It should have been over on the first page. How do you restrict save scumming and make the game still good? You can't and you're an idiot for bringing it up.
If you could wouldn't someone do it?
You're a fucking cretin.
By your logic everything everywhere must be perfect already, because if it could have been improved, it has been.
We so fucking need a "bow of shame" button, in addition to "brofist".
You're operating on the assumption all the enemies will be like the player.
No, I'm operating under assumption that having majority of races in the gameworld being dedicated cannon fodder for player to slaughter for lewtz and exps is just fucking dumb and leads to shitty, forgettable universes.
My assumption has been supported by 100% of cases I've encountered so far.
Unless you have some good, plot-related reasons for the PC to be unique little snowflake, like being undying dude with lots of scars, twice-undead, immortal, ex-vampiric wraith, or the last dragon-knight, the PC (or party) will be racially the same as good portion of the gameworld, will have the same range of statics, and will typically fight against other members of same races, while not fending off wildlife or fighting a relatively rare supernatural/mythical/alien opponent.
Why would the enemies be the same level as the player?
Because enemies come from full range of levels.
Fine, you're an aspie and players and enemies are all cookie cutter clones with no differences at all.
Of course not! Stats don't matter when defining a character in an RPG! At all! What does matter when defining a character in an RPG is how many landwhales it took to write a gay romance line for them.
Instead of changing the enemy stats, I change their numbers, formation, and surprise rounds of encounters. Ta-da! Difficulty is exactly the same whether the player is getting a giant penalty or a giant bonus. Still no fucking reason why a penalty system is different from a reward system.
So, if player reloads, he's rewarded with more challenging tactical gameplay, while if he doesn't he gets punished with dumbing down?
(Also, runaway suck is a big problem if reloads cause combat difficulty spikes that cause more reloads).
I don't agree with any kind of forced ironman or savegame restriction
That's why it shouldn't be a hard restriction, but soft penalty, and it shouldn't be placed on saving, but on reloading. Duh.
Back to the ironman, I don't like artificial difficulty
But isn't the ability to reload at will, effectively rolling back anything undesirable that happens to you in the game artificial ease?
Unrestricted saving and loading of games, but with RNG seed always stored to block save scumming during battles in the case of turn-based games.
If you remove the ability to retry by save scumming you reinforce the ability to scout by reloading.
It's an unwinnable situation - either you make the game deterministic and foreknowledge gained by reloading reliable, or you make it non-deterministic and susceptible to probability manipulation through save scumming. Either way scummer wins.
There's a huge difference between reward and punishment, both in game design terms and in the psychology of the player. If you reward a player for not saving, they feel like they achieved something, and there's also an extra gameplay mechanic involved in the choice. It follows a risk / reward pattern: a player takes a risk and is rewarded with superior power. There is reason not to save, but sometimes saving is the optimum strategy because of the risk of dropping dead and losing a bunch of progress. When a player judges a decision correctly, they feel good and are having fun.
Punishment for reloading, however, is a horrible idea.
You've got it ass backwards. Rewarding not saving is horribly retarded as it forces player to choose between forfeiting the reward and leaving himself open to (often technical) failure and losing hours of progress.
Also, the difference exists only if you have single special frame of reference (like for character abilities).
The main reason a player would reload is because they are being beaten / have failed a task; but as a consequence they are then further weakened which does nothing except make it arbitrarily more difficult to pass the section they were already having trouble with. This is guaranteed to annoy the player horribly.
No one says negative consequences should even affect combat or MQ-critical tasks. RPGs typically have a lot of optional, but highly desirable rewards attainable by players, like treasure, artifacts, and quest rewards. Those can be selectively disabled, starting with non-unique treasure (replacing randomized treasure with null on generation) when player doesn't reload too often, and ending with permanently (for that character) disabling unique optional content when player establishes himself as pathological savescummer.
The idea isn't to prevent saving, quite the contrary - player should save as often as he can.
The idea isn't even to prevent reloading, it's to ensure that player will only reload when it's absolutely necessary and capture all upsides of ironman (like player investment in survival at all cost), without any of its downsides.