The Stack

The player’s mission in Wizardry I is to slay the wizard Werdna and obtain the amulet he stole from the mad overlord Trebor¹The names Werdna and Trebor are the reversed first names of Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, the game’s authors. Greenberg and Woodhead’s initials also form the basis of the layout of dungeon levels 8 and 9., but the game only announces this after a major battle on dungeon level 4 (out of 10). Before that point, you’re just dungeon-delving for its own sake. It’s a little like how Final Fantasy 1 only starts its main plot after the first dungeon, and in both cases it’s probably based on how tabletop D&D tends to go: only after the first few sessions does anyone think of turning it into a campaign.

But here in Wizardry, the mission start comes unusually far into the thing. In fact, in a sense, it’s right at the end. Here’s the thing: Dungeon levels 5 through 8 are useless for the actual mission, except to the extent that you can use them to grind levels and loot. There are no stairs down from level 8. The only way to reach the last two levels and Werdna (other than by teleportation magic) is via the elevator on level 4, which you can only access if you have the blue ribbon you’re awarded at the same time you’re told of the mission. So there’s no obstacle to going straight down from the mission assignment to the endgame, if you’re arrogant enough to think you’re up to it.

I’ve always found the whole situation a little confusing. The upper parts of the dungeon, at least, are the titular “proving ground” that Trebor uses to find heroes worth sending after Werdna. But to prove yourself worthy, you have to ignore a number of signs telling you that certain areas are off-limits and break into a section marked “Testing Grounds control center” and “Authorized personnel only”, where alarms go off, summoning monsters. A mention of “the remains of crystal balls and other magical artifacts all now broken” makes the place seem abandoned and overrun, but it’s still functional enough to dispense elevator keys on Trebor’s behalf. Just what’s going on here? We’re told that that Werdna is hiding in the depths of the maze, but the maze is apparently right underneath Trebor’s castle and features an elevator leading straight to Werdna’s lair. We’re probably supposed to chalk a lot of this up to the mad overlord’s madness.

One other thing about the battle of the control center: It yields significant loot, including a Ring of Death, a cursed item that drains the hit points of its wearer at an alarming rate. That might not sound good, but you have to bear in mind that it also costs a fortune to uncurse it — so much that you should probably give up on the character who put it on and roll up a new one. OK, that also doesn’t sound good. The good part is that the cost to remove a cursed object is proportional to what you can sell it for if you identify it without triggering the curse. There’s a certain risk in identifying cursed objects — the character doing the identifying can accidentally become cursed while identifying it — but successfully identifying and selling a Ring of Death is basically the point in the game where you stop worrying about money and start lamenting that there’s so little to spend it on.

This time around, I’m really noticing just how weird the entire dungeon is, viewed as anything other than an abstraction. This is a place that just doesn’t make sense. And I’m not even just talking about the physically unrealistic aspects, like wraparound. I mean that it doesn’t make sense that anyone would build it this way, even bearing in mind that it’s a labyrinth created by a wizard.

I think of my recent experiences with Litil Divil. That was a completely artificial labyrinth, with tunnels meandering this way and that for no reason other than to be circuitous, punctuated with rooms containing challenges of various sorts. There’s a senselessness to that, but it’s a top-down senselessness, a senselessness of purpose. The details of the maze and its rooms make perfect sense as an execution of a strange and pointless intention. The dungeon in Wizardry I has rooms too, and hallways leading to rooms, and corridors with rows of doors leading to rooms on either side. What’s in these rooms? In most cases, absolutely nothing. They’re not rooms that serve a purpose. It’s as if the whole thing was built by an alien intelligence that knows that human buildings have rooms in them, but doesn’t understand why.

Alternately, I guess you could decide that the minimalism of the graphics is just hiding implied details. But that just leaves you in the position of trying to imagine details that make sense of rings of tiny rooms or cycles of one-way doors. Level 5 is particularly chaotic. I recall the short-lived Leslie Nielsen comedy series Police Squad! had a recurring gag involving a door that one character goes through while another just goes around the wall of the set it’s in. There’s a door like that near the beginning of level 5, and even worse, it’s a one-way door.

