I checked in with Mr. Reverend on Crow's stream, he gave thumbs up on stat abuse for any% with major skips.

About quitting/crashing/killed and the run being over: Don't know if there are any specific rules for or against it. My first fighter 100% run contained a couple of crashes and possibly a death. My mindset is that you can keep going, but only load saves that you created during the run, though at a certain level of optimization a game-crash or death would be a dead run anyways.

I haven't done magic-user in a while, so don't know how well the ems fix applies to Mage's Maze (I imagine it would help). But the wonky color things, we don't have any real fix for it.

The speedrunning subreddit has a starting page that you might reference (https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/wiki/faq), though could be out-of-date. Really the important points are:

1. Correct dosbox settings (cycles=10000 is the rule, EMS=false makes your life easy)
2. Have a tool to stream/record your runs (OBS is great for this)
3. While not strictly necessary, a timing program helps a lot (I use LiveSplit, but there are others).

I'll comment some more about splits - they're hard to keep consistent if you're still routing. Don't worry too much about them until you're positive that time improvement comes from better execution or luck on the path you're already going to take, or maybe just use them to remind yourself what your route is. My splits have largely gone unused in fighter 100% due to the inconsistency of random encounters (I could be 2 minutes behind because I got additional encounters early, and then suddenly be 2 minutes ahead because my kobold fight was faster as a result and I finished training earlier).

For further investigation, I've decided to highlight the entirety of my running that night to see what events might have contributed:

My thrusts ended up being way quicker than normal while fighting the Weapon Master last night:

This seemed like a bug. If it were reproduceable, we might be able to get away with much less grinding in fighter 100%.

I'd adjust some of the rules wording on the class any% categories and ban any major skips (and explicitly list dagger-glitch in QFG1 and early Bruno in QFG5 as examples), but I'd also rename the categories so that the one that allows major skips is just any% while the others are labeled "no major glitches". That renaming is largely to keep it consistent with the way other games name categories - they tend to list restrictions rather than allowances.

One last question - the new wording on any% major skips in QFG1 suggests that we're allowed to cheat stats like crazy. Intended? A test run of QFG1VGA had me get about a 2:38 (no video proof yet) when my thief boosted stats, picked the lock on the cave door, killed Fred and climbed past Toro.

2 week vacation coming up soon though, it's going to be a while before I get around to it.

I'm actually much less worried if intelligence makes a difference. If that gives me a way to beat the game at 10k cycles, I'll stick to 10k and just figure out how to do an efficient grind.

Sent you the saves.

All of that actually seems to make a big difference - I haven't had time to test it more, but my intelligence was 10/11 and everything else was 100.

The other thing I'd note is that I don't appear to be using the same version of dosbox; I was using SVN-daum for the MT-32 emulation.

Fighter 100% is empty at-the-moment and it's clearly because of Swordy Lordy. I experimented a bit and found that he's impossible with my dosbox cycles at 10000, but easily beatable at 1000-2000 (max stats, I haven't experimented with lesser stats yet but figure weapon use is the main one).

So... tweaking cpu cycles mid-run feels like cheating, but running the entire game at 2000 feels like pain. Anyone have opinions on which way should be done?

I want to get into some Quest for Glory speedrunning, but I have questions around some of the rules and I figure I should probably get them out of the way before I start posting some times (I'm also trying to avoid watching the existing runs so that I can do my own routing first before I compare later, though I'm aware of how broken QFG1 is already):

1. Are there any hard and fast rules around Dosbox? I'm running the Daum build for that MT-32 sound and specifically want to know how many cycles I can use on my cpu.
2. Game versions. Any ones to stick with? I saw the TAS of the original hero's quest and know that you don't need to learn hiden goseke in that version, but later versions require it. For the most part I have the GOG versions anyways.
3. When exactly does the timer start and when exactly does it end? On a per game basis. (Example: I'm assuming QG1VGA starts when the Spielburg entrance screen loads and stops when the ceremony screen displays, but want clarification)
4. Defining 100%. I saw another thread that says all points, but I vaguely recall one of the versions of QFG1 having a bug where some points intended for magic-user could be obtained by thief. Get the points intended for thief to add up to 500, or just get 500?
5. Related to above; Fighter 100% in QFG2. All paladin points too, or just the 500 and skip paladin?
6. QFG5 - since points cap at 1000, what is 100%?
7. Small one - I noticed that the QFG1VGA thief any% and any% times don't match. Are there rules prohibiting the dispel potion skip in thief any%?
8. Finally, is there any sort of leaderboard or categories for a one character all games run?