Into the Chokesverse: Let's Play SSI Gold Box Forgotten Realms

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Into the Chokesverse: Let's Play SSI Gold Box Forgotten Realms

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Oh man, I was just looking through the LP archive about two weeks ago wondering if someone had ever LPed these games because I've been playing through them (on PC unfortunately, I'm too attached to Gold Box Companion) and I was very sad that no one had.

And now you are, this thread literally made my day, thanks.

(By the way, I fell into lurking on your FFL1 thread but I have to say: your rendition of Elly was absolutely perfect to what I was imagining when I made the suggestion. ^_^ )

# ¿ Sep 30, 2019 16:32

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 21:34

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Chokes McGee posted:

Pool of Radiance, Chapter 3: Looking to Train? Good Job!

Not today!

Jason Sextro posted:

Yeah the last person I saw to do it gave up partway during Secret of the Silver Blades. Also, high-five Gold Box Companion buddy! That has some amazingly fun capabilities for game-breaking.

We'll see how far I make it, I want to finish all four parts. I'm halfway through Curse, and that's all I'm saying about that.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2019 16:00

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

MechaCrash posted:

So that thing about your elf caster topping out at 9? Yeah, that's because non-humans have level caps in these editions. Why? Because gently caress you, that's why. I guess there needed to be some incentive to playing a human.

As for multiclassing, only non-humans can do it, and the way it works (assuming those particular rules remained the same between this edition and the one I know) is that experience is divided up between your classes evenly, and they grow at their own rate. So if you're a fighter/magic-user, and you do something that gives you 500 XP, you don't get 500 XP as a character. Your fighter half gets 250, and your mage half gets 250. And when you beat on enough stuff that your single-class fighter buddy has 10k XP and is comfortably level 4, you'll have 5k XP in Fighter and 5k in Magic-User, making you a level 3 Fighter/2 Magic-User.

But like I said, only non-humans can multi-class. If you're human, instead you dual-class, which is needlessly complicated, kind of stupid, and something Chokes may want to cover when we get to the point where it's relevant.

This is correct. Also, the game rounds down when it's dividing, which mostly matters for those triple-classed elves and half-elves.

But yes: Non-humans have a level cap in AD&D 1st and 2nd edition. This wasn't included for any particular game balance reason; rather, just the opposite - it was included specifically because Gary Gygax wanted to ensure that humans were the most powerful and unbalanced race in the game, and not having a level cap was his way of achieving that. It's a rule that I'm led to understand the overwhelming majority of AD&D dungeon masters promptly thought was dumb and ignored.

In 1st edition, the level caps for non-human characters relevant to this game (Gold Box doesn't implement half-orcs, druids, monks, illusionists, or assassins) were as follows (putting this behind a spoiler tag so people who don't care can easily skip over it):

Dwarven fighters have a level cap of 7, which increases to 8 if they have 17 strength and 9 if they have 18 strength.
Elf fighters have a level cap of 5, which increases to 6 if they have 17 strength and 7 if they have 18 strength.
Gnome fighters have a level cap of 5, which increases to 6 if they have 18 strength.
Half-elf fighters have a level cap of 6, which increases to 7 if they have 17 strength and 8 if they have 18 strength.
Halfling fighters have a level cap of 4, which increases to 5 if they have 17 strength and 6 if they have 18 strength. In the tabletop edition there's some nonsense about halfling subraces that I don't think Gold Box implements.
Elf mages have a level cap of 9, which increases to 10 if they have 17 intelligence and 11 if they have 18 intelligence.
Half-elf mages have a level cap of 6, which increases to 7 if they have 17 intelligence and 8 if they have 18 intelligence.
Half-elf clerics have a level cap of 5..

2nd edition raised most of the non-human level caps considerably but didn't eliminate them from the core rules; that wouldn't come until 3rd edition. If you're playing these games on the PC version, it's possible to cheat past the non-human level caps (Gold Box Companion makes it easy, and doing so I suspect is the main use case for it). If these games used the 2nd edition caps, non-humans would have been viable into Secret of the Silver Blades, but still too underpowered to play ball in Pools of Darkness probably.

