I've completed the game twice, both on balanced mode.
I've also failed honour mode twice. The first was my dwarven monk against the spider queen in Act 1, when I was trying to sneakily destroy her eggs but failed miserably only to have her teleport on top of my poorly positioned party who were trapped in a corner and mainly out of spells. They didn't survive long. I did initially keep that save but then deleted it and started again with the same character (he's just made it to the Last Light Inn this time).
The second was my cleric of Mystra/divination wizard who perished today in Act 2 when Gale blew up a horde of corrupted shrubs with a fireball only for the Needle Blights to all explode on death and take my party and all the enemies with them, apart from a nearly dead shambling mound that finished off my KOed party. Aargh! I'd forgotten those blasted things did that. And I didn't mean to delete that run as I did want to finish the story with the character, but pressed the wrong button. Aargh again! But I'm not counting it as a save deletion as I had taken a zip copy of a save when I'd almost finished Act 1 to attach to a bug report, so I don't have a lot to redo. (For info, as I wasn't sure until I unzipped and tried it, you can continue an honour mode run from a copied file, and it seems the same as continuing a failed run in that it's treated as a custom difficulty, single save game.)
I also have a Durge tactitian playthrough that's towards the end of Act 1. But I think I'm going to start a new honour mode run with a new character first, and come back to my other in-progress runs later. I feel I need to let today's pain dissipate before facing the Isobel/Marcus and Kar'niss fights again!
I do enjoy the challenge of the honour mode settings, but don't much like the more cautious play going for the achievement encourages in me (even though it's clearly not cautious enough!) I will keep trying honour mode until I complete it, but if that ever happens then I'd probably play custom mode with the honour mode settings but multiple saves (which, yes, is now possible, though not unfortunately to move to multiple saves after failing an honour mode attempt).