I think that when I played this game for the first time, I wasn’t really taking it seriously as a place. It was as fake as a carnival funhouse, and similarly intended solely for entertainment. You get that in a lot of older games, like how the endgame in Colossal Cave takes you through the warehouse that stocks the caves.

My craving for making maps on a grid unsatisfied, I turn back to the game that taught it to me in the first place. I left off Wizardry III in the middle more than a decade ago on this blog; I think it’s time I got back to it. But first, it’s been so long now since I played the first two Wizardries that I feel like I should start over from the very beginning. So last night I created a new party of adventurers to explore the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Just like when I started over Wizardry III, I still have some old characters around — I’m not using the same machine as 12 years ago, but I still have the files — but I intend to only use them for emergencies like dragging characters’ carcasses out of the dungeon for attempted resurrection after a TPK. (Recall that resurrection is not guaranteed to work in this game.)

My writeup of Wizardry III describes generating lots of level 1 characters and getting most of them killed immediately, a cycle that repeats until I finally, painstakingly get someone to survive to level 2, which provides the leverage I needed to get more characters over that hump. Strikingly, that didn’t happen at all in my replay of Wizardry I. I just took some simple precautions, like pooling my party’s gold to buy the front-line fighters decent armor, and heading for the exit before I ran out of healing spells, and that was sufficient to get my entire party up to level 2 without any deaths at all. By the end of the evening, they were level 10-ish with only one replacement. I remember the game being a lot harder than this. Of course, when I first played it, I had no idea what I was doing, and this time around, I’m very familiar with both CRPGS in general and Wizardry in particular. The opening hallways and chambers of level 1 are engraved in my memory, and instantly recognizable — moreso than the rest of the dungeon, because this is the part you see at the start of every delve.

But to be honest, the main reason I’ve been able to advance so quickly is the Murphy’s Ghost. Hidden away in a secret area of level 1 where you won’t find it easily, it may have been initially intended as a kind of trap. You enter a room and get some text describing an altar, and a prompt asking if you want to search it. Say yes, and a Murphy’s Ghost appears — or sometimes two; I think the name must not mean “the ghost of Murphy” but rather, something like “a species of ghost identified by Murphy”, like “Thomson’s Gazelle” or “Pallas’s Cat”. At any rate, the Murphy’s Ghost is a great deal tougher than other monsters you encounter on level 1, but once you’re advanced enough to beat it, it offers an unparalleled reward-to-risk ratio. And since you can just enter the altar room and summon it again as many times as you like, it’s the ideal grinding spot. And grind I did.

All this ease inevitably led to overconfidence and a TPK on level 4 when I prematurely took on the game’s first real boss encounter. I’ve more or less recovered from that, but my party has been almost entirely Ship-of-Theseused, with only one of the initial roster remaining. The Murphy’s Ghost helps a lot with that, too: it doesn’t have any ranged attacks, so if you’re training up a fragile new level-1 character, you can just park them in the back row and let them earn XP by watching the big guys slaughter ghosts for a while.

The problem with just doing town quests is that they don’t yield any XP.¹[29 September] This turns out to be false. Some town quests yield XP, others do not. The rewards tend to be either goods or services, or even just discounts on future purchases. In one case, the armorer who refuses to sell you masterwork items until you slay a giant, it isn’t even a discount; it’s just an opportunity to spend more money. And so, despite a couple of quests that took me outside into monsterland, my party is still level 1.

I’ve taken them out to the moat house again anyway, largely on the strength of a couple of level 2 NPCs helping me out. As in Wizardry, this makes a big difference. I’ve actually survived the bandits, and now I’m getting killed by the slimes and zombies in the dungeon underneath. I’m guessing that this is where you find out that the Elemental Evil cult, previously thought wiped out at the Battle of Emridy Meadows ten years ago, is still active. I’m not at that point yet, though. I’m taking it slow. After every successful fight, I’m heading back to town to rest up and heal, and sell any loot. In other words, I’m using the same approach that Wizardry demanded. But somehow, it feels more wrong here than in Wizardry. ToEE is a bit less of an abstract set of rules and a bit more like a world. When I take a day-long break in the middle of clearing out a dungeon, and find it completely unchanged on my return, it feels like I’m exploiting a flaw. But it also feels necessary.

