With Swordflight 2, I am finding it a bit tedious to have to buff up with potions before every single fight (sometimes scrolls too, as I am a Bard), which is slightly spoiling an otherwise highly enjoyable module...
I can understand why you would feel this way, though even without potions being a factor playing classes like Bard or Cleric will tend to involve a lot of potentially tedious buffing. Actually, in one way playing these classes might be less tedious in Swordflight (with its severe limitations on rest) than in a very difficult but otherwise more conventional module, in which one easily could (and thus arguably should) rest and rebuff after every single encounter. Likewise in a more conventional module, I at leasst tend to find collecting and managing potions even more of a nuisance since most of them provide tons and tons of readily available potions and similar consumable items yet 99% of the time they turn out to be completely redundant and unneccessary and just clutter one's inventory to no purpose. It is rather absurd to provide unlimited healing on rest AND the ability to teleport back to a temple and get healed at any time AND more healing potions than one could ever need, yet something rather like that sometimes seems to be be the NWN standard. If one is going to provide masses of potions (as any standard NWN module in fact does) one might as well make them useful (or so I figured, at any rate).
There a lot of buffs in NWN that can potentially make a huge difference to one's capabilities, so there are few choices for a module builder who does not want to encourage their frequent use. You can either make combat so laughably easy that they are unnecessary, or change the mechanics of the game in a fundamental way, with the latter often being a massive and impractical enterprise (at least for single player modules, where I am inclined to think it unreasonable to expect players to learn a completely new rule system for each one they download). The importance of buffing in Swordflight is to a great extent simply the natural consequence of making many encounters difficult enough that every little bit helps.
By contrast, healing resources were made finite (though by old school standards still quite plentiful) by conscious design, so as to make strategic resource management an element adding more depth to the game. In more modern RPGs, resource management tends to be purely tactical (typically once an encounter is over one can easily return to full hit points, mana, or whatever), so this is certainly more of an "old school RPG" approach than what many players these days have become accustomed to so I am not surprised that many people find such a system a bit difficult to get used to. I am not denying that there are a few disadvantages to the way I do things in Swordflight (restricted rest + making limited use items important), but I think it has the following advantages (at least, may think of more later), that at least to my mind make it worth putting up with:
1) As already stated, it adds more strategic depth. One does not only need to think about how to win a given encounter, but how one's expenditure of resources in that encounter will affect one long term.
2) It makes even routine encounters meaningful. With unlimited healing available after every encounter, every encounter will tend to be either a desperate, all-out struggle, or a rather pointless exercise that poses no threat to the player whatever. With consumables important yet limited, even an encounter in which a player is unlikely to be killed still requires him to pay attention and play tactically, lest he end up expending more resources than he wants to on it.
3) Balancing for different classes is made easier. You can make an encounter that is especially hard for Class A, yet less so for Class B in the expectation that A will use extra resources to overcome it. Then another type of encounter might be easier for A yet harder for B, meaning that in that case A spends fewer resources than B, roughly balancing things.
4) Game elements like instant death attacks, monster powers incapacitating the player with fear, etc., can be made a meaningful part of the game. In a more conventional NWN module you will either have items granting immunity to such things (making them essentially pointless) or else a player will have no way of dealing with them aside from hoping he gets lucky and makes his save. By making it possible to protect oneself from such effects, but only with limited use items, such powers can be made tactically interesting.
5) It helps avoid the excesses of a high magic monty haul. If I hand out as loot items with a higher bonus than what the player had previously, than I need to balance every subsequent encounter on the assumption that players have such items (hard to do in a very non-linear module like Swordflight). I also need to have subsequent quests hand out even better loot, in a vicious cycle, if players are to be expected to still find it interesting. By making limited use items important, one can give out significant loot that has an important effect on the game, but without necessarily radically altering the module's balance in perpetuity.
Next time, I think I might cheat, and after the first module, save the character and buy a Drow Piwafi Cloak, and a Lesser Ring of Power. That should negate the need for most potions, reduce preparation time before fights and increase my enjoyment of this otherwise superior module...
You are certainly free to play in whatever fashion you find most enjoyable, but from what I have said above it should be clear that you risk substantially altering the sort of RPG expereince I designed, particularly by bringing in a regeneration item or anything else that provides unlimited healing.
