The Stack

After the ruminations in my last post, I’ve decided to drop back to the grinding spot on dungeon level 4 for the time being. I had given up on it before as actually having a too-high risk-to-reward ratio, something level 5 fixed by offering greater rewards: more XP, better loot. But now that my characters have more hit points and better armor, the risk on level 4 has dropped considerably. And with the ability to summon as many random encounters as I want, it’s the next best thing to Murphy’s Ghost — the main downside being that I do still have to think about tactics somewhat.

I suppose it’s a fairly common pattern in CRPGs: the One Spot Especially Suited to Grinding. whether by accident or design, like Final Fantasy VI‘s “dinosaur forest”. But usually the grinding spot is more optional, something you only need to find if you’re trying to max out your power and get achievements or something, not just finish the main story. Here in Wizardry III, it seems essential. I could still be wrong about that, though. Maybe the Fung temple is more like the optional extra-hard miniboss and my fear of level 6 is unjustified. But I don’t intend to find out until I’ve leveled up some more.

So basically it’s going to be a while before anything interesting happens again. I’ve come to understand that this is a long-haul game, and not ideally suited to binge playing or serial blogging. But I’m willing to regard coming up with something new to say about it every day as a sort of special challenge.

Wizardry III is a difficult game — easily the most difficult Wizardry I’ve played, and I’ve played Wizardry IV, the one that has a reputation for extreme difficulty. But that’s a whole different thing. Wizardry IV‘s difficulty is mainly in its puzzles, some of which require specialized knowledge, like the Kabbalah or Monty Python references. And while that sort of riddlery might stop someone cold, I found the game had been written from the same sort of geek culture that I myself was immersed in.

I’ve encountered this mismatch of difficulty assessment elsewhere. Spellbreaker is supposed to be Infocom’s hardest adventure, but I’ve never understood why — all it really takes is an “I wonder what happens if I do this?” mindset and some slight knowledge of classic math puzzles. The coin-op game Sinistar has a reputation for being unusually hard, but I always could last about as long in it as in other games of its type — although in this case I suspect it more signifies that I’m not very good at space shooters in general, so it’s not so much “For me, Sinistar is as easy as these other games” as “For me, these other games are as hard as Sinistar“.

Anyway, the thing that makes Wizardry III particularly difficult isn’t the puzzles, but that it demands patience. Wizardry I let you power-level at the Murphy’s Ghost room, and Wizardry II let you import your overpowered characters from Wizardry I, but if there’s any option like that in Wizardry III, I haven’t found it. You have to level up the slow and risky way. Sure, you get some ability to trade that off, choosing where to grind to make it less slow but more risky, or vice versa. But that means that when things get too slow for your liking, there’s a temptation to take on more risk than you can handle.

The series is called Wizardry for good reason: magic is what wins battles, and learning how to use your magical resources effectively is essential to progress. Knowing when to use a single high-level damage spell to wipe out an entire encounter and when it’s more urgent to use multiple low-level disabling spells to increase the odds that the enemy doesn’t get any attacks off. This is how I’ve been steadily becoming more effective as I grind my way through dungeon level 5, even as experience level increases become rarer.

And yet, i’ve always found the magic system to be something of a disappointment. There’s just so much redundancy! It inflates the spell list without giving us spells that are meaningfully different. Of the 21 mage spells, fully a third are direct-damage spells at various strengths, and another three are spells that either kill their targets outright or do nothing to them. (Other CRPGs have taught us to expect that instant-death spells of this sort basically never work, but they’re actually pretty effective here.) That’s nearly half the spell list devoted to just hurting and killing stuff. Priests get 29 spells, including 6 that heal or resurrect, and 8 that do the opposite, hurting or killing outright — again, nearly half the spell list, and you almost never use the offensive ones, because you don’t want to waste spell slots on doing something a mage can do better when you could be saving them for healing.

Mages, too, get some useless spells. There are two mage spells that just improve the caster’s armor class, which is generally pointless on a mage, because you don’t put your mages in melee range, and even if they wind up in the front row because the fighters have been killed or disabled, they won’t improve the mage’s AC enough to make much of a difference. I could imagine it being used by a front-row caster, a samurai or a mage-to-fighter convert, but they’re usually better off killing stuff.

A few spells simply cost too much to be worthwhile, including two high-level mage spells that ask the gods for a random boon at the cost of an entire experience level. Another, LOKTOFEIT, teleports you back to town at the considerable cost of all your stuff and most of your gold. This could have solved some problems for me earlier, if any of my priests had learned it; as it is, by the time I had it, I also had a mage who could teleport for free.