I’m a little surprised that Wizardry is the game comparison that keeps coming to mind, because the presentation is more like Baldur’s Gate or Pillars of Eternity: third-person view with isometric perspective, finely-detailed bitmap backgrounds with 3D humans and monsters, combat mode only slightly separated from exploration, no obvious grid. The 3.5e combat rules are really designed for playing on a grid, but if there is one here, it’s obscured. There are a whole lot of games in this vein, and the only immediately obvious way that ToEE deviates from the formula is that combat is always turn-based. But take a step back, and it looks more old-school than any of them. Which makes sense, considering its source material.

The navigation mode in Pool of Radiance is Wizardry-style, but not too Wizardry-style. The biggest difference is that you can’t see as far ahead: where Wizardry and Might and Magic let you see three map tiles in front of you (in addition to the tile you’re on), PoR lets you see only two. As a result, the perspective is stretched out in a way that I found rather confusing at first, having come straight off those other games: walls that are right in front of my nose look like they’re one space away. At the same time, it corrects Wizardry‘s chief deficiency, its tunnel vision. Walls are rendered to the full width of the view pane (which takes up a rather small portion of the screen).

Like Might and Magic, PoR uses the first-person navigation mode even in the city. (In fact, the basic premise of PoR is that you’re helping to reclaim an abandoned city that’s become infested with monsters.) Unlike M&M, it actually tries to make it look like a city. Buildings are largely freestanding structures, with different wall textures than their neighbors, all rendered in 16-color EGA and very much looking it. (Finally, we’ve got a game where the PC version isn’t a port of the Apple II version. PoR seems to have been developed on multiple platforms simultaneously, fully using the graphics capabilities of each platform, which, given the time period, means that the Amiga version looks the best.) And instead of inky blackness wherever there isn’t a wall (as was the case even in the wilderness areas of M&M), there’s a sky, which changes color with the time of day. The very concept of “time of day” isn’t found in those previous games; to the extent that time passes in them, it passes whenever you choose to rest. I don’t yet know the full extent of how time of day affects things in PoR, but at the very least it seems like the town guard comes out at night in the civilized areas to hassle adventurers trying to sleep on the street.

Both Wizardry and Might and Magic had a spell that revealed your current map coordinates. This was crucial for effective mapping (particularly after you got teleported or fell down a chute or something), and my first impulse was to look for such a spell here as well. But it doesn’t exist — how could it? This is an official Dungeons & Dragons game, and D&D doesn’t have such a spell, or even the underlying concepts to support one. Instead, your grid reference is simply displayed on the screen in navigation mode, right under the party roster. Clearly we’re not going to be seeing Wizardry-style interference with navigation: like Pratchett’s elves, our heroes always know exactly where they are. But even the coordinates are a little confusing at first, when coming off of Wizardry and Might and Magic, because those both put the origin in the southwest corner, and PoR puts it in the northwest. Seriously, if there’s one thing this game reveals to me, it’s just how closely Might and Magic imitated Wizardry.

I have to admit that what little I know about the Might and Magic series comes from its spin-off series, the Heroes of Might and Magic turn-based strategy games. I was curious enough about where it all came from to pick up the Ultimate Might and Magic Archives when it was released in 1998 as publicity for Might and Magic VI, but not curious enough to actually get around to playing it until now. Presumably the package was named by the same committee as the Ultimate Wizardry Archives; it isn’t exactly “ultimate” today, containing the first five of what is now a nine-game series. It’s a pretty nicely-put-together package, though, containing several handsome and colorful world maps on stiff paper, which fit neatly in a 6×9 envelope along with a compact booklet containing summarized instructions and spell descriptions. The full manuals are in PDF format on the disc, rather than in a thick book the way Ultimate Wizardry Archives did it.

