How do you deal with death?

[stuh505]

Did anyone actually just quit and start all over? I'm not sure how people can be expected to deal with death...do you start over just that book, or the entire series? I always thought it would be too tedious to start all over, so when I died, I would just go back to where I made the mistake and pick up from there...sort of like a saved game.

[Zipp]

Really, it is up to the player how to "deal" with death. Many of us, in our first times through, simply picked up where we died and tried again.

Now I would say there are three levels of accepted play: easy, normal, and hard.

EASY:
You bring a certain number of saves with you into each book, and can choose where to use them. Then, if you die, you go back to your last save. For instance, in book 2, I generally save after fighting the assasin in the inn, after getting the magic spear, and after getting the sommerswerd.

NORMAL:
Every time you die, you must restart at the begining of the book you are currently playing.

HARD:
Every time you die you must go back to the begining of the entire series and make a new character.

[Vonotar]

I generally save my character at the end of each series, i.e. at the end of Books 5 and 12

[North Star]

When I was feeling virtuous, I would restart the book. Other times, I would just retry the battle.

NS.

[stuh505]

Perhaps another option would be to make yourself be able to trade a certain number of healing potions for a save

[Zipp]

Like I said, it's really up to you. Come up with your own method that you don't feel makes you a "cheater" and go ahead and use it.

[deiseach]

The first time I played LW, loaned to me by a friend, I read them like regular novels

The second time around, several years later when I bought the books, the first time I created a character I had a CS of 16 and 24 EP. I have stuck with this for every time I have started out on the series. It seems like a reasonable score - and I picked up the Sword on Weaponskill at the first time of asking, reinforcing my Sommerswerd prejudice.

Generally I try the battle again until I win, allowing myself infinite retries. The last time I started the series properly, I decided to be honest, i.e. once I was dead I was dead. As a result, I was in such a state by the time I got to the Gourgaz about to skewer the Prince that I ran and well, oops (www.projectaon.org/xhtml/lw/01fftd/sect306.htm)

(Incidentally, just looking at the illustrations in FftD, they really are evocative of the chaos engulfing Sommerlund at the time. Very good)

[stuh505]

that brings up another question which is how do you deal with character generation

I have always gone with a method used by some D&D players, which is that you can reroll your scores as many times as you want...but you can only "save" one set of scores to choose from if you decide to reroll, and also the scores come as a "set". in other words I wold roll all my stats, items, everything that starts out random...and choose from this as a whole as opposed to rolling for stats and then rolling for items. this way I usually ended up with pretty good but not perfect stuff because eventually I am just bored of rolling and want to play

[Zipp]

Well, again, it's really up to you. The "official" way is to roll only once and take what you get.

The way I like to do it is to roll three times for each stat, choosing the highest of the rolls.

[Laguna Blade]

Well, with the help of statskeeper, rolling is not that tedious (Complements for Project Aon!), the same goes with the lone wolf action chart. Of course, if you like to keep using the traditional method by using dices and flipping the hard copy of the book, what can I say huhuh....

[Sphigx]

Zipp said:

Now I would say there are three levels of accepted play: easy, normal, and hard.

EASY:
You bring a certain number of saves with you into each book, and can choose where to use them. Then, if you die, you go back to your last save. For instance, in book 2, I generally save after fighting the assasin in the inn, after getting the magic spear, and after getting the sommerswerd.

NORMAL:
Every time you die, you must restart at the begining of the book you are currently playing.

HARD:
Every time you die you must go back to the begining of the entire series and make a new character.

I'm usually at the NORMAL level, except in book 11, where I'm playing EASY! I save my data at the end of each book.
When facing the Chaos master, it's more interesting to count how many attempts you need to get rid of your enemy, rather than repeating the whole adventure endlessly.

[Nathan P. Mahney]

When I used to play with the print volumes, I would usually save my progress at the end of each book. Sometimes I would save at the end of the Kai series instead. But now, with the advent of the on-line editions, I almost always go right back to the start when I die.

Nowadays I also just take whatever character I roll up, no matter the stats. If I get a rubbish character, I take it as either a challenge to see how far I can get, or an opportunity to go and explore some places that are probably deadly, but nonetheless cool.

[Doomy]

I'm one of those people who treats the end of each book as a "save point". I'm sure we are the majority. Although it is not explicity stated I think it would be what Joe Dever intended.
If I think my current character is too weak to progress, I restart from Flight From the Dark to reroll my stats, rather than rerolling my stats and restarting the book with all items and bonuses from the previous books.
However to cut down on complete replays I will roll five random numbers and choose the best for my stats, avoiding pathetic characters without guaranteeing perfect characters every time. I think my current Lone Wolf started out with 18CS/25EP, and got through all the notoriously hard fights up to Book 16 fairly easily. I hope to complete the remaining books with this character but will have to wait for their online publication.

[Laguna Blade]

Nathan said:

Nowadays I also just take whatever character I roll up, no matter the stats. If I get a rubbish character, I take it as either a challenge to see how far I can get, or an opportunity to go and explore some places that are probably deadly, but nonetheless cool.

Yeah...you are so brave to continue with rubbish stats. Well, the Kai Wisdom does state no matter how low the stats there is always chances to win.

I, for one, very hard to believe I can win

[Doomy]

Laguna said:

Kai Wisdom does state no matter how low the stats there is always chances to win.

This is probably a lie, but Darkash actually made a fair bit of progress, even getting past the Chaos Master!

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