And that’s another pattern: spells that become obsolete. Once you have LOMILWA (permanent light), you never use MILWA (temporary light). HALITO, the weakest damage spell, fades into insignificance quickly. I don’t think I’ve ever used KALKI (improve party’s AC by 1) at all — at low levels, you need to save your level-1 spell slots for healing, and by the time you have better healing spells, you also have MATU (improve party’s AC by 2).

D&D has the idea of casting spells at a higher level to make them more effective in some way, adding power or targets or both. It didn’t have this when Wizardry was made, but it did have the notion of spells that simply became more powerful as the caster gains experience levels. If Wizardry had either of these things, I think we could pare down the spell lists to this:

Mage spells:

1. Direct damage (possibly split into Fire, Cold, and Neither for monster vulnerabilities)
2. Instant kill
3. Sleep
4. Improve party’s AC
5. Worsen enemy’s AC
6. Reveal party’s location
7. Teleport

Priest spells:

1. Heal
2. Resurrect
3. Direct damage
4. Cure status conditions
5. Sleep
6. Silence enemy casters
7. Improve party’s AC
8. Light
9. Identify trap
10. Identify monsters

That’s actually more diverse than I was expecting. I guess it’s easy to get an impression that the few spells you cast a lot dominate the spell lists more than they do. But it still doesn’t have a lot of utility spells, or a lot of genuinely different effects in combat.

One absence I find particularly notable: Although there are spells to do damage to an entire group, or even to all groups in an encounter, and although these spells can be cast by enemies on the entire party, there are no corresponding group heal spells.

I’ve mapped out most of level 5, and even acquired a Crystal of Good to go with my Crystal of Evil, but there are still parts of the level that I’m clearly not ready to tackle yet. One enclosed mazy region has been claimed by priests of Fung the Irascible, who stop and harass you every two steps or so. They’ve got instant-death spells — sure, they fail most of the time, but when they don’t, the result is instant death. So I’ve been mostly leaving them the Fung alone. Nonetheless, I managed to get a party stuck inside their turf by teleportation — not a fixed teleporter with a planned destination like before, but one of the random teleporter traps you sometimes find on chests.

Seriously, those teleporters are the scariest traps in the game. With high-level characters, you barely notice the effects of most traps. I spent a while adventuring without a thief recently, and couldn’t disarm traps at all, and my basic approach to most was like “Oh, an exploding box? That’s fine, my guys have good armor. Poison needle? I can cure poison a bunch of times. Mage Blaster? It’ll turn my mage to stone if I open it? Sure, he can take it.” Teleporter traps, though? I left those alone, when I successfully identified them. Which is something even the best thief possible only does 95% of the time. Hence the predicament I was describing.

I applied the same tactics as last time, leaving the teleported party suspended in the dungeon while I brought in a different party to explore the unexplored and figure out how to get them out of there. The big problem was that even a fact-gathering mission would have to go through multiple Fung encounters. So I spent a good long time leveling up, and came to the conclusion that there was in fact a fairly short route from the party’s current location to the exit, but that they’d probably all die along the way. But at least I could make them die in a more convenient place, one where I’d only get Funged one or two times on the way to collect the corpses. And as chance would have it, that didn’t even come to pass: the very first encounter after reactivating them had another chest with a teleporter trap, carrying them out of danger as easily as they were carried in.

The main effect of this misadventure, then, is that I spent a lot of time leveling up in preparation for Mission: Fung. I have two level-13 characters now! That’s a big watershed in this game: level 13 is when you get access to the highest spell level. In particular, I now have a mage who can teleport, which should help further exploration enormously.

One thing about Wizardry III I haven’t mentioned yet: the orientalism. It’s not a very big part of the game, really — it’s skin-deep in a game that barely even has a skin. But the first level — remember that castle? The inhabitants of the castle have the unidentified name “Corsair”, and their portrait shows a man in a keffiyeh holding a scimitar. When identified, they turn out to be “Garians” of various sorts — Garian Raiders, Garian Guards, Garian Mages, and so forth — but their boss in the back of the castle is identified as “High Corsair”. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. Were they intended to be Arabs? The art is really the only thing to suggest it, and since I’m playing the PC version, it’s not even the original art. (Wizardry‘s native platform is the Apple II.) The word “Corsair” was certainly used historically for the Muslim pirates of the Barbary coast, but also for pirates in general. And “Garian” sounds like they’re named after someone named Gary.

(Incidentally, the same scimitar-guy image is used for vultures, which seems like it must be a mistake. I was willing to contemplate the possibility that the word “vulture” was a nickname or metaphor, but apparently their unidentified name is “Large Bird”.)

