Yep, I’d also say my self-imposed rules are more guidelines. I’d probably break them if the alternative were a TPK and reload, and in some other circumstances when following them became tedious.
But over the course of EA, I worked out that I find the game more immersive and a more interesting challenge if I apply the following principles. This is just my preference, of course, and I’d never say that others shouldn’t play the game however they wish!
- Prioritise roleplay: do what feels right for my character, and don’t say or do things just because they’re easier or give better rewards and try to avoid meta-gaming.
- That includes approaches to build, quests and combat: I try to balance it between what is effective and what it feels like my party would realistically try. Including use of barrels, shove and stealth. Sometimes, especially if there are explosive barrels in the area, my party might make use of them but I’d not exploit magic pockets to blow things up when I felt it didn’t make sense.
- Create a build that makes sense without particular items (ie don’t create a low strength character that’s going to regularly rely on strength and therefore items and potions that confer it).
- Don’t reload just because a dice roll didn’t go my way, or indeed for any reason other than a probable imminent TPK.
- Minimise use of Send to Camp. I use it mainly either at camp, to quickly offload stuff, or occasionally for more valuable items that it would make sense for my party to trek back to camp to dump.
- Don’t loot or steal everything, just what feels sensible for my party. (Looking in every urn doesn’t feel realistic, for example!)
- Rest when it seems to make sense to do so, ie between “missions” and when it feels like the party has done a good day’s work that would feasibly take a few hours. (In my first playthrough when I was playing a number of hours per day, I was resting roughly once each real day.)
- Only teleport when I know there’s a clear path that my party could walk back to the nearest circle (I head canon it that the circles work by teleporting us from one to another, but that you can’t really just teleport from some random spot. But I’m happy to fast forward past the actual walking.)
- Respeccing of my PC should be an exception and should just be for tweaks, though I’d feasibly do it if I thought I’d made a mistake at level up.
- Respeccing companions should be a one off at recruitment and should still make sense from an RP perspective (in general, I’d stick with their level one class and multiclass rather than choose a new one, but in my first playthrough I did respec Minsc’s attributes as I didn’t think the default ranger spread suited him at all.)
That all said, once I’ve played the game with what I consider a straight bat a few times, I can imagine mixing it up and trying some fun and silly options that break those rules. In fact, one of my current characters is a Jack-of-all-Trades achievement attempt, and though I’m still pretty much trying to stick to the above, and do have a roleplay justification for her, obviously some meta-gaming is involved in that!
