The Stack

Just a brief note today, corresponding to a brief play session. My time has mostly been spoken for the last few days. This will end soon, but I can’t help but feel like I’m dragging my heels again, like when I was just starting Pool of Radiance — perhaps because I’m no longer rushing to access sequels on schedule. (There is one more game left in the series, Pools of Darkness, but I don’t feel like I have to start that next week, because I have other games from 1991 I can do instead.)

But also, I may be getting tired of the gameplay. I’ve made a lot of comments about the subtle differences between the Gold Box games, and how the user interface incrementally improves, but the fact is, the bulk of my time spent playing the game is still a matter of maneuvering guys around on a battlefield, casting the same few spells, and then going through the ritual of resting up, re-memorizing spells, and identifying any enchanted loot I found. Bosses break this up a little, but they’re a minority of the play time. The one thing that really changes as I advance is that my higher-level characters have more spells and more hit points, and therefore can have more battles between rests.

I vaguely recall a passage in the first edition Dungeon Master’s Guide about how the players should regard monsters as obstacles, not goals. (Presumably this is the rationale for providing XP for treasure.) A lot of CRPGs break this idea, to the point where players spend time wandering around explicitly looking for random encounters. Here, though, I’m really feeling like random encounters are just getting in the way of me doing what I want to do, which is advancing in the plot in a timely fashion. In the previous two games, there were ways to avoid a lot of the random encounters, usually by means of the “Parlay” option. (One dungeon in Curse of the Azure Bonds had random encounters with giant slugs, which could be avoided by simply stepping out of their way.) But that hasn’t even been an option here.