Anyway, you pretty much leave these questionably-Eastern individuals behind when you leave level 1 behind and the niche of basic-humanoids-that-are-occasionally-spellcasters gets taken over by goblins. But I was reminded of it when I started encountering particularly pernicious dragons called “T’ien Lung” and started wonder just how far east of Llylgamyn this mountain is. (I assume just on the basis of orthography that Llylgamyn is in Wales.) But then, as I’ve noted before, the fauna is all over the place, what with the anacondas and Bengal tigers and whatnot. Before the T’ien Lung started showing up, the dragons I kept having trouble with were Komodo dragons. Like real Komodos, their bite is infectious; unlike real Komodos, they also breathe fire.

The Garians seem a little different, though, because they’re not just random encounters. They have a headquarters, and guard posts at fixed locations. Anything else could be just visiting, but the Garians live here.

I’ve seen every last tile of level 4 now, even the secret bits. This also goes for the parts of level 2 that are only accessible from level 4. That done, I spent a while just grinding for XP and item drops, because level 4 has a very good place to do this, where you can basically summon random encounters at will by deliberately stepping on traps. It’s like the Murphy’s Ghost area that way, but more varied and dangerous.

In fact, I’m not entirely sure I made an overall profit on it, XP-wise, due to the occasional encounter with level-draining undead. Most monsters become less of a peril as you gain experience levels: a monster that can hit you for 8 points of damage will kill a level-1 character outright, but be far less of a concern to a level-10 character with 50 or more total health. But level-draining monsters like Banshees are the opposite. The higher-level the character, the more XP the banshees take away when they manage to hit you. Presumably there’s a break-even point where you gain levels exactly as fast as you lose them, but exactly where that point lies depends on your defenses and your party’s initiative. The best way to deal with Banshees is to kill them all before they get any attacks in, throwing all your highest-level group damage spells at them just to be sure — yes, the game successfully makes me terrified of undead, as is appropriate.

But any encounter has a chance of giving the monsters a surprise round — if you’re really unlucky and ill-prepared, they can kill your entire party before you have a chance to react. Good armor helps here — and that’s what all this grinding is really good for. Every once in a while, I find enchanted armor or a magical pendant or something, usually improving someone’s AC by but a single point, but every single point has a perceivable effect.

At any rate, I’ve braved level 5 by now, albeit just barely. I haven’t yet encountered anything there that wasn’t on level 4 — it’s not clear to me if there’s really a steady increase in difficulty from level 1 onward or if it compensates for the way it’s set up to send good and evil characters into different parallel tracks by making 2 equivalent to 3 and 4 to 5. But I’m not taking any chances.

I’ve been spending quite some time on the 4th floor. It’s been slow going, but this is not a bad thing — indeed, I’ve reached a state where I’m enjoying the game completely without reservation! It’s hit a sweet spot of slow but steady incremental progress, where each venture into the dungeon adds just a little bit more to the map before I’m forced to retreat, and random equipment drops yield something new and better just often enough to be encouraging, but not so often that it stops feeling special.

But for a while, it was going slow because I didn’t have a quick way to get to level 4, and had to take the long route all the way through the moated fortress on level 1 and then from one corner to the other of level 2’s winding maze. There’s a stair joining levels 1 and 4, right next to a stair joining levels 1 and 5, but they’re across a lake from the entrance. The means of crossing the lake is an item called “Ship in a Bottle” — a lovely bit of whimsy, and also a little bit of a puzzle, as the item name is all you get, and exactly how it gets you across the lake is left to the imagination. This kind of guessing-on-the-basis-of-scant-clues puzzle is really coming to the fore, and I remember it being a big factor in Wizardry IV as well. Anyway, the Ship in a Bottle is a very common drop on level 4, but I wasn’t finding it at first, because I wasn’t opening chests. When I was new to the area and scared of the monsters in it, I left the thieves out of the party to make room for a second cleric, and without a thief, you really want to leave chests alone.

But even when I couldn’t use those stairs as a quick entrance, I could use them as a quick exit. This has to do with what I’ve been calling “alignment-locked”. Levels 2 through 5 are alignment-locked: a party with any evil characters can’t enter levels 2 or 4, and a party with any good characters can’t enter levels 3 or 5. I think the content of the levels is tailored to their alignment a bit, too. Level 3, an evil level, has evil architecture: the bulk of the level looks like a massive open space, but is really made of one-way walls, invisible and passable from one side, visible and impassible from the other. Also, it has the most evil trap I’ve seen: an open passage into a space that, once entered, turns out to be solid rock. Teleporting into rock is one of the few ways to instantly lose an entire party with no possibility of resurrection, and here it’s possible to do it without even teleporting. To be fair, it’s preceded by a series of signposts warning you away, but if I paid any attention to warning signs, I never would have finished Wizardry I. Anyway, levels 2 and 4, the good-aligned ones, have plenty of tricks and traps of their own, but they play relatively fair about it.