On another note, I'm deeply looking forward to being able to point to your LP as proof that you can beat these games with relatively normal stats, since basically every resource on the internet claims that beating Pools of Darkness is a fool's errand without cheaty stats. As you said, in AD&D 1e, most stats don't really matter except at the extremes (you need 18 intelligence to cast 9th level wizard spells and you need 18 wisdom to cast 7th level cleric spells, for instance.) My own runthrough of the games I've been working on has only relatively mild stat cheating (I raised all of my characters' constitution to 18, and a few other stats to 16s or 17s for various reasons), and does use GBC to enable me to take a multiclass half-elf through all four games without her becoming horribly gimped by the end. (Getting 1/3 EXP will probably still gimp her a fair bit, I'm betting.)

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 13:26

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Kliff posted:

This is where the NES version has one major difference in this game. For some reason, and I don't know if it's because I was always extremely lucky or if it's programmed in that version, delivering the package to Ohlo gets you a Necklace of Missiles in addition to the other rewards.

In the other versions his reward is one random magical item.

EDIT: Beaten to the punch by Chokes! Alas.

Of course, the random item could *be* one of those...

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 16:26

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Chokes McGee posted:

I mean, it's possible, but this is Ohlo we're talking about here. We're lucky we got a lovely magical polearm

"lovely magical polearm" is a pretty good summary of my entire play experience for the last couple weeks, it's true.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 19:11

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Random thought, since it was mentioned that Amiga's the superior platform for these games:

Is there actually a complete documentation anywhere of all the bugs in the various ports? I'm familiar with some of the bigger ones, which I won't mention specifically because they're still kind of spoiler territory, but.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2019 20:46

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Chokes McGee posted:

I'm sure there's plenty out there, PoR is one of those games that every weirdo on the internet has played and there's a lot of weirdos on the internet

that being said Amiga is superior in all ways except game speed, and mass combat is such a loving chore

Tell me about it, I went through Radiance on the default emulator speed set by the GOG release which is pretty slow (3000 cycles iirc, the dosbox default).

# ¿ Oct 11, 2019 01:41

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Another obscure trick for the troll fight: at least on the PC version, dunno if this is true for Amiga, but if you keep a character standing on the space the troll died, they can't revive.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2019 07:26

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

I suspect it's actually the dust of disappearance that's being talked about.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2019 23:18

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

SotSB (and PoD) also both suffer from game design issues that are endemic to the core AD&D 1e rules; they exist in the space of the ruleset where most meaningful character development has stopped. Every level you gain in PoR and CotAB feels like a big step in progression. Even the lowly level 1->2 jump, while it gives you nothing in the way of new power, is doubling your longevity, both in hit points and spell slots. Even just at the end of Pool of Radiance, your characters are multiple orders of magnitude stronger than they started the game.

Breaking it down even a little, because I'm a math nerd and this poo poo excites me in stupid ways - assuming you hit the level cap in each entry:

