Rituals playing tome

[cksiu]

Do you have any rituals playing tome? And why?

I have a day's break before starting certain things in the game. Tier 2 dungeons. Tier 3 dungeons. Vor armoury.

I take a day's break after each character death.

I lose exactly one character of each class I try to Melinda's trap because I think I am bad ass and can save the ladies.

What are yours?

[Zizzo]

I keep meaning to reply to this and keep forgetting; We Apologize for the Delay.™ Anyway, I do have some basic rules I've learned from hard experience, basically for the purpose of staying alive. (These are generally in the spirit of the rules I had for T2's old Sandworm Lair, which included things like "No more than two levels per sitting, counting the one you just recalled back to" and "The correct answer to the question 'How recently have I cast Detect Traps and Detect Monsters?' is 'Not recently enough, if you have to ask.'")

The rules I have so far are fairly simple:

• For some zones (Nur, Tempest Peak, Vor Armory, Orc Prides, High Peak if I haven't restarted the character by that point), one level per sitting (not counting empty first levels), or even multiple sittings for particularly stressful levels.
• For some other zones (Elven Ruins, Dreadfell, Reknor, Telmur Tower, Tannen Tower), a separate sitting for the final level. (That also included a separate sitting for the orc ambush after Dreadfell, back when I still did it.)
• By the time you hit Tempest Peak, you should have at least 15 infusion patches of clearing and 5 of healing. By Dreadfell, that should be 25 clearing patches; by the Prides, 40 (possibly even more for a melee character going up against Gorbat).

"Sitting" here is for a particular character; I usually have several characters going at once, so after nerve-wrackingly inching one character through an Orc Pride level, for instance, I might detox by switching to another character who's still puttering around in Daikara.

I lose exactly one character of each class I try to Melinda's trap because I think I am bad ass and can save the ladies.

Oh, yeah, I generally don't bother with that (did it once, just to get the achievement); when I do, I wait until after returning from the east.

[GlassGo]

Female characters are Ogre-Drem only, no exception.

[pizdabol]

I have a kind of a fetish of naming character after HoMM3 heroes, dunno if that counts.

[smithfield]

All my Wyrmics are named after cities and small towns in Canada.

Under 1.5.10, I'd make a little write up for each character (thanks zizzo) at the end of OF-1 before going on. This used to be the place that I would reach at the end of a good first effort. Now, I'm too frazzled by the T1's, I've stopped doing this.

I play tome like it was mountain climbing, too.
Stage the difficult parts and cross them together.
I've got some parked on DF.
I've got some parked in GoM.
I've got one parked on the doorsteps for HP.