far, the only reason I’ve made Nameless a thief is to take advantage of a tattoo. He’s a mage, and I’ll probably keep him a mage.
But for the next play through, I AM going to get that mod for max HP. There is something seriously wrong with the random number generator for HP. I shouldn’t have to save and reload 20 times to get an HP increase of more than 1.