Am I mentioning Wizardry a lot? I shall continue to do so. Might and Magic, it turns out, is a Wizardry clone. At the navigation level, it plays so much like Wizardry, with even the same visible distance and everything, that I’m finding the minor differences in the controls quite disconcerting. (Where in Wizardry the down-arrow key did an about-face, in M&M it moves you backward without turning.) I’ll note just three major differences that I’ve noticed so far in what little time I’ve spent playing:

First and most visibly, there’s the graphics. Instead of line drawings, we get textures, like in The Bard’s Tale. Remember when I said that Wizardry‘s minimalism holds up better than more ambitious graphics from the same era? This game is a good example of what I was thinking of. The wall textures just scream “The programmer who drew me was really pushing the limits of Apple II hi-res mode!” The PC version is actually capable of running in 640×400 EGA mode ¹[23 January] It turns out that EGA doesn’t have a 640×400 mode. I think the emulator I’m using is automatically upscaling. Still, it’s definitely using multiple pixels to represent each Apple II pixel. Apple II hi-res mode pixels are just freakishly elongated., but faithfully imitates the pixel size (and, where relevant, the dithering) of the Apple II version throughout, eight EGA pixels to every Apple one. Because this isn’t a perfect fit to the Apple pixel aspect ratio, the scenes are stretched out horizontally somewhat relative to the original. And yes, the game does credit the programmer as an artist. It also credits a couple of artists who aren’t credited as programmers, but I think they must have worked mostly on the monster illustrations.

Secondly, the first-person view extends to more of the world than in Wizardry. The earlier Wizardry games, at least, are played entirely in the dungeon (even if they sometimes try to pretend that it’s something other than a dungeon); the town is nothing more than a series of text-based menus. In M&M, as in The Bard’s Tale before it, the towns (plural) are something you can explore, and where you can be attacked by monsters while walking around. Unlike The Bard’s Tale, though, the starting town looks like a dungeon. Enough so that it’s actually worked into the fiction: mention is made of how the towns moved underground as a defense against dragons. The wilderness outside is also explorable, and rendered in the same engine, which looks fairly ludicrous: the world is plainly made of square partitions with pictures of forests and mountains wallpapered onto them.

Thirdly, the game is a great deal gentler than Wizardry. Characters reduced to zero hit points are not dead, but merely unconscious, and can be revived by means of a simple healing spell (even in the middle of combat). Even if you suffer a total party kill, the only consequence is that you start over from the last time you stopped at an inn. In this respect, it’s a lot more like a modern CRPG: nothing permanently bad happens. It’s making me a little worried, though: I created my current party thinking of it as a test run, but if they can’t get killed off for good, maybe I should have spent more time rerolling for better stats.

A TPK of my second party has left me in a poor position. Oh, it’s a better position than starting over from scratch — I meant everything I said last time about saving up the snazzy gear, and I still have a few back-up characters waiting in the wings. The highest-level one remaining is a priest, which is probably the best class to jump-start a new party, what with all those healing and protection spells. Nonetheless, the plan was to pull out a new game every two weeks, and since it’s pretty much time for that, I’ll take this as an opportunity to bow out for a while.

It’s funny. After mastering dungeon levels 2 and 3 so handily, I really thought I was going to finish the game before my self-imposed deadline. But that sort of attitude just encourages recklessness, and this is a game that rewards patience — the reward being those “I can’t believe I actually pulled that off” moments, rendered meaningful by the very real possibility of failure with major consequences. With that and the major role of randomization, the game plays more like gambling than most CRPGs do, albeit gambling where the odds are really tilted in your favor, however it seems sometimes.

I do want to get back to it, and will probably take it up as this year’s game-to-play-between-other-games. As I mentioned before, I’m finding it’s a good thing to play on the bus with a laptop: it occupies the attention, but doesn’t absorb it so much that you miss your stop. Dealing with maps on the bus is awkward, but that just means mapping is best done at home and the bus is better for grinding. After you’ve spent some time grinding on a level, you don’t even really need to consult a map very often; you just develop an orbit that takes in a few guaranteed monster encounters and returns to the exit.

Maps are still necessary if you trigger a teleport trap, mind you. Traps are the single deadliest things in the game — my latest TPK was the result of triggering a teleport trap and winding up in a place that I was in no position to get through, and in the near-TPK I described last post, the reason my party was mostly poisoned was a gas cloud trap. Traps are also completely avoidable: they’re only found on treasure chests, and opening treasure chests is optional. But pass them up and you’ll never get the buff gear that makes it so easy to train up your replacements. I’ll admit that it’s kind of a circular argument, but there it is.

Next up: Another old RPG from an anthology package! I have a lot of those. If I stick to schedule, it’ll be mid-March before I play anything else.

