Spoilers for Pool of Radiance ahead!
As the party enters the tower repurposed as a courtyard, a Pool of Radiance enhanced bronze dragon appears. It dispatch its close guard to fight off the invasion of its territory. The party deals with that situation with good old fashioned mass Hold Person and the ever so deadly darts from the Magic Users while the Fighters takes the beating. As the guards lay down dead, the dragon waits patiently as the Clerics outfit their newly acquired Plate Mail +2. The NPCs are also happy with their new Two Handed Swords +2.
Then the dressing contest is over, it's time to take down the dragon. A sprinkle of the Dust of Disappearance made the dragon completely powerless while the party hacked and slashed it to death. When it was dead, the party had to flee the scene, 'cause bug happened and this ended up disbanding the NPC as well.
That was a very unepic ending! Dungeon masters in '88 were probably wondering if the coming that game would make them irrelevant, and the answer is pretty obvious. Still it's a great game despite the long list of known flaws. At the end of the day, it's a good adventure, something that newer games have problem to do in the first place. Can't wait to import in Curse but one of the Clerics is probably not going to make the trip, I think I will create a Paladin instead.
I don't know what will happen in the next games gear wise, I already have a Long Sword +5, it's hard to get a better non campaign specific weapon than that in the D&D universe. