I am curious about one thing. Which of the following methods of playing through the game is faster:
1. Set the game difficulty to Story, and play through the entire game on that difficulty
2. Leave the game difficulty at the default, but use the cheat console to create kill swords ("killsw01") for your party

My guess would be #2, but I am not completely sure.

(Of course, if you want the enemies to pose any threat *at all*, you wouldn't do either of these, right?)

Some cheats can kill a good game,plain make it too easy.

"Making the game too easy" is obviously the point of using such cheats/mode. The point of this thread isn't to discuss that, but rather to discuss which of those two approaches would be faster for getting through the game for someone who is not interested in the actual gameplay.

Who cares? You're the only person who posts in this forum who takes any interest in such foolery.

And who would give a shit about such a question? Do you not see the idiocy in the opening question? If the person playing the game isn't interested in the actual gameplay, why are they playing the game in the first place? I seriously doubt such people would care about completing it faster, they should simply move on to another game.

Some reasons:

1. The person is only interested in the story or other non-gameplay aspects of the game.
2. The person wants to test something, and it is necessary to play through the game in order to test it. (This includes, for example, mod developers; got to make sure the mod works properly!)

1) Like what exactly? The story is standard fare DnD, there's nothing special here you won't find in any other DnD game or novel. Consulting a walk through would take much less effort

2) There are cheats to skip areas/chapters, you don't need to play through the entire game. Even then, if they aren't interested in the game as you said per your OP, why would they care about testing something?

As someone who has done a lot of modding, that's a really bad idea. It's already way too easy to make a mod too difficult, if that makes sense. You know the results of all the dialog paths. You know the strengths and weaknesses of the encounters. You know the search maps, so know the best route to approach the encounter. You know whether to charge, hang back, spread out, whatever, because you've chosen or even defined the AI.

I can't think of a single reason I'd like to be testing a mod without the kind of equipment you would expect someone to actually have at that time in the game. AROW01, absolutely. BOLT04, ok, but don't overdo it. SCRL09, there aren't many of those in the game. Unless your mod gave one away earlier, with some foreshadowing, probably shouldn't CLUA one in. Ctrl-J, fine, so long as you don't skip important things someone playing your mod will encounter.

It is, indeed, not a good idea to blatantly cheat if you are concerned about testing the combat balance of the mod.

However, such cheats can be useful if you want to make sure the scripting is correct. You might think you know the results of all the dialog paths, but perhaps you made a mistake in the script and something unintended happens.

It's worth noting that, when you are testing the scripting, you probably don't want to use Ctrl-J or outright skip chapters, as that may put the game into a state that wouldn't happen through actual gameplay. On the other hand, cheating killsw01 or playing on story mode will not affect scripts not relating to combat. (Also, cheating killsw01 will help you test the case where more damage was dealt to a creature than intended. Maybe an enemy is supposed to transform into a stronger form after losing a certain amount of HP, but you forgot to give the enemy a minimum HP item?)

In summary, testing combat balance and testing event scripting are two different things, and the sort of cheats that would be useful and which would be disruptive are different.

You're full of shit. Your question was: "Which of the following methods of playing through the game is faster:"

That kind of mistake is pretty hard to make. You can branch to the wrong place, sure, but then it's exactly the same as if you chose a different option.

Once dialog starts, doesn't everything else stop on your game? Can't you walk through most of the dialog paths, then reload and go through the ones that changed game states? Why would you need a mega-weapon to do the testing? Giving yourself a min 1HP item, maybe, but why do you need the offense?So in the more or less singular case of some heavy-handed mod where whatever the players do, your mod breaks combat to force your story on them, it might be useful.

Remind me to not install that mod. There's enough of that in the game already.

Then why did you mention cheats?

Here's an example from the unmodded game: The Throne of Bhaal final boss. Here we have a boss who, when reduced below a certain amount of HP, triggers the next phase of the battle. At the end of the battle, the boss's script summons another creature which then produces more dialog and triggers the ending.

I believe that, if the player somehow kills this boss without reducing the boss's HP to that threshold (for example, by stat drain), the boss dies and the game softlocks, as there is no way to continue. A softlock, if it's possible for it to happen normally, should be considered a bug.