The Stack

It suddenly strikes me that Heimdall, as an RPG with realtime movement and isometric perspective, could be seen as anticipating Diablo. It took me this long to notice this because it doesn’t play like Diablo at all. Core to Diablo is the lack of separation between exploration and combat: monsters chase you around the map, attacks take place in the same realtime system as movement. That’s not the case here. Exploration is realtime, and combat is realtime, but they’re different realtimes.

As in Desktop Dungeons, all encounters are bound to fixed locations, and involve only one enemy. Sometimes you can see the enemy just standing there waiting, usually blocking a passageway. Other times, it’s a surprise: you’re walking down an empty corridor and you’re suddenly told that a monster has snuck up behind you. As with the pit traps, I can’t really see the surprise encounters as helping the game. For one thing, they’re only a surprise the first time, and I’ve been tending to go through a lot of the islands multiple times, due to not having the right keys to get to the best treasures the first time. I may even need to replay from the beginning soon: a possibly-essential item seems to have vanished from my inventory, whether through glitch or careless click.

Although you have six characters in your crew, you can only take three of them at a time ashore, and only one at a time can fight. (These vikings clearly get their ideas about battle from kung fu movies.) Combat is mainly a matter of clicking the on-screen “attack” or “defend” buttons at opportune moments. An animated illustration of the enemy takes swings at you and sometimes dodges. You can watch this to time your actions, but frankly, I don’t think I do significantly better by this approach than by just mashing “attack”.

But then, sometimes pressing the “attack” button doesn’t do anything. I’m halfway to convincing myself that only the text of the word “attack”, rather than the whole area of the button, is clickable. If true, horrible! I know that my earliest attempts at attacking failed simply because I hadn’t selected a weapon yet. This is something you have to do at the beginning of every fight; the game has no memory of what you’re wielding, and no notion of a default weapon, even if you’re carrying only one. Fortunately, every combat starts with a “Do you want to run away?” prompt that can be answered with a Y or N from the keyboard. This gives me an opportunity to position my mouse over where I know the button for my weapon will appear, so that I can save valuable seconds at the very beginning. And it’s kind of terrible that the game has me thinking like that.

The chief play mode in Heimdall, the one where you spend most of your time, is an isometric view of various rooms and corridors. Sometimes the corridors are decorated to look like roads in the outdoors, and they do a much better job of looking outdoorsy than the wallpaper back in Might and Magic, but they’re still functionally corridors. You make your avatar trudge around in this environment — there’s no “run” button, and walking is slow enough to make me impatient sometimes — picking up treasure, finding keys to unlock doors, and running into monsters and pit traps.

The pit traps are the most irritating thing in the game. They don’t kill you, they simply take away a certain amount of health and send you back to a safe position. But they’re unmarked, and usually come without warning — a cheap trick if there ever was one. (When I do manage to anticipate a pit trap, it’s usually because I fell into another one nearby. They hunt in packs.) There exists a “detect traps” spell, but casting spells in this game uses up the scrolls they’re written on, so you can’t simply cast “detect traps” in every room — even if you were to find an infinite source of “detect traps” scrolls, you don’t have enough inventory slots to carry as many as you’d need. And anyway, so far it seems like it’s more efficient on the whole to just go around triggering the traps and then eat some food to replenish your health when necessary. This may change over the course of the game, if the traps become deadlier or more numerous, but right now, they’re just an annoying non-challenge.

The color scheme of the corridors, as in game as a whole, tends toward brown and grey, with occasional splashes of red or light blue. I’d call it dull and unvaried, but sometimes it seems more like deliberate TRON-like stylization on the palette level: the vikings blend into the stone as if made of the same substance, while the occasional red bits seem all the more significant. (One area has walls that are entirely red, and it seems more special because of it.) I don’t really believe any of this, though. More likely we’re just seeing the artists doing the best they know how with palettized 8-bit color. They know what they can do with shades and tones, but only have room for so many.

