Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
The bigger problem, however, is that your party's experience is now lopsided, which is irritating.
Oh, and also there's the whole "all his items are on the floor and I have no room to put them in anyone else's pack" problem. That's a pretty major one.
All this goes to show that YMMV. I'm obsessive/compulsive, and having unbalanced character experience bothers me not one whit.
And having no room to put all a deceased character's stuff is one of the interesting problems the game provides for us to solve. I remember one Celtic party that had to roam across two zones twice to pick up all the crap they'd lost when two party members were slain.
On the other hand, I do agree that there are times to use 'save-and-reload'. In N:R I used it the first time I ran across the Formorians at the toll bridge. After fighting them six or eight times quickly without being able to kill more than one or two, I satisfied myself that I should pay them whatever they asked. I also did the s-a-r the first time I faced the dragon in the goblin mines (as the Romans).
And there are games that are unplayable without s-a-r. Wesnoth, one of my favorites, immediately comes to mind. In that game you can't avoid problems, and you can't progress in the game until each problem is solved. Every campaign (except a couple of the shorter introductory ones) has one or two places where I'd go insane from the monotony of playing the same two hours twenty or thirty times to get past a sticky spot, so I've established a policy that if I can't get past a scenario after three or four 'honest' tries, I'll use s-a-r to refight until the luck is even on both sides. (Wesnoth keeps a running tab on your luck and the AI's.)
I tell myself that's not cheating, but there have been a couple of campaigns where I had to cheat like a sonovabitch to get past a certain point.