Resting in dungeons

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Are there any patches to PST that allow resting in dungeons?

It's really annoying to have to leave dungeons in order to re-memorize spells, makes magic a lot less useful than it could be, and the dungeons a lot more of a grind than they would be without this handicap.

 

I wasn't aware magic needed to be any more effective. Unless you're soloing, I don't see how that's something that would be particularly annoying.

If you need to get out quickly, you can just kill TNO and you'll respawn in a safe space.

 

It's not about wanting to get out, I'm looking for the opposite. I'd like to stay in the dungeon and continue, but if I need to memorize more magic before doing so, then I'm forced to exit the dungeon, rest, and then return, which is annoying to me.

I'd rather just rest where I am and continue from there. It would save a lot of boring running back and forth over areas which I've explored already.

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I think I might have found the answer to my own question: Qwinn's PS:T Tweak Pack. One of the advertised features is "rest anywhere".

Hmm.. but it looks like both the tweak setup utility itself and the GOG PST Mods Guide say that "rest anywhere" is "not recommended" for some unspecified reason.

I don't know if that's because they think it ruins the balance of the game or for some other meta-gameplay issues, or because it's buggy and can screw up your game. I guess I'll find out.

 

Having been introduced to RPGs on games with a time limit like The Magic Candle and Might and Magic II, I tend to try to avoid resting as much as possible. Also, many games such as The Bard's Tale series, the Gold Box games, and even the first Final Fantasy use what TVTropes calls "Beef Gates" where if the enemies are too hard, maybe you are trying to tackle that dungeon too early.

If you can't complete the dungeon without resting save for the designated places, then either you are underleveled for that dungeon, or your party is poorly designed or your characters were built poorly. You need to learn to rely more on your fighters and use your spells more sparingly. TNO is a tank with regeneration, even if you change his class to mage or thief he can still tank, soak up damage and then heal by standing idle for a few minutes. You should not need to waste HP restoring spells or items on TNO outside of battle.

 

It's true that I can tank with TNO, and that's what I wind up doing, because even though he's a mage, the resting restriction makes it difficult to actually use him as a pure mage, which is the whole reason I chose to be a mage in the first place. If I wanted to play him as a fighter, I would have just made him a fighter in the first place, and then he would have been a much more effective one.

Your point about my party possibly trying to bite off more than it can chew is well taken, however. And it's true, they may be, if I insist on trying to get through with magic. If I use TNO in hand-to-hand combat, however, they get through just fine. So that just goes back to the fighter vs mage point above.

But if I do want to play just as a mage, what am I supposed to do? Grind through hundreds or thousands of low-level monsters to earn enough levels so that I can make it through a dungeon on one set of spells without resting? Or go trudge back and forth out and back in to the dungeon whenever I need to rest over and over again? Or just use the rest-anywhere mod and save all that hassle?

As to character creation and party composition, I've maxed out my WIS and INT, which seems appropriate for a mage. I'm not really sure how much better a character I could create if I wanted to play a pure mage. And the party members that I have are the only ones I could have without making it through the dungeons I was having problems with playing a pure mage. So, again, I'm not really sure what the practical alternative is to using the rest-anywhere mod. But thank you for the suggestions, they are welcome and it's good to get another perspective.

 

My point is that you need fighters and/or ranged attackers, you cannot hope to beat this game with only spellcasters. If you have a party of just spellcasters, as you have found out, you will run out of spells.
AD&D in general is designed to be done with a party, a "core" party has a warrior, a cleric(healer/buffer/defensive spells), a mage (offensive spells), and a thief.
Use TNO to draw the enemy's attention while everyone else uses ranged attacks or joins in.

 

If I could get an effective fighter in my party at this point in the game, I'd be all for it. All I have right now is TNO, Morte, and Dak'kon. I don't have the option to get anyone else yet. Even though my TNO character is designed to be a pure mage, he's the most effective fighter of the party so far. So I do use him for that, and mostly ignore his spellcasting skills, except for occasional buffing, which is really not the way I'd prefer to play a pure mage character. He's really not acting like much of a mage at all, at this point.

But even if I did have a better fighter in the party, allowing TNO to act as a pure mage, all his spells would still be used up pretty quickly in the dungeons, and he'd have to resort to either acting as a fighter again or just doing nothing until the party could make it out of the dungeon and he could rest to get his spells back. IMO, this is a broken mechanic in PST, and rest-anywhere (though not perfect) is a good compromise to work around it, if you want magic to play a bigger role.

Anyway, combat's not really what this game is about, it's just a means to get to the more interesting part, which is the story. So whatever gets me to the next part of the story fastest is appreciated, in my book.

 

It has been YEARS since I played PST, I thought TNO did not dual class like conventional 1st & 2nd edition AD&D losing the fighter levels until he surpasses them with mage levels, but did it more like in 3rd edition where he retains his fighter abilities while picking up mage levels, effectively making him a sort of fighter/mage.
Maybe I am remembering wrong.
Point is, if I am remembering right he is a fighter/mage and can be used as such.

 

The whole resting bit is why I'm not that fond of mages in D&D. At least in NWN, the resting is fairly quick and painless, and can be done in most places. With maxed INT and WIS, you should be set as a mage, and for all the story bits, as well. In fact, I usually get maxed WIS and either INT or CHA in PS:T as well, even as a fighter or thief.

I always found Morte to be the best tank, because he has pretty good damage resistance, as I recall. I don't quite remember if that was due to Morte-specific items or was innate, though.

