Kakugo

That sounds cool. I'm gonna apply some Draconian restriction from 11 on 3 once I complete 3 normally first.

Yeah lol and that's relatively to the rest of the RPG's. It's like doing addition when every other genre are polynomials. It's already baby mode stuff so a challenge will only take it to the first grade.

My party got wiped because a mushroom made everyone fall asleep in the first round and for the next 3 rounds the rest of the monsters turned us into mincemeat. How can I avoid these wipes? Sleep the shrooms and pray that it works?

I'm so glad I started off with 3 Draconian Restrictions since they can be easily turned off if you're fed up with them, and Hard Monsters was one of them. I ended up disabling the other 2 (no shops and no escapes because I rarely needed to escape from anything - I might had no armor too, it's been a while). Related to the thread: I still cannot tell when I'm underleveled or recommended for an area

I was wondering how to go about playing Dragon Quest 3 for the first time and avoid overleveling. One idea was the "dumb-dumb strat" which is similar to running until I hit a wall aka. I wipe, then use whatever money I have left for upgrades and try again. The other involved checking how much experience I gain around an area and whether my characters can get a level up in 3-5 fights.

Whenever I'm "stopping to grind" is because I tried to progress through an area and the fights are so taxing on resources (MP, items) that they burn faster than before by a lot. So, for example, if I'm walking from a village to a tower and I already used heal 3 times after 3 battles whereas before that route I'd use 1 heal after 3 battles (placeholder values btw), that's my alarm going "go get some money and update your gear idiot" 😅

I've been thinking that maybe levels are an easy "culprit", because there's also the factor of gear to consider. If that's the case then being underleveled doesn't mean much if you have early access to some casino or mini-game (like the monster arena in Dragon Quest 3). ...Actually, casino and mini-games might motivate low level runs, because you gain access to gear that compensates for your lack of raw stats. But no gear can compensate for your lack of agility or spells/skills or MP for that matter. For instance, if I told you that I went through the dreamer's tower on level 5 and omitted that my squad has steel swords and chain mail on the surface it would sound moderately impressive, but once you looked closer to my achievement you'd go "oh so you've been betting on monsters for an hour eh?".

In Dragon Quest XI I was unable to tell what the intended level for any area or boss was due to the lack of level as a reference in the monster book (monsters have no levels). How can I learn to tell? Do I just say "I take a lot of damage, time to grind a bit"?

One of my favorite reviews is the Dragon Quest XI review by Tim Rogers for Kotaku. I must have watched it at least 4 times, not only because it's a fun review but because he also helped me see things in a different light. My first Dragon Quest was Dragon Quest 1 and that was 2 years ago not 32, so Dragon Quest XI was my first party-based Dragon Quest. He showed me that I should be using the "Tactics" menu, that I should be taking my time through the game and play about an hour or 2 a day, kinda like watching a daily TV show. But I haven't yet experienced his response to anyone claiming that "Dragon Quest is too easy". He claims that there's fun to be had in fighting a boss underleveled. Given that the average player (myself included) grinding themselves to death by youtubing "DQ11 easy level 99" as soon as possible, I was wondering if anyone has experience with playing underleveled Dragon Quest and what's the general opinion about it. Do you agree with Tim or not? Edit: In case someone never watched it, this is one of the timestamps where Tim Rogers talks about it https://youtu.be/4iTbUGItU0s?t=633 and another one somewhat relevant to his "grinding" assertion https://youtu.be/4iTbUGItU0s?t=1284 (I still don't know what he means by counting cards).

I had no idea this book existed. Now I'm torn between getting the kindle version or ordering a physical copy because I'm from Greece and I need to check multiple amazon sites for shipping costs.

You know I was thinking how A.I. teammates as an option are meant to emulate different party members making their own decisions. A round-based combat system where at the start of the round every person does whatever they want would be too fun. FF6 tried it but it was local and multiple command windows were clunky on top of the ATB system.

Subreddit is strong and good but as long as Reddit has this abhorrent downvote/upvote system it dilutes any kind of discussion to popularity contests.

That is so Dragonball-esque. Like a father+son kamehameha. I can see the cool factor in it. I also expected that I'll misuse the term "pet peeve" but people will forgive me 😊lol