I’m recovering from another TPK. It was a pretty anticlimactic one, too. I had just gone through a heroic effort to bring my party back unharmed from a one-way trip into a lengthy sequence of unexplored tunnels — basically, the previously-unexplorable reaches of dungeon level 2. The monsters back there don’t pose a serious threat to me any more, except perhaps through slow attrition after I run out of spells, but there was one complication: most of my party was poisoned, and losing health just from walking around. Not only that, but there was a point where the only way forward required a password. After guessing wrong twice, I really thought I that was it, but, in classic storytelling form, I solved the riddle on my third try. And I made it out without loss of life. It was the sort of adventure that leaves you elated for having beaten the odds. And then, on my next try, I blundered into a previously-unseen boss lair, was surprised, and bam. I couldn’t even run away.

Fortunately, I had another party waiting in the wings: the reclaimed remains of my last TPK. They’re not quite as advanced as the ones newly-lost, but they’re pretty close. The only real drag on my progress right now is the need to train up a new mage, as I seem to be fresh out of mages. In fact, I should probably train two. Two in the hand is worth one lying inert on the dungeon floor, right? After all, I’d be in really bad shape if the party I’m currently using got wiped out too.

But not as bad as you’d think. Spending a long time in a particular area of the dungeon means picking up a lot of redundant magic items. Even if I had to start over with level 1 characters, I think I could get through the opening stages of the game again pretty quickly if the entire front row started with +1 plate mail. Which means I have to make sure to actually give the spare gear to someone not currently adventuring. This is certainly doable, but it goes somewhat against instinct, and involves fiddling around with menus instead of just selling your loot and going straight back into the dungeon.

Still, one thing is clear: I’m going to need a much more powerful party to do the rescue this time. My best characters are going to rot in a heap until they aren’t nearly my best characters any more.

I’ve survived another trip to dungeon level 4. It was a close thing, though: fully half my party was dead by the time I made it out. (Fortunately, they all survived resurrection.) This time, though, it wasn’t due to any individual encounter. It’s because I spent too long wandering the dungeon and getting into fights. Not deliberately, either: I hit a teleporter I didn’t know about, and had to find a way back to the exit through uncharted ground. The upside is that it’s not uncharted any more.

Since the primary distinguishing feature of my last session was more fights than I wanted, let’s talk a bit about what fights are like. The Wizardry combat system is the basis of turn-based combat in so many RPGs, notably including Final Fantasy. It’s all turn-based, or, more precisely, it’s what’s been called a “phased” system: you give every character their instructions for the round — whether to attack or cast a spell or whatever — and then there’s a certain amount of randomness in the ordering of the results, weighted by experience level and Agility. This includes the actions of the monsters.

Monsters come in homogeneous stacks, with up to four stacks per encounter, but act individually. The stacks (or “groups”, as the docs call them) are significant to the mechanics: when you specify a target for a spell or an attack, you specify the group, not the individual. Many of the combat spells affect an entire group at a time, which makes a sufficiently-advanced mage vastly more powerful than an equally-advanced fighter, who can kill at most one creature per round. Past a certain point, the fighter has only two purposes in the party: meat-shield, and conserving the mage’s spells by killing the less-threatening monsters the slow way.

Not that this makes them less crucial as parts of the party! Mages really, really need their meat-shields, because it’s the only kind of shield they can use. Although the interface doesn’t indicate this clearly, the party is divided into two rows. Only the first three slots are in melee range of the monsters. I don’t mean that there’s a reduced chance of hitting the back row, I mean the back row can’t be targeted by physical attacks at all. This is why samurai and lords are so valuable: they’re spellcasters that you can put in the front row without getting them killed. They are, in effect, their own meat-shields. Priests are almost as good in this role, in that they can wear armor that’s almost as good as a fighter’s, and in addition can carry enough healing power to compensate for the difference. But I’m still somehow not comfortable putting more than one priest in front.

Mind you, even in the back row, you’re vulnerable to spells. This is something I remember coming as a bit of a shock when I first encountered spellcasting monsters on dungeon level 2 of Wizardry I. I had gotten used to wiping out the monsters with group damage spells, and suddenly they were easily wiping me out using exactly the same techniques. It seemed somehow unfair, despite being symmetrical. Or, well, not entirely symmetrical: spellcasting monsters tend to come in groups, which increases their chance of getting in the first cast, which can determine the outcome of the entire battle. It’s a good thing that your initiative goes up with your experience level.