The earliest games on the Stack, the ones from the 1980s and early 90s, are all RPGs. You might think this means that I’m a big RPG fan, but only if you forget the reason that these games are still on the Stack after all these years: they’re the ones that I haven’t played yet. They’re also not games that I purchased when they were new. Everything I’ve played so far in this chronological run-through has been from various anthology packages, all released around 1998. I’d say Heimdall doesn’t quite qualify as part of this trend, but it’s a judgment call: I bought it, on impulse, as part of a 1995 bargain-bin two-pack re-release that included its sequel, Heimdall II.

I understand Heimdall to be a fairly short game, but I was unable to complete it back when I bought it because the graphical effects accompanying spellcasting caused my system to crash. We’ll see if DOSBox does any better. I have reason to be worried already, though: even before I get into the game proper, I’m getting graphical glitches. If I play in fullscreen mode, sometimes it gets into this state where graphics simply don’t show up until the part of the screen they’re on changes. Animation shows, and the non-animated bits of the screen can be revealed by scrubbing over them with the cursor, which could make an interesting game element if it were deliberate, but it’s not. At any rate, it doesn’t seem to happen when run the game in a window, so that’s how I’m going forward. We’ll see if this prevents the game-crashing later on.

I suppose I’ve been fortunate to have had so little trouble with other games this year. I remember the DOS days as being full of game-specific tweaking — editing the config.sys file to free up more EMS memory, fiddling with IRQs, etc. DOSBox takes care of a lot of that automatically, of course, but also, I think we’re just hitting the point in the history of PC games where compatibility problems started hitting hard, thanks to the slow adoption of VGA, the variety of new sound cards, and the increasing demands on memory of both the games and the hardware drivers. Windows 95 and DirectX would simplify things a lot, but that’s still a few years off at this point. (And also, the era of DOS games didn’t exactly end immediately.)

So, about the game. This is basically an action-puzzle-RPG about vikings. Cartoonish ones. Not nearly as cartoonish as the ones in The Lost Vikings, but definitely moreso than those in Rune. But unlike most games about vikings, it puts a certain amount of emphasis on the fact that vikings are sailors. The main navigation mode is all about sailing from island to island, and your party can contain characters of classes like “shipwright” and “navigator”. Functionally, however, they all seem to just occupy various spots on the scale from warrior to wizard. I’m just getting started here, so it’s possible that the nominal professions will become important later, but there’s no indication of it in the docs. (Also, the fact that all characters, regardless of profession, are represented in the landing party by either a warrior figure or a wizard figure is a little suspicious.)

The initial character creation stage — which only creates the stats for the main hero, not for the rest of the crew (at least not directly) — is particularly notable. In it, you prove your worth for the coming adventure by means of three minigames: throwing axes, fighting on a boat, and catching a greased pig. The notable thing about it is how much programming time must have gone into such a minor part of the game: each of the minigames uses its own mechanics and user interface, takes about a minute to finish, and, as far as I can tell, is used nowhere else in the game. You see it only once unless you start over — which I suppose most players will do, because you’re bound to be disappointed in your first try. But to make the whole thing even more marginal, it’s skippable. You can go directly into the main game with less-than-ideal stats if you want to. For a while, I thought I was going to have to do this, because I thought that the game had frozen up at the start of the greased pig sequence, but when I consulted the manual, it turned out that I had to press the space bar to make it start. (I think I tried every other plausible keystroke.) I’m glad I didn’t have to skip it after all, because in addition to your stats, the minigames also govern who you can put on your crew: there’s a choice of 30 characters, but the more powerful ones turn up their noses at sailing under viking who can’t even catch a pig.

Next time I’ll try to describe the main part of the game a little. I’m still getting used to how it all works.

I’m several days late now at posting about my initial experiences with the next game on the Stack. I do in fact have experiences to post about, but that’s not what I’m talking about today. Instead, an interlude. ¹Literally, something played between I’ve been spending a lot of time this week on Desktop Dungeons, and have a few things to get off my chest before moving on.

