found a way to sort of clip into the side of walls in vampire: the masquerade - redemption. picking up an item seems to move the character forward by a bit, and repeating the action with the inventory open allows you to spam pickup and inch closer into a wall. it only seems to work if you're up against an angle, or where i was testing it just had bad collision since i can have christof just walk into the wall and get stuck without using items (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rJCHGuj8l4 video of me trying this for reference)

would be nice if the clip worked right there because that's the first mission, and going through that way would let me skip 2 levels of the mines and go straight for the first boss ahzra. however, it might be that the level transition doesn't exist if you did manage to clip, and the strategy for fighting ahzra relies on picking up holy water through the dungeon and spamming it on her - with the clip, you wouldn't have any holy waters

i'm hoping this inventory pickup movement can force me oob somewhere helpful. it seems once the item you're using is actually oob itself that you can't pick it back up? i'm not even sure how the game will react to a character being oob

i'm also seeing that vtmr will be incredibly luck based through the entire run. the pen and paper underlying system makes battles take forever, especially in the early game where you haven't leveled up any dexterity to increase hit percentages. plus i'm trying to avoid clearing out entire areas, so i'll be missing a lot of experience that the game expects you to get. the level up route is going to be super important, and even then i'll be at the whim of random dice rolls

i'm hoping i can find some significant exploits early on to abuse: i know raising charisma can allow you to buy and sell back items at a greater price, so you can get unlimited money this way and purchase the expensive protection and blood pool equipment. but then you have to level up charisma instead of something combat oriented like disciplines, dexterity, strength, or vitality. christof the main character has the highest base charisma at 40, wilhem has 25 or something. it would make sense to drop charisma into a coterie member since they don't matter as much, but they need more experience than christof to reach that level of infinite money haggling

there is a segmented run by a french speaking runner on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpTD6AG_j3g), i'd love to watch it with someone who is fluent in french and can translate the commentary for me. laml did a bit a few years back, and the commentary at the beginning was that the dude reset a ton until an enemy dropped a quality weapon which he used to beat ahzra faster. it'd be nice if something useful and applicable could be found in there for me to exploit

idk this game seems terrible for speedrunning but i'm enjoying the routing process so far. it feels like i'm on the cusp on figuring something out that will bust the run open but i'm not sure if it'll really happen