To Save Scum Or Not To Save Scum (The Jimquisition)

With stuff like this my question is always: who cares if you do or don't? It's not like people are monitoring what you do or do not do in a game you are playing for your own enjoyment. So what if they used mods in Sekiro? It's not like they're forcing you to also install those mods. Same with save scumming or the ever tired topic of difficulty levels. Who cares if you do it? Who cares if you play on Normal instead of Nightmare mode? It literally has no impact on how another person plays and enjoys the game. If you don't want to play that way then don't. NO ONE IS FORCING YOU TO DO IT!

I've played through Kotor a couple times now and I go by the strategy of holding back on soldier/scout/scoundrel levels to have more Jedi levels available when you get to dantooine. unfortunately, to get there you have to get past taris...and bendak starkiller if you're doing that quest. there's no way i'd ever consider trying to climb the ranks of the dueling ring to finish with starkiller without a few saves along the way 😂

What a great topic. There's definitely a factor in the game design that impacts how I feel about save scums. Project Zomboid is not supposed to be scummable but it does help when you're learning the game. As my experience has grown, I have moved the scums to further and further intervals. On my current save I did copy the save file at 1k kills, but I have not even restored the last 2 saves before where I did die because I am more in the lane of being OK with the single life run. The game I have scummed the most is football manager, saving before every game. The game I refuse to even play in the single save file mode is Crusader Kings 2. For Baulders Gate, my multiplayer group has been quite good about playing in commitment mode, but one of them is a paladin who occasionally does dumb things and will instantly become an oathbreaker, so it has been very useful there. Another player respeced to change a spell, but ended up in the wrong subclass and didn't have the money to do it twice. In BG3, mistakes will be made (don't ever trust Volo) and I think it's good to not live with those mistakes for the life of your save, if you're ok with accepting those mistakes.

As a player of a 3.5 Epic-level Cleric (yes, the campaign's been going for over 15 years now - in the old days when we used to have sessions regularly I used to dream more as Jonan than as myself) who was once handed an amount of diamond dust by a drunk DM that he didn't realise was essentially infinite and insists that, if we have to live with the consequences of our actions, he has to live with consequences of his (and who was allowed to use Divine Insight making said Cleric's Diplomacy so high there's essentially no situation he can't smooth over... and has made friends with at least three other Epic-level Clerics around the world just in case he ever dies), our party can essentially savescum. I've had to start coming up with convoluted reasons not to be able to True Resurrect friendly NPCs so we could avoid doing so without breaking character. ...I was at least good enough to recommend the DM not let me take Permanent Emanation (End to Strife) because, while he was so bad at play-testing even in the early days that me and the other more experienced players need some truly hilarious bullshit up our sleeves to get him out of having created unwinnable battles he intended to be routine, I don't want anything that would break the game entirely that I couldn't think of an in-character reason not to use. I did let him let me add Sublime Revelry to the spell list, though, so I can't pretend I'm a Saint even if Jonan is (seriously, look it up if you play 3.5 and don't know it - it's utterly absurd). On savescumming in games where choices/performance really matter, mechanically or narratively, I'll generally allow myself chunks of game that I can restart if I want but at the cost of significant progress so as to have an unpredictable experience without ending up in the DA:2 scenario... where I straight-up never recruited two of the most interesting companions. In XCOM, I'd never save in-mission or before any RNG event but I'd replay entire missions that went so catastrophically they'd make the game nearly unwinnable.

Well I in fact did have a WoW enthusiast DM that put raid-dungeons in his campaign where the party would respawn in case of tpk. I don't really remember if there was an explanation or if it was just a videogamification, but I didn't enjoy it. They exist 🤣

God save the Bra-glins

I was hoping you'd mock "you haven't only cheated the game, but also yourself". It is, as you say, bullshit, and was one of the first things I thought of when I got the email for this video. I also had a shitty experience in my first tabletop campaign. DM permanently nerfed my key stat by 4 points (despite the rules for this system actually not allowing that...) because of a bad die roll, at level 1, on the very first adventure of the campaign. They didn't provide any way to address it until several months later, and only then in a way that hurt me *in a different way*. ... pretty sure there was some bullying involved there, too, but just wanted to say I empathize with you and Vox.

TITS! I mean GREAT VIDEO!

Player choice is a good thing. Play how you want. Also the braglin should be a wrestling move. Perhaps a new finisher

Great video, Stephanie!