DD seems to be most commonly described as a “ten-minute Nethack“, but I disagree on both counts. First of all, I find that my typical session takes about a half an hour. At first I thought that I was taking so long because I was unfamiliar with the game mechanics. But honestly, that’s going to be the case in most sessions here, at least if you play it like I do. Completing a session successfully tends to change the game enough that I have to relearn it, whether by unleashing new monsters or map types that require new tactics, or by unlocking new character classes that also require new tactics. And some of those unlockable classes defy anticipation. Yes, you start off with the D&D-standard four choices (fighter, thief, priest, wizard), but then you get a class that specializes in destroying walls, or one that regains health from the bloodsplots left behind when you kill a monster (something that had been purely cosmetic up to that point). It reminds me a lot of the Final Fantasy V “Jobs” system, in that I’m constantly trying out new character abilities without any sense of prolonged commitment. I find there’s not much point in revisiting a class/map combination that I’ve already completed successfully, so I’m pretty much always playing from a new angle.

Secondly, the Nethack influence is pretty slim. It’s a dungeon crawl with a randomly-generated map which starts off dark and gets filled in as you explore it. This puts it into the same general category of games as Nethack, but that’s a pretty big category — with just those criteria, we probably haven’t even narrowed it down to roguelikes. A couple of stronger influences are mentioned on the game’s download page: Tower of the Sorcer and Oasis.

From Tower of the Sorcerer, we get the stationary monsters and deterministic combat mechanics, also seen in DROD RPG. (Actually, there can be a certain amount of randomness in combat: one of the special abilities of the Rogue class is a random chance of dodging and avoiding a blow completely. But most of the time, it’s deterministic.) This scheme is done in the context of randomized maps rather than authored puzzles here, but it still has the same effect on gameplay: it lets you choose your battles carefully. Also like those other games, the UI provides you with some help: hovering the cursor over a monster gives a report of its stats and what the outcome will be if you hit it — usually “Victory”, “Death”, or “Safe” (which means that neither you nor the monster will die). This is valuable information in special conditions where the math isn’t entirely obvious — for example, when playing a Berserker, you do 30% extra damage when fighting a monster of a nominally greater experience level than your character, but it’s not obvious how that fraction gets rounded, and a single point can make the difference between victory and defeat, so it’s good that the UI confirms this. It would be nice if it went further, though: the hover text only covers the next blow, and doesn’t cover things like the fireballs you plan on throwing in beforehand (and which you don’t want to waste if they’re not going to do enough damage). So I still spent a lot of the game doing mental arithmetic.

Oasis provided some basic overall inspiration for the game: it occupies a similar niche, being the “ten-minute Civilization“. It also clearly inspired the mechanics behind exploring the dungeon. To start with, movement is instantaneous — it’s exploration that takes time. You move to a spot simply by clicking on it, and if you don’t reveal any new territory in the process, no time passes. Mind you, “time” means something different here than in Oasis. Oasis had a limit on the number of turns you could take, and repositioning yourself on the map didn’t take a turn, because it basically didn’t do anything — the whole notion that you occupied a location on the map at all was purely aesthetic, with no effect on gameplay. In DD, your location is sometimes significant: if you use the teleport spell, you can wind up with multiple explored patches, islands in the unrevealed darkness, and you can’t move directly from one such island to another until you’ve explored enough to find a route.

Now, when you add newly-revealed tiles to the map, the time spent lets you (and any wounded monsters) heal and regain mana. This is very similar in feel to the way that exploring new area harvests resources in Oasis, right down to the graphical effects that illustrate the resources floating from the revealed tile to the appropriate bins in the UI. But it’s very different strategically. In Oasis, your only motivation for leaving things unexplored is time contraints. DD has no time limit, but does limit how much health and mana you can have at any given time. You can only reap an unexplored tile’s bounty once, so if you’re already at max, exploring new territory is a waste. Darkness is a resource to be hoarded.

