Hello! I don't know if anyone will see this, but, as a long time fan of this game, I used the idea of speedrunning as an excuse to revisit The Bard's Tale recently, and I just wanted to clarify something in advance. I've been mapping out a 100% All Collectibles run, and I noticed the Category Rules stated that "each token over the course of the game" needs to be collected.
Using legitimate means, the Player can only get either 23 or 24 of the 25 total tokens in the game, due to a choice made in Chapter VI to either be nice or snarky to Dolyn. If you are nice to (or ignore) Dolyn before freeing him, he later gives you the White Book of Rhydderch in Chapter XII, and he allows you to open a door in Chapter VI that gives you the Golden Coronet. If you're mean to Dolyn before freeing him, he runs away and dies, giving you the Ring of Tara and preventing you from getting the Golden Coronet.
If there's a way to somehow trick the game into giving you all of those, I don't know it & I haven't seen it. My solution to this problem has been to save outside of Dolyn, get him killed, pick up the Ring of Tara, and then reload so that I can get the other two. This allows me to finish the game with the maximum allowed token count, which is 24/25. Really it's more of a 99% completion run, but that's just how they made the game. It's why the achievements for the game has "get 5/10/20 tokens" and not "get 25 tokens."
Anyways, I'm nearly done putting it together and I'll probably end up submitting something within a week, if I had to guess. Again, idk if anyone will look at this haha, the number of people who will ever care about this subject can probably be counted on one hand, two if we're lucky.
So I didn't originally write the rules for the category, but for what its worth, I'd say to get the highest amount of tokens (i.e. the amount that gets you closer to 100%).
To my knowledge, theres no known way to trick the game into giving you additional lockout items like that.
The usual method for handling situations like these across other games, is that if a mthod is discovered after the fact that can make it doable, the older record gets spun off into a different leaderboard (usually something like low%) and the new method would become the new 100%. So your work will still be recognised.
If anyone ever discoevers any sequence breaking or exploits of any kind in this game, I'll come right back and start running it again.
Yeah, I'd be shocked if something like that was found, and I certainly don't think I'm going to be the one to find it hahaha. I guess I'll just plan for 24/25!
im thinking of changing it to 24 tokens instead because i just learned this
That makes sense. Then if some kind of glitch or exploit is ever found to acquire the last one, a new category can be made.
