FWIW IMO XBox Fable is very good

[Crystalion]

Right away though, I found a gold exploit, making the game much easier than it should be. I'm using a close-to-end-game weapon right away, simply because I'm the master at "memory". There's a card game where you match card combinations -- There are only 4 rows of 4 (or 5?) that you must match in 40 seconds. Plenty of time! I was able to get 20k gold in a short amount of time, thereby allowing me to buy some sweet gear. My brother just stumbled upon another key and gold-getting exploit as well. Looks like those boys need to fire their Q-A guys!

Ah, you're faster than I at the card pairs game (it would be easy for me at 50 seconds and clearly impossible at 35... I always run out of time on the last few cards at a 40 limit).

The design center of the game is clearly "easy" and getting gold is no exception. While quests are atomic, requiring that you complete them in entirety once in the initial critical region, the game even allows you to do "Hero save"s to keep items and experience found within the quest (when you fail and/or reload). This is of course "exploitable"... apart from the obvious fact that the design is meant to be "easy", not frustrating.

(Well, it did take me four or five tries to win the ultimate boxing championship, and that was a bit frustrating... but I did learn to box better).

In such a game design, it is really up to the players to decide how hard they want the game to be (e.g. since gold is easy to come by, and "boasts" only grant you more gold, clearly making a quest harder on yourself by boasting is largely meant for fun factor).

BTW, understanding the Combat Multiplier, the CM/2 for zoning (e.g. recall), and Physical Shield, it is quite easy to pretty much start off by getting the Greatwood Caves Demon door prize, a really nice light melee weapon (iirc 135 damage with lightning augmentation).

The in-game games are fun and pretty easy apart from the time limits... many of the games I just barely can't beat because I can't quite meet the time limits. The game I personally find trivial is Ha'penny, which isn't available until late in the game. For those that don't know, you didn't mention that most games have modest betting limits (e.g. 200 to 1000 gold) and the games take both real and game time (the later as I discovered while playing a game as an assassin was beating up on me). So spending time and effort beating these games isn't much different than repeatedly trashing the Greatwood Caves troll for rubies (or any other easily repeated fight with decent payoff).

Trading can generate decent cash early on. Renting out property generates tons of cash if you just spend a minute sleeping 3 times (e.g. free bed in South Bowertown Quay and zone back to collect rent). In other words, gold is "cheap".

My favorite "exploit" thus far, for gold, is the following (because it's sneaky)...

Buy the Marital home in Oakvale and upgrade it if desired to two trophy holders (one at least is needful). Don't rent it out during this process. Put your valuable trophies on the wall, stand in the doorway and sell the house. The sales price you recieve will include the value of the trophies (which is small for early trophies but substantial for later ones--ranging from hundreds to thousands of gold). As you are standing in the doorway, the doors will not close... so duck into the house and reclaim the trophies. You can now walk out the (open) doors (which close behind you) and buy the house back at a discount.

Effectively what you are doing is selling your trophies and stealing them back over and over (without risk of being caught, afaik... assuming a guard were ever up that way, I'm not sure that being in the house qualifies as tresspassing and there isn't any "evil" involved with either the trophy removals or door finesse).

BTW, for those reading that don't know Fable, the above sleaze is certainly in line spiritually with the design... one intended thing you can do is learn enough guile to steal, which is, e.g., effective when you bribe the guards to "take a break" and scare the shopkeeper off. If you get caught then the game provides that you can flee town without paying fines, as long as you "hide out" (i.e. stay out of the town with fines) for eight minutes (realtime).

Personally the only spendy things I think are needful to buy over the course of the game is one suit of decent armor (many decent weapons are available free) by the end game. Early game doesn't need armor and mid-game has free armor available that does just fine (actually one mid-game suit is available trivially at the beginning). The best complete suit of armor in the game runs less than 20k net, iirc, which is a paltry sum of money (at least by the time you need it).

So the only major use for money, if you intend to be good, would be 100k+ in donations to the Temple of Avo (the gods grant several special rewards for that, but any gold donated generates "good" points, so this is one possible way to redeem yourself if you've done a bit of evil you wish to erase quickly).

I've played the game through twice now. Tonight I did some testing with my second character (didn't save) in which I maxed out every skill in the game (some magic skills require that you be fairly good or evil inherently to do the max notch, but there isn't anything stopping you from swinging from absolute good to absolute evil and back again, as I did tonight).

Some of the skills and equipment that works well in the early to mid-game would not cut it for the finale battle... however the lead up to that involves endless battles (you're expected and instructed to pass on through the "cinematic" battles) in which you can harvest as much xp for skills as you wish.

This is not a game in which you "mess up" your character unrecoverably by ignorance. It is clearly intended to be enjoyable when played in many different ways, with a lot of room for "role-playing" in the non-statistical sense (the success of the AD&D model tends to equate CRPG with things D20 because that is easier to program).

I might play it through a third time, with a character that eschews combat (and being good at it) as much as possible (and is good or evil in a completely self-serving way). The main questline has several "locked door" encounters where you must triumph militarily (including the final battle, of course) but apart from those a surprising amount of the game should be possible to finesse in a sneaky or cowardly manner.