Frequently, combat begins with a surprise round, in which only one side gets to attack. The interesting thing about this is that you can’t cast spells in a surprise round, which completely changes the dynamic. The priestly ability to dispel undead isn’t considered a spell, so that’s pretty much your only option for disposing of monsters en masse. Until, that is, you realize that this is what scrolls are for. I had written them off as worthless at first, just an expensive way of getting the equivalent of an extra spell slot, but a Katino (sleep) scroll used in a surprise round against against a group of spellcasters has on more than one occasion prevented them from getting off a single spell.

Well, it happened, just like I said it would: I got cocky. My rapid mastery of dungeon levels 2 and 3 led to a total party kill on level 4. The really galling thing here is that my first foray to that depth was relatively placid: I explored a small area, enough to find a quick one-way route back to town, which seems pretty important, given how long it takes to get to and from that level by the front entrance (and how many encounters you’d have along the way, and what shape your party will be in on the way out). On the second trip, I tried to just do a sweep to that exit, but got slaughtered en route. I’ll want to pick up their corpses at some point, but for the moment, they’re out of reach. The one time I attempted that level with another party, I was beaten back; by the time I completed the return journey the long way, only one member of the party remained alive. Most of the rest resurrected successfully, but it’s clear that I’m not going to be able to make more progress until I’ve improved my defenses to the maximum possible extent.

And that’s been a bit of a problem. The dead party had better armor than you can buy in the store, and better also than what I’ve been able to find since. Even worse, my new priest has been strangely unable to master Maporfic. This is a priest spell — all of the spell in the game have nonsense names — a spell that improves the entire party’s armor class, and lasts for the entire expedition, until you go back to town. (Or until you hit an anti-magic field, I suppose, but I haven’t run into any of those yet.) Since it offers potentially unlimited protection for a single casting cost, Maporfic quickly becomes a part of your regular routine on entering the dungeon. I certainly don’t dare consider braving level 4 again without it. But at this point, it’s starting to look like the quickest way to get it will be to create a new priest.

To fully understand my problem, you have to understand how leveling works, and just how random it is. And since leveling up is the focus of my attention at this point, it seems a good time to describe it in detail. As usual, killing monsters (or even just passively standing and watching the rest of the party kill monsters) yields experience points, which yield character levels at exponentially-increasing intervals. Unusually for a CRPG, you don’t gain experience levels in the dungeon; you have to explicitly stay at the Adventurer’s Inn back in town. Sending each party member to the inn becomes part of the post-adventure routine, just like selling your loot. If you failed to level, you get a report of how many more experience points you need; if you succeed, you get a report of exactly how it changed you. You always gain at least one hit point on leveling, but frequently only one — although sometimes you’ll wind up gaining twenty. (As a point of comparison, all level-1 characters have 8 hit points.) Some of your stats will increase by one, but others will decrease by one, with no discernable pattern, except that higher experience levels seem to make increases more likely. At low levels, net stat loss on leveling is not unusual. (I have one fighter in my party whose IQ stat is down to 0; I think it’s possible for it to even go negative.) I know I keep saying this, but: No one would design a game like this today. The whole idea of rewarding experience with random decreases in power seems downright perverse by modern standards. But really, it isn’t as bad as it seems, because the increase in overall power from just being a higher experience level more than compensates for such losses.

Leveling is also how you learn spells. It’s the only way to learn spells, and it’s just as random. Spells come in seven levels, and there are limits on how soon you can learn them (with pure mages and priests getting access to higher spell levels at lower experience levels than bishops, samurai, or lords), but once you have access to a spell level, you’ll just pick up the spells in it at random as you gain experience levels. But it’s quite possible to start picking up level 5 spells before you’ve got all the level 4’s. Quite possible, and quite frustrating.

The one upside of spending three or four experience levels trying to get a particular spell is that, when you’re done, you have a character who’s three or four experience levels higher than before. Even if I decide to give up and power-level up a new priest, having a high-level healer around will expedite it. The amount of time you can spend in the more experience-rich parts of the dungeon is limited mainly by the amount of healing magic you have available.