And that’s in tension with the player’s need to explore for upgrades and, more importantly, for information. Getting a spell glyph can be important enough to burn some darkness. On encountering a shop, you want to know if it’s worth spending all your cash immediately or if there’s a better shop somewhere, and the only way to find out is to go and look for another shop. Finding an altar can be of paramount importance, and is probably the single biggest thing behind the early push to explore. Once you find one, you can declare allegiance to its god, who then rewards you with additional power of some sort in exchange for accepting some kind of limitation. For example, there’s a god of magic that increases your mana limit, but forbids you to use melee attacks — which is not a bad tradeoff if you’re playing a primary spellcaster. Typically, the reward for worshiping a god increases with the number of monsters you fight by the god’s rules, while the limitation remains constant. Thus, you ideally want to find an altar before starting to fight monsters at all. But you can waste a lot of darkness looking for one — there are typically about three per dungeon, but they’re selected at random from a larger set, and you don’t always get an opportunity to worship the god you want.

All of which is to say that this is a game that, despite its familiar framework, has interesting rules that create varied gameplay, in which I have to keep learning and figuring things out. It’s so nice to see something like this after what I’ve been playing for the last month and a half.

I defeated the end boss of Secret of the Silver Blades on my second try. The winning technique hasn’t really changed since Pool of Radiance, but at least it provided a little variation after the fact: since the Dreadlord is a lich, killing his body isn’t enough. I had to find and destroy the item containing his soul, which was guarded by a second contingent of monsters. This secondary final battle wasn’t as tough as the first, lacking spellcasters as it did, which is fortunate, because I hadn’t bothered to rest up and re-buff after the first.

In the end, my entire party survived, including Vala, the NPC who I picked up about halfway through the game. Vala, who spent the last few centuries trapped in a magical box, is the last surviving member of the warrior order called the Silver Blades — or at least, she was until the rest of the party got inducted into it shortly after finding her. Despite the fact that my characters now constitute the majority of the Silver Blades, I’m still not clear on what their secret is. Perhaps it’s more that the order itself is a secret, as one might say “the crime of murder” or “the hour of noon”, or indeed “Curse of the Azure Bonds”. At any rate, Vala is the NPC whose death I described earlier, and I’m glad I went to the trouble of going back to before she died, because she occasionally made useful comments as I explored — not often enough to become annoying, either, the way a lot of hint-providing sidekicks do — and also because she was handy to have in the final battles. I really wasn’t expecting her to stick around that long; as I mentioned before, most NPCs in this series leave the party as soon as you leave the dungeon where you find them.

But then, this entire game is, in a sense, one big dungeon. As I surmised, there is no overland map of any kind — just a phenomenally expansive bunch of tunnels. Consequently, I have no idea where it all takes place relative to the lands around the Moonsea that form the setting for the first two games in the series. And it would have been good to have some geographical connection to the other games, because there’s very little to connect it to them otherwise. The only real links we’ve got are a couple of strikingly pointless reprised minor NPCs — the council clerk from Pool of Radiance (who I could have sworn was male back then), the Red Plume mercenary captain from Curse of the Azure Bonds (now serving as town mayor in a completely different place — just how much time passed between games, anyway?). Both are so marginal that you never learn their names. I had been expecting more because of the ending to CotAB: when you finally destroy the Pool of Radiance, Tyranthraxus gloats with his dying breath that you have, in so doing, unleashed an even greater evil, or something like that. I assume that the authors meant this as a general-purpose sequel hook that could be retconned into referring to anything, but it’s hard to see how my actions there could have had any impact on the Black Circle’s already-ongoing project to free the Dreadlord.

In fact, the strongest connection to the previous games comes in the red herrings. Remember that these games have text passages (and sometimes maps) in the manual, which the player is expected to read when referenced within the game, and not before. As a punishment for the impatient, this “Journal” contains a smattering of fake entries. I read all of SotSB‘s unused Journal entries after completing the game, and it has this whole false storyline about how Tyranthraxus managed to possess the body of a mouse just before his apparent death. There’s a tavern rumor about someone seeing a glowing mouse, a wounded adventurer who saw a glowing mouse delivering orders to a bunch of monsters (in a squeaky voice), even a revelatory villain monologue by the mouse itself. I don’t recall the previous games having fakery anywhere near as cohesive as this, although maybe the imagery just stands out more here.

Overall, this is definitely the most linear game in the series so far. Apart from a couple of quick sidequests, it’s all a single journey from point A to point B, with occasional teleporters back to point A along the way. I think the designers were trying to create a certain amount of nonlinearity by putting long gaps between the places where you find crucial items and the places where you use them — for example, the whole quest for the pieces of the Staff of Oswulf in the mines doesn’t really need to be completed until you get to the gates of the castle, which lies on the other side of the glacier crevasses and an Ice Giant settlement. It might even be more satisfying to rush forward unprepared, and only go back to pick up quest tokens when they become indispensible. (At the very least, you’d know your motivations.) But personally, my long habit in CRPGs is to proceed level by level, or place by place, being as thorough as I can in exploring one thing before going on to the next. Not only does this net you all the best treasure, it smooths the way to XP without explicit grinding. I can’t imagine I’m the only one to take this approach — pretty much everyone who’s ever ascended in Nethack does something similar — but perhaps the designers of this game had a different player in mind.

Next time, 1991. I could wrap up the entire “Epic” by moving on to Pools of Darkness. But unless the readers demand it, I think I’ll do us all a favor and move onto something else for the time being. A couple of weeks ago I thought I might be eager to see how the story ends, but SotSB has kind of ruined my faith that any kind of unified story exists.

Nearly all of the spells in Secret of the Silver Blades can be divided into three categories: offense, healing, and buffs. All three categories are directly related into combat: offensive spells are for waging combat, healing is for recovering from combat, and buffs are for preparing for combat. This focus on fighting isn’t at all unusual for a CRPG. But it’s notable here because this is a D&D-based game, and it provides only a subset of the spells from D&D.

Some spells are left out because there’s no way that a computer game (especially one from 1990) could handle them adequately, like Stone Shape or Wish. The entire category of illusions relies too much on the player’s creativity and the DM’s judgment of their effects on the viewer to have a satisfying implementation here.

Other spells are left out because the simplified game mechanics leaves no room for them. I mentioned a while back how the system lacks such concepts as darkness and hunger, and thus has no way to support Light or Create Food. Languages seem to also be considered too much hassle to implement, so spells to understand or speak other languages are right out.

And some spells seem to be left out just to be difficult, and possibly to enforce the kind of gameplay that the designers want. There’s no Identify spell, for example. The game system understands the concept of identifying items, you just can’t do it with a spell. You have to take the items back to the store in town to identify them. I assume that the designers felt that the experience of looting equipment and not being able to identify it immediately was important to how they wanted the game played, either because they wanted to give the player reasons to go back to town once in a while, or because they wanted to give players the experience of experimentally trying on unidentified armor while still in the dungeon to determine which bits were worth lugging home.

There are a few pure utility spells in the game, though. There’s Knock, a spell that unlocks doors: I haven’t really needed this at all in SotSB, but there were a couple of doors in Pool of Radiance that I could open no other way. There’s Detect Magic, a useful way to separate out the better loot from an encounter, although it becomes less useful past a certain point: by the endgame, you pretty much take it for granted that everything you find is magical to some degree. Most weirdly, there’s the Read Magic spell. The only thing Read Magic does in this game is intrude on the process of copying a spell into your spellbook, putting a rather pointless extra step into the process. But I guess someone saw value in this.

It should be noted that clerics and magic-users gain spell slots at the same rate as they do in normal second-edition D&D, even though they have fewer useful things to spend them on. This contributes to the sense of monotony in the game, the way that I’ve mainly wound up casting the same combat spells over and over again. But also, there’s a kind of pressure to favor combat spells when exploring new territory (which you’re doing most of the time), because they’re more likely to be useful in an emergency. As such, having one’s primary spellcasters memorize utility spells seems like a waste of a spell slot that could be better spent on offense, healing, or buffs. But warrior-types like Rangers generally don’t cast spells in battle, because they’re better at just fighting. (You can’t even get a ranger to the point of learning Fireball in this game.) This makes them an ideal choice for memorizing utility spells, once they have enough XP to do so.

