I had the same experience. The first hour sucked me in. Unfortunately, I find it harder to motivete myself to play. The story is excellent and I really want to see more, but the game crashes every three loading screens (Much more often than Fallout 3 who was my most unstable game until now). Any ideas on why it started crashing so often? (Maybe because I was using Alt-Tab).

If you play as a thief, it's entirely possible to max out your stats. Thieves level up faster than fighters or mages, and with all of the free stat bonuses from quests and the like, you can get everything up to 25 even without lots of tattoos. Technically you can do this with any type of character, but it's easier with thieves due to the levelling. The max level of PST is actually 99, though you're more likely to be 20-30 by the end of the game, unless you farm lots of monsters for XP.

And you CAN farm monsters for xp... LOTS of them. Curst, Undersigil, and the Modron Maze are the best for that. However, it's kinda pointless honestly. You'll likely be more than powerful enough by the end of the game even without grinding. Even my magey characters tend to be able to stab monsters to death with ease. Late-game Undersigil has Greater Glabrezus, though, which can drop some REALLY nice items. (Heaven and Earth, Bell's Shield, Umei Kaihen, Ring Zero)

I like killing everything that moves, just for fun. :)

I'm mostly wondering if, given how important dialog is in this game, playing as a fighter will effectively gimp your character.

As I said before you can play an intelligent fighter with high charisma. With good fighting moves and weapons you can do well and get all or most dialog options.

It depends entirely on how you allocate your stats. You can play a fighter and still pump Wis and Int up initially to around 20 or so while leaving Str and Dex around 10-12 (and Dak'kon and Morte can handle most of the early combat without too much difficulty- Morte's a great tank, and Dak'kon can really dish out the damage). My first time through I did this and never felt like my TNO was gimped (and by the end he was a serious powerhouse in melee, with enough Wis, Int, and Cha to talk himself out of nearly any situation).

I think it was very easy to cheat your stats (a text editor or something was enough). Feel free to adjust your settings, if you find combat to hard. That is not a major part of the game.

Oh, and try to avoid dying, just a hint for way later.

Definitely do play a mage with high WIS, CHA, INT. Don't bother with other stats, don't bother with combat -- this is not that kind of RPG. Non-mage classes are perfectly playable, but mages have the most dialogue options (Dak'kon!), which is what this game is all about.

EDIT: Also, eventually you're going to find a yellow, round object. Don't throw that away either.

Bah, as I & others said before it does not matter the class you pick as long as the right stats are put up high enough. Well maybe you might not get to shoot fireballs and whatnot.....or talk about some of the magic stuff...but that's about it(afaik).

Mage class is fun though.

And no combat? Yeah you don't need to do much of it in PS:T, but who doesn't enjoy a bit of random killing in an RPG? :)

It's not about fireballs (most of the spells are useless anyway); as far as I know, you can only get to Dak'kon's backstory if you're a mage. If you're not, he presumes you can't possibly understand his Circle of Zerthimon (do I remember that right?) and you don't have a chance. Which is a shame, because it's an interesting backstory. There might be some other occasions of something like that, too.

And yeah, the combat is there and can occasionally be fun, but mostly it just gets in the way. In fact, I always felt PS:T could have been better if it did not use the Infinity Engine; it does not fit the game at all.

However, this doesn't mean you need to play most of the game as a mage. Since you can switch between classes whenever you want you could easily play most of the game as a fighter, then simply switch over to being a mage for a little while for events and conversations that require you to be one.

The game takes off after you leave the Hive - just saying. Until then I felt like a regular courier-boy and helper of sorts (I also have/had no idea about the Planescape lore, so it felt weird, even though the diary helps a lot).

This thread has inspire me to play PS:T again. This time.... I'm going to trying to finish it this time! :D

*Know* that this game is a fantastic experience. *Know* that you can expect at least 40 hours of wonderful writing in one playthrough, assuming that you do everything.

*Know* that this is a modern literary classic.

Easily one of the best games I've ever played and I've played a fuck of a lot of them in the 30 years I've been gaming.

I might as well just paste in my review

One of the finest and most creative games ever made. It subverts almost every trope of the fantasy genre, its a D&D game with no dragons, it has no swords (well I think there's 2 but the PC can't use either), it has a chase succubus with a voice like liquid sex who runs a brothel where there's nothing but conversation with highly educated intellectual prostitutes, some of the most honest folk you meet with be demons, you can influence reality by mentioning someone's name enough times, you can have a chat to a letter of the alphabet, you can recruit a clockwork robot...

There's not enough space in a single review to encompass the sheer creativity of this game. Ultimately, it's a deep philosophical story regarding the nature of reality yet manages to get necrophilia jokes into the very first conversation you have.