I had been playing Bard's Tale 1 for almost a year now, almost finished completely mapping out the castle.

Then out of curiousity I wanted to check out Bard's Tale 3 (Because I remember playing it on the old Apple II and wanted to see how it had changed)

In BT3 what I presumed was a quicksave that I saved over, was actually my BT1 save... LOST EVERYTHING. How was I supposed to know that the thee games didn't have their own individual save files?

I"m done.

There's only one save slot, even in legacy mode?

IIRC, it's save anywhere--I have tons of saves. Of course, I go the full route in saving and so each save file of mine is named after some facet of where I am and in what game...;) Like for instance: BT1-Sewers 1, etc. Not sure what keeps people from doing that--laziness?

Because it's not like a Sierra game where I would need a ton of saves to go back to if I mess up. I still don't think I need more than one save (per game) I lost my save due to a fluke, that I will seriously plan ahead next time I play.


But I understand :) some people like having lots of saves, others like having only one, or two.

I mean, I actually do that too. Like with Elder Scrolls, making a ton of saves as I progress. But I never felt that way with Bard's Tale for some reason.

I can't remember what hit me back in the day, but I had a similar experience. Now I *ALWAYS* use multiple save slots, because I never trust that my save file will be usable if something weird happens. Corrupted save files, Dumb "gotcha!" moments that cannot be fixed, accidentally going somewhere so dangerous I can't get back out again without dying, there's all kinds of things that can go wrong.

I only have one save slot in real life. I play games for a different experience.

Daggerfall taught me to keep redundant saves of everything, and depending on game, back the suckers up as well. Though I did have an incident with my original DOS BT2 game back when we only had a 386. I stuck a bunch of gold in the bank, not realizing that there was no separate save files or bank files; just character files. My brother was playing at the same time and saw all that gold sitting there, plus a bunch of nice gear I'd outgrown and sold to the shop. His newbie party got a huge leg up, and I started using my own copy of the game on a floppy instead of playing off the HDD.

Well put...;) We play games for entertainment! Certainly not "realism"...;) We play games to get away from "realism," etc. Saving your games as you go is simply an excellent habit to adopt if you are someone who has more than a casual interest in your games and you'd rather take your games than leave them, imo.

Saving a game and writing your own title for your save games take 2-4 seconds--well worth hours of backtracking when a save is lost, and as you point out, savegames can sometimes become a mess for a variety of reasons--so the more, the merrier!