So, what happens if you try to enter an alignment-locked level with the wrong party? You get teleported back to town, that’s what. And that’s why a stair to level 4 and a stair to level 5 next to each other work as a quick exit, even if you can’t cross the lake to the stairs out.

Now, level 4 also has a stair up to what I believe to be level 6. And it displays the same behavior: attempting to go up it sends you back to town with the familiar “You’re not welcome here” message. And that made me wonder, because it seemed like it was expecting an evil party, but an evil party couldn’t get into level 4. A puzzle! There were two obvious approaches, but neither seemed very practical. First, you could stay on level 4 until you had fought enough friendly encounters to turn your good party evil. But this would require surviving on level 4 for a very long time. Second, you could create an entire neutral party, which should in theory be allowed everywhere. The problem with this is that an all-neutral party couldn’t have any healers — priests are allowed to be either good or evil, but they have to be one or the other. Perhaps a mixed party would be allowed through? I made a note to try experiments once I finished mapping out levels 4 and 5.

But in fact I found a solution without meaning to. I had a weary and injured party, looking for the quickest way out, and it looked like getting teleported back to town by those stairs up would be it. To my horror, however, they simply went up the stairs. I immediately realized it had to be due to the Crystal of Evil in my inventory, picked up after a tough battle with a wizard named Delf, whose minions turn people to stone (a status I can’t cure yet, but I can easily afford the fee to have it done in town). I closed my laptop still in the dungeon, wondering what to do, and after some time, it came to me: Go back down the stairs, drop the crystal, and go back up again, both getting back home intact and confirming my guess. The game doesn’t really keep state for stuff in the dungeon; all state-tracking is done through character inventory. So what if I don’t have the plot-important crystal any more? I could just fight Delf for it again — something I kind of wanted to do anyway, because he gives massive XP.

So here I am on dungeon level 4. Twelve years ago, in my first attempt at Wizardry III, I almost lost my best characters when a teleporter sent them deep into unmapped territory, leaving them with no idea how to get back to the exit, and no way to replenish spells until they did. I somehow managed to get them out, only to see them suffer a stupider and less dramatically-justified TPK shortly afterward.

This whole experience is largely why I’m taking the “abundance of caution” approach this time through. Nonetheless, I blundered into the exact same teleporter again. The level is just set up to make this happen; it’s right on the other side of a door, where you have no way to know it’s there until you’ve sent one party through it. It is, in effect, part of the plot, a “party gets lost” event. As before, I made it through the unconnected part of level 2 and back to the uncharted part of level 4, but was battered greatly by monsters along the way; my mage was dead, and the rest of my characters were hardly in fighting shape. Understand that, unlike most of my TPKs, this was not a matter of folly or hubris on my part. I hadn’t deliberately taken on more than I could handle or stayed in the dungeon when I should have headed for home. I had just been sent on a very long path, with no possibility of going back, and over the course of many encounters, I inevitably ran out of spell slots, then hit points. And I still didn’t know how to get back out. A TPK seemed inevitable.

Here’s what I did about it.

First, I terminated the program. This is something that the version of Wizardry III I’m playing tolerates. It saves your status and position after each encounter, and lets you resume outings in progress. Then I sent in another party, not to drag the dead back to town for resurrection, but simply to thoroughly map out the area around my first party. I didn’t know their exact coordinates — with the mage dead and the bishop out of spells, I had no one to cast DUMAPIC — but I knew their approximate location. It turned out to be accessible from outside. I probably walked over the very map tile where they were invisibly and intangibly waiting to be reactivated.

And, having done that, I knew the quickest and safest way out of the dungeon. It turned out to not be very far, once you knew which way to go. One more character died along the way, but both survived resurrection, and the lot of them racked up quite a few experience points in their perilous adventure.

We’ve looked a bit at the influential aspects of these early Wizardry games. What about the things that weren’t imitated even by its direct imitators? Those should be the aspects that really define Wizardry as an entity unto itself. I’ve mentioned the peculiar randomized point-buy of stats and the way that stats randomly go up and down when characters level up. What else is there?