Okay, I know I said that I was only going to give Secret of the Silver Blades one more day, but I’m giving it an extension. I’ve been making very rapid progress, and have reason to believe that I’m on the verge of getting all the way through the glacier crevasses (home to ice giants and their pet mastodons) and reaching Castle Endgame. I may be farther from the end than I think I am, but, as is often the case, the perception that I’m close to the end is spurring me to greater activity. Just as getting stuck in a game is demoralizing and makes one less inclined to pursue it enough to get unstuck, so does progress beget more progress. There’s probably a lesson for life in that.

Another thing that supports the idea that I’m almost at the end: most of my characters are level 15, which is the maximum experience level supported by this game (except for thieves, who are allowed up to level 18). My paladin is a little behind the others, because paladins need a lot more experience to level than other classes in the second-edition rules. (The idea that the experience per level varies with character class was eliminated in third edition, as part of a general effort to simplify things and reduce the number of tables needed, but that hadn’t happened yet when this game was written.) Similarly, the fighter/thief has the handicap of splitting experience between two classes.

If there’s one thing I’ve gotten from playing this entire series so far, it’s a greater appreciation of the structure of progress in (second-edition) D&D, including its failures. Magic-users turn from near wastes of space to the main thing that wins fights for you, but in the process go through a lengthy phase when they do nearly nothing but cast Fireball. Clerics become less and less useful in melee as the actual warrior-types outpace them. Fighters spend a lot of their time nearly unhittable, due to finding better and better equipment — although this is punctuated by periods of hittability, when you start encountering tougher foes that you don’t have the appropriate armor for yet. And for all classes, gaining experience levels means a great deal more at the low end. No spell I’ve learned has been as much of a game-changer as getting Fireball at level 5; no increase in the number of spell slots has been as significant as being able to cast Fireball twice at level 6. Hit points increase by an average of 100% when you attain level 2, but only 7% when you attain level 15.

It’s a lot easier to notice patterns like these in the Gold Box games than in live D&D. Partly this is because I’m playing all classes at once: in live sessions, I generally only focus on my own character. Also, having the computer take care of the details of the game mechanics frees up one’s mind to focus on the effects. Mainly, though, the experience is highly compressed. I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a D&D group that met more than once a week, but even if I spent as much of my time on live D&D as I’ve been spending on these computer games, it wouldn’t go as fast. Combat is resolved much faster here, and the whole system seems to be set up to accelerate leveling, whether through quest XP or through gratuitous XP-yielding treasure finds. Those ice giants that I mentioned carry enormous quantities of platinum — far too much to carry, even if I still had a use for more riches at this point, but it does artificially inflate the experience reward for the encounter.

I’m almost ready to wrap up Secret of the Silver Blades for the time being. I don’t expect to finish the game this weekend, though. Judging by the number of teleport gates I’ve liberated, I’m still a bit less than half done with the game. That might not be a very good way to judge progress, though, because the teleporter density varies a lot. The game seems to provide a new teleporter whenever it would be inconvenient to redo your progress from the last one, and how often that’s the case depends on the game design. There was only one teleporter for all ten levels of the mines, even though they took me the better part of a week to clear. This is because the mines were basically arranged around a single hub, the mine’s central shaft: a teleporter near that hub could serve all the levels. In a more linear section, like where I am now, providing the same level of teleporter access means putting a separate teleporter at the beginning of every major section.

The sections immediately after the mines go back to the established 16×16 block design, and the constraint seems to have inspired some of the creativity that the mines were lacking. We’ve got riddles and illusions — on more than one occasion, I’ve gone to rescue someone only to fall into an ambush. I’ve accepted into my party a man in a Black Circle uniform. He claims that he donned it as a disguise while he searched for his captured companions. His story seems to check out so far, but trusting anyone or anything around here makes me a little nervous.