At the start of Pool of Radiance, all of your characters (regardless of class!) have a 5% chance to hit an opponent with AC 0. By the end of the game, that's improved to an 40% chance for fighters, a 25% chance for thieves, a 15% chance for clerics and a 10% chance for mages. Your mages and clerics' hit points will be approximately six times their initial values, your fighter's eight times, and your thief's nine times. Second and third level spells are some of the most significant increases in all the games, with staples like Hold Person (2nd level cleric), Stinking Cloud (2nd level mage) and Fireball (3rd level mage) remaining relevant forever.
Even in Curse of the Azure Bonds, the growth in your characters' power is much more modest by comparison; those hit rates improve to 60% for fighters, 35% for clerics, and 20% for mages, while thieves get the short end of the stick and remain at the same 25% they started. Meanwhile, your fighters will see about a 20% increase in their hit points, your thieves a 16% increase, your clerics a 53% increase and your mages an 83% increase. Your casters get fourth and fifth level spells here; for clerics this isn't a terribly interesting expansion of their abilities, with the main stars being Neutralize Poison (4th) and Cure Critical Wounds (5th). For mages it's a bit more interesting, especially for fighter/mage multi or dual-classes, with stuff like Dimension Door and Fire Shield in 4th, and Cloudkill, Cone of Cold, and Hold Monster in 5th. (Cloudkill falls off hard after this game, but you can definitely get mileage out of it in lategame Curse.) Curse, of course, also introduces the paladin and ranger classes in general, which you might replace one or more of your Pool of Radiance characters with. Also, this game is pretty much the last point in the quadralogy a demihuman that isn't a fighter/thief is a viable character without cheating due to racial level caps; a fighter/thief will continue to outperform a pure thief in combat all the way to the end (but not a pure fighter) despite capping fighter levels here.
By Secret of the Silver Blades, progression has slowed to a crawl; only a thief sees an HP increase better than around 10% over the entire game, and those hit rates have now improved to 75% for fighters, 45% for thieves and clerics, and still 20% for mages. Clerics only gain two spells in this entire game, and only one of them is useful, but it's a very big useful (Heal); mages basically gain a large pile of different save-or-die spells and Delayed Blast Fireball which is Fireball but better.
Ultimately, your characters hit their peak power levels very early in Pools of Darkness, since most progression past level 18 is functionally irrelevant and few of the top-level spells SSI actually implemented are dramatically helpful; most of the power you gain in PoD is more 7th level slots for more Delayed Blast Fireballs between rests.

Silver Blades undoubtedly suffers some from being more linear and less interesting than the titles that preceded it, but SSI was helpless to do anything about the game's actual biggest flaw, which were the AD&D rules themselves, to the point where I feel like if you took these four games and remade them with a more modern D&D edition's ruleset but all other factors remaining unchanged, you'd still end up with the last two games looking much better than they did under 1e.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2020 07:09

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Seyser Koze posted:

I know there've been some rumblings about the studio that did the Bard's Tale and Wasteland remasters possibly doing the Gold Box games next. Maybe we'll get to see how that pans out!

Oh my God, really? Day one purchase if so I was literally fantasizing about that with my RL friend who introduced me to the Gold Box games a few nights ago.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2020 04:07

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Re: Cloudkill - On the GOG copy of the game I have the spell worked fine, for certain unimpressive values of "worked".

(The simple fact is that by the time you get it, there's very little you're going to be facing in the Gold Box engine that's actually susceptible to it anyway. I did, however, manage to get a little use out of it against some of the more annoying trash, but it wasn't really anything Fireball wouldn't have handled equally well.)

It is absolutely worthless in Silver Blades though.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2020 06:19

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Narsham posted:

1E Cloudkill: Automatically kills enemies with fewer than 4+1 HD, requires creatures up to 6 HD (inclusive) to save vs poison or die. Does nothing against creatures with more than 6 HD.

In a game that doesn't usually confront you with low HD foes, it is pretty useless. But hey: Phase Spiders have 5+5 HD, so it can conceivably work against them, meaning there's maybe 3-4 combats where it is useful.

I suppose it's more useful if you grind random encounters so you have L5 spells earlier than you're supposed to.

Yeah, I put it to work against the phase spiders in fact. There's not much else in the endgame susceptible to it.

The deeper I get into SotSB, the more and more I understand why Chokes isn't finding much to write about in it. Secret of the Filler Blades, indeed. @_@

# ¿ Oct 31, 2020 04:24

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

Now having finished Secret of the Silver Blades, I can absolutely see why it's simply not great LP material. It's like... at no point did I ever actually actively hate the game? But it is painfully filler, and the plot is largely something that could have - and perhaps, should have - been done with lower-leveled characters simply by just changing what was in the encounters. It's just way too low-key for levels 10-15.

It would still probably be a much better game if it wasn't saddled with being level 10-15 in the 1e rules, though. And while Pools of Darkness is suitably much more epic, the "level 15+ in 1e AD&D" problem does not go away.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2020 21:14

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 21:34

Reiska: Oct 14, 2013

I am always game for more of your writing, Chokes.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2020 13:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Into the Chokesverse: Let's Play SSI Gold Box Forgotten Realms