The thing that I very much enjoyed about BG was the way that the technical glitches worked themselves into the role-playing somehow. The pathfinding was just awful, and for some reason Minsc would often decide that the best way to any given point was to truck through uncharted territory, setting off traps and training monsters after him. Usually I would micromanage and bring him back, but with BG I just let him go - curiously. He would eventually arrive at the rest of the group with some sort of cheery comment about his hamster, and the rest of my party would set to work killing off the horde he had brought along. Once he found a badass crew of ghouls that destroyed us all. In any other game this would infuriate me: in BG I just chalked it up to Minsc's sub-10 intelligence. Haven't found many games that possess this particular quality, where (for me) an annoyance is 'just life' rather than something to get frustrated by and hung up on.

I seem to remember being lvl. 4 by the time I hit Nashkel and the mines, but I think my guys decided to spend some time backstabbing bears and wolves in the forest. "Wildlife Management": good for XP.