For a while now, the main theme in the enemies has been monsters with petrification attacks: cockatrices, basilisks, medusae. This is something that really started back in the mines, but they were just spicing on the normal encounters before, and now they’re the bulk of the monsters, and appear in quantities I used to associate with kobolds. I’ve contemplated equipping everyone permanently with a mirror, but this doesn’t even seem all that necessary: my saving throws are good enough by now to survive most petrification attempts, and I can generally take out the bulk of the monsters beforehand with a couple of well-placed fireballs (still my bread-and-butter spell, despite having higher-level stuff: its range and area of effect are unmatched, and it’s low-level enough that I can memorize a whole bunch of them). And to top it all off, both of my mages can cast Stone to Flesh. Supposedly the shock of being unpetrified can sometimes kill the patient, but I haven’t yet seen this happen. I think the game is starting to phase out the petrifiers in favor of driders and other spellcasters, but they’re still vulnerable to the same general tactics — that is, kill or disable them before they can do anything.

Anyway, I’ll give it one more day before I go on to 1991.

I’ve finally made it through the mines to what I assume to be the start of the game’s real dungeon. Secret of the Silver Blades is definitely a lot more dungeon-heavy than the previous two games, and I hope I’ve been clear by now that this isn’t a compliment. This is easily the most slow-moving game in the series so far.

In third edition D&D, there is a trainable knowledge skill called “Dungeoneering”, which is used both for knowledge of dungeon-dwelling creatures and for things like identifying important features of mines and caves: unstable areas, unnatural rock formations that may be concealing something, etc. Second edition didn’t have knowledge skills of this sort, or at least the Gold Box games don’t. Dungeoneering knowledge is instead the inherent province of Dwarves. And it happens that, even though I didn’t know how dungeon-heavy this game was, I have a dwarf in my party — a fighter/thief. (Despite the advice of others, I simply wanted a thief in my party, but making a pure thief seemed a waste, and combining it with a fighter seemed like a good idea. And in fact this is a combination recommended in the manual. In fact, the manual contains a couple of complete recommended party rosters, one of which is, strangely enough, identical to what I came up with independently: fighter, paladin, fighter/thief, cleric, and two magic-users, all human except the one dwarf.)

There have been a few occasions where my dwarf has had a visible impact on what happens. Obviously the designers don’t want to make this stuff too critical — some players won’t have a dwarf on their team, especially now that we’re at the point where the level caps for nonhumans really begin to hurt. But he spotted a trap door at one point, and there’s a repeated feature where you’re offered an opportunity to dig for gems, with the gems invariably spotted by the dwarf. I kind of wonder if there are similar special opportunities for the other nonhuman races, but really, this isn’t an environment for elves to do much (apart from exercise their natural ability to find secret doors, of course).

I’ve been encountering a lot of Umber Hulks lately — there aren’t a lot of different monster types in the mines, so what types there are, I’ve been seeing a lot. Umber Hulks have a gaze attack that produces effects equivalent to the Confusion spell. It seems to be broken.

Confusion is supposed to make characters act at random — there’s a table to roll on for the effects. One of the possible effects is attacking your allies instead of your enemies. This never happens to the PCs. It almost happens, though. At one point, when I directed a confused character to attack the enemy, I received the same confirmation prompt that I normally get when I accidentally try to attack an ally. Clearly, the game considered that character to be on the enemy’s side — but I was still in control of the character’s actions. And control seems to be the nub of it. Perhaps the testers were always leaving their characters on autopilot during combat, in which case they’d attack whoever the computer thinks they should be attacking.

As if to confirm this, I found and freed a captive NPC who joined my party. (This is something that happens fairly frequently in this series. Generally speaking, they stay with you only while you remain in the dungeon where you found them.) Being an NPC, her actions weren’t under my control, and when she became confused, she started hitting the PCs — and hitting them rather too well. I had to cast Hold Person on her to restrain her, and then faced the problem that, as long as she was still considered an enemy by the combat engine, the combat wouldn’t end. I really botched things here. I wanted to take her down and then heal her, but wound up just killing her instead. Dead NPCs, it turns out, are removed from the party, rather than kept around for resurrection like PCs. But — and here the whole situation started feeling really unclean — I got her equipment as loot from the encounter. And it’s really good loot.

You want to talk about moral dilemmas in games? This one was a humdinger. I start to suspect that the key to making a good moral dilemma is to make it unexpected and, if possible, unplanned.