I've read this article in a gaming magazine and I felt the urge to play and finish Baldur's Gate I (as I've played it as a kid but never finished)

what I want to ask is how to go through the game as easily as possible. the reasons are obvious, my time is limited, my backlog is huge, and I simply don't want to spend hours saving/loading at each wild wolf encounter as it happens now.

I'm thinking about a couple of solutions:

a) pushing the "difficulty" bar to zero - can anyone advise what are the cons of that? I know the experience gained is lower, but how is that easier? won't I need the XP to defeat all the monsters anyway?

b) making my group larger - at the moment it's just me (a mage) and Imoen and I'd like to keep it that way. I'm willing to take Khalid and Jaheira as well, but does it help that much (I mean with the difficulty set to normal)?

or if you can think of anything better (although I'd like to go through the vanilla version) please let me know :)

PS: please no "skip it and go straight to BG2", I really want to experience the first game as well...

My suggestion would be to change your class to fighter. I know that mage is great, but playing with fighter is much easier and faster!

Also making your team bigger is really good idea. I finished BG on standard difficulty with no problems, so I don't know cons of that, sorry :)

/e: Take as much melee NPC to your party. Two more hands to fight is always better than additional experience :)

Well, the trade off of having a 6 man party is you all level slower.

However, it also means there's more people to share the burden of being targeted by enemies.

I'd personally advise against trying to end the game as quickly as possible. Much of the enjoyment is the exploration.

I'd second the choose fighter as your class, and make a melee/ranged heavy team, and skip a bit on the mages - they first become truly powerful in BG2.

Further, skip sidequests and focus only on main quests, this will lower the game time significantly. Putting the difficulty on easy doesn't affect xp gain from what I recall (And in Icewind Dale where it did, it doubled the xp gained when playing on easy).

I agree with you on that, by "quickly" I meant "not having to spend 20 minutes on each encounter as I die about 5 times before I'm able to defeat them by accident"

Keep your party small at the beginning, go to the maps on the right you should reach an area with basiliks and a ghoul that wants to join you. He is no regular party member so no XP shared to him and turns hostile after resting but he is immune to the basiliks petrification, Let him kill the basiliks but watch out that they don't hurt him that much. You don't want him to die before the basiliks are dead. If you are alone you will have around 20k-30k xp more with imoen in the team its half that. This will give you an easy start and other npcs level with the level you first had on that map.

Then take that difficulty slider way down.

Also, sleep will be your friend as one of the better spells for managing assassin parties (and command, which IIRC is the priest equivalent for single targets).

And DO NOT run a mage as your main. If you die, it's game over. Mages are just too weak and prone to being gibbed far too easily. Ranger, paladin, cleric, fighter. You will be far harder to kill and make sure you get yourself a good roll and crank that Con and Dex.

This is exactly the reason why I had to start Baldur's Gate 2 for the second time!

I entered the Underdark with low experience mage and, well... I started over again :D

/e: Typo.

You might consider installing the BGTweaks mod.
It lets you increase stacks of gems, scrolls, ammo etc to 9999 each.
It also gives you various other tweaks / cheats that will make the game easier….

Have you considered using a walktrhough to avoid needlessly travelling to and talking to people and places that aren't crucial to the story?

Also, I can send you a file with my level 8 (I think...) ranger.

It'd kind of make the game easy as sin, but you definitely won't be reloading, heh.

(of course, I think he may only be usable in BGTutu)

I do want to explore everything there is in the game, I just hate the hard combats... and I want to keep the mage, I always play the mage and I know that he can get better and more powerful eventually... this sounds like a great solution for me, thanks, I'll try that! ok, first I'll try Darkcloud's trick and if it doesn't work for some reason, I'll turn the difficulty down... and yes, I do sleep a lot now, I've spent about 8 days just on the first two maps :D

Also, unless I remember wrongly, having a Paladin as protagonist makes it impossible to take some quest rewards, so to make sure that you can pick material rewards, choose another (heavily armored) class.

You don'y have to fight every wolf in the wilderness.
Use the Stealth skill to scout the area and pick your fights.

When I get stuck, or need to figure what the npc's are hitting with me, I go to gamesfaq.com. Use to go to gamespot, but have to jump through too many hoops to get the walkthrough (gamespot my have changed since my last vist a few years ago). Often, I only need something specific, and gamesfaq often has several faq's that answer questions only about armor, weapons, or special formula or items. It's nice because you can get the help you need, without more than you might want.