 

Kids nowadays. In Bard’s Tale I the only safe place to rest was the Adventurer’s Guild (so not in any dungeon and not in any street of the city and "mana points" to cast spells only replenished through sunlight (so not in a dungeon). Real heros back then, whiny whimps today.

 

Easy there grandpa..
While i don't appreciate how some more recent rpg games are dumbing down their systems for casual gamers, i do think that some mechanics like resting can be made less of a hassle - i enjoyed pillars of eternity's system where you have a limited number of camping supplies, but when you have them you can pretty much rest anywhere.

 

I guess there's a reason it's called Torment ^^

 

It is intentional for balance, or there would be no need for warriors (catch-all term used in the PHB & DMG for fighters, paladins, rangers, and similar classes). Mages are powerful, but have limited spells before they run out. This makes you pick and choose when to use those precious spells as you only get so many per day.
If you blow all your high level spells on a few goblins in the first encounter, you are in trouble. Let the fighters take care of it and conserve your resources.

I too cut my teeth on Bard's Tale, Curse of the Azure Bonds and other Gold Box games, Magic Candle, Might and Magic, Wizardry (there is one where you had to return to town on the first level to rest. The deeper you went the longer the journey back to rest, and it had random encounters), and lots of other games that had it that resting in dungeons was generally forbidden except if you get lucky and find a safe place. Gold Box games often let you try to rest with high odds of being interrupted unless it said you were safe.

BTW, IIRC in Bard's Tale, I don't recall spell points actually recharging if you just entered the Adventurer's Guild and walked away, even if daylight. You had to be waiting out in the sunlight in the street. What the Guild did was instantly make it early morning upon exiting it, in game terms you spent the night there.
This was the same in both BT1 and BT2, and the equivalent in BT3 (can't recall what they called it but it severed the same purpose. ).
I do recall wasting a lot of time waiting for my SP to recharge, before I realized that the reason I got such massive amounts of gold was they intended for you to spend it at Rosco's Energy Emporium. First playthrough of both BT1 and BT2 I wound up rarely using it, prefering to work on my homework while having the bard sing and waiting for my SP to recharge. When attacked, I would stop, and use a macro program (called El Macro, if anybody actually plays this game on an Apple IIGS. It is on the Ground and Caltech FTP sites) to quickly defeat the weak enemies (by the time you are tackling the castle or either of the towers they are weak) before going back to my homework. I got sick of Rhyme of Duo Time in BT2 because of this.

 

gah - resting in a game is a bit underwhelming though it is useful to grab small bits of treasure etc in AD&D ... the only have to about it is the devs decided to set it up that way for lack of imagination of other ways to add verisimilitude.

what I really seek is not simply high level magic (generic) boom tough enemy dead but something that changes the nature of what is happening, that is special and creative

 

But can it change the nature of a man?

 

how could a certain type of magic not?

 

I understand that it's to balance the game, though it's hardly the only way. The cooldown system works as well. Though my biggest issue with the way it is in PS:T or BG, is that it promotes meta gaming. You pick the spells you think you need, then rest, then use those spells. Picked the wrong spells? Better go sleeping again. I prefer sorcerers over mages, simply because you can more easily optimise for different encounters. Without resting and rearranging your spellbook every single time.

 

I always hated the Vancian casting system.
My own group independently invented a spell point variant very similar to what was described in chapter 12 of the story "Skysaber's Choice". It was not an exact match, but eerily close, only we had combat spell slots, non-combat spell slots and swing slots and rather than the spell points coming back at a fixed rate, the rate they regenerated at depended on what you did, if you were "meditating" they came back at the same rate as spell memorization (1 point every 15 minutes, pretty much the same rules and limitations), if sleeping a bit slower (IIRC 1 every 30 minutes, aka 16 points for 8 hours of sleep, but you needed at least four hours sleep, following memorization rules), slower still when resting (1 per hour), and even slower when doing "light" activity (I can't recall if we started with one point every two hours and changed it to four hours or went the other way around).

The cost of a spell was based on its level. One point per level. It did change the dynamics of spell picks because you could throw three fireballs for the price of one meter swarm or nine magic missiles. Was it worth it to spend seven points on a delayed blast fireball when you could throw two regular fireballs in successive rounds and hurl a magic missile at the strongest survivor on the third round?

It also gave mid to high level mages more endurance if they stuck to lower level spells rather than higher level ones. They did not need to constantly horde their spells as much, but were still reluctant to commit to casting major magics. Which was part of the point, we wanted to be able to actually cast magic, especially the utility spells that often had to be forsaken to make room to ensure they had enough combat spells to survive. Having non-combat spell slots for utility spells made the game more fun for mages and priests as they could keep things like "Leomund's Secure Shelter" or "unseen servant" memorized.
Oh, we did the same for clerics and druids, but instead of spells, they could pray for miracles, subject to their deities approval. They could channel a certain amount of their deity's magic under a spell point system as identical to the mages system as the normal game is. Any cleric spell was now a "miracle" that could be prayed for. Of course, certain deities could be fickle about granting those spells and the energy might be lost, but it was generally NOT random and they were generally reliable, as long as it was fitting with the deity's ethos. A cleric of Shar trying to heal a follower of Selûne or Mystra might not get the spell approved.

Oh, spell point capacity was based on how many spell levels per day you got according to the rules. You just added them up on the chart, using multipliers for each level. Again, one point for every first level spell, two for every second level spell, three for every third level spell, and so on. So you got to memorize three times as many spells as the rules said, but only got enough points to cast as many as the original rules allowed in theory. In practice you got more because people would cast more low level spells and fewer high level spells. On the other hand, in tough battles they could cast more high level spells too. Useful against something like some litches that are immune to spells below 4th or 5th level.