For starters, there’s the aging mechanic. Every character has an age, apparently recorded in weeks, which increases when they rest at the inn, change class, or get resurrected. There exist items to magically rejuvenate characters. Why is age important? Because it’s related to the random stat changes: the younger the character, the greater the chance that stats will go up rather than down. If someone ages enough, their stats inevitably start decreasing; apparently they die if their Vitality goes below 3, which can be interpreted as dying of old age. I’ve never gotten anywhere near having an actually old character, although one of my fighters is perilously close to dying of old age just from unlucky die rolls. It’s worth noting tangentially that stats other than Vitality are capable of going all the way to 0, and even underflowing to 31, indicating that stats are stored in 5 bits, or 30 bits for the complete block.

It is of course extremely common for CRPGs to have shops where you can not only buy equipment but sell scavenged items. And such shops are usually willing to buy back items you bought from them, for a smaller price. But it’s very rare for shops to keep track of the dungeon finds you’ve sold them — to add them to their inventory, and sell them back to you at a markup. And that is something Wizardry does. You can essentially pawn your +1 broadsword for resurrection fees, intending to get it back once you’re on your feet.

Another thing: Identifying monsters. All monsters have some generic description like “Man In Robe” or “Large Snake” in addition to their proper name, and have a random chance of becoming identified that depends on the level and stats of your characters. And it’s kind of important to know what’s what, because a lot of monsters share their unidentified names — that Man In Robe could be a mere Apprentice or he could be an Arch-Wizard. But if monster identification isn’t a factor in other games, it’s also just barely a factor here; there’s a fairly low-level spell, LATUMAPIC, that effectively eliminates it from the game.

Speaking of monsters, I’d say a strong piece of the Wizardry flavor is the use of out-of-context exotic animals as monsters. Wizardry II has hippopotami roaming the dungeon. Wizardry III has Bengal tigers and anacondas. The first level of episode 1 has “Giant Rodents” that I assumed at first to be your standard D&D giant rats, but which, once identified, turn out to be capybaras. Encountering this as a child, I knew about capybaras only as a bit of trivia: the largest living rodents! By now, I’ve actually seen real capybaras, both in the zoo and on the internet. They’re not nearly as aggressive as the game would have you believe.

Despite taking a generally cautious approach, I managed to blunder into a completely avoidable TPK on level 2 — it was one of those things where you’re pretty close to visiting all of a certain set of rooms in a single go, and so you try for inconsequential completion when you should be heading home to rest. It took me a while to drag the entire party out, and two of them didn’t survive resurrection. I’ve created replacements for them, and have been trying to train them up. Better to do it now than when there’s an even larger experience gap.

While doing this, I mapped out the entirety of level 2, or at least those parts accessible from the stairs without teleportation. (I’m still several experience levels away from learning MALOR.) Mapping out levels, even the tricky ones full of teleporters and spinners, doesn’t really take long — not nearly as long as it takes to level up your characters enough to survive easily on the next dungeon level, particularly if you’re trying to do this for a full roster of 20 rather than a single party. And when it came to exploring level 3, I had another problem: my entire roster, apart from a couple of thieves, was good.

Recall that one of the chief gimmicks of Wizardry III is that some dungeon levels are alignment-locked. Level 2 is accessible only to good parties, level 3 only to evil parties. Level 1 has stairs leading to both 2 and 3, and 2 has stairs leading to level 4, skipping 3. But I didn’t want to skip 3. I wanted to do all the levels, in order. That means I had a choice: either delete some of my characters and create evil ones, or turn existing characters evil. I opted for the latter. In fact, I opted to turn my entire roster evil.

I’ve described it before, but: The key to changing alignment in this game is in your treatment of friendly encounters. Whenever you leave friendlies unmolested, every evil character in your party has a chance of turning good, and whenever you attack them, every good character has a chance of turning evil. But it can take a while to find a friendly encounter, and when you do, you have no control over which characters turn. What’s more, when only some of your party has turned, you have a mixed good/evil party. Such a party will stay together as long as you don’t take it apart, but it can’t access alignment-locked levels at all, and neither good nor evil characters can join it. The obvious solution to both these things is to simply swap out characters when they turn and replace them with ones that need to. But that winds up in uncomfortable random constraints: all my mages turned early, so I had to make do with just bishops for a while. And of course eventually you wind up with a party consisting of whoever’s left.

Still, what all this means is that I had something else to focus on while grinding. And that’s something this game sorely needs. By the time I everyone was evil, most of them had substantially more XP than before.

And by now, I’ve thoroughly mapped out level 3 and, I am convinced, obtained everything there is to obtain from it. Time to convert everyone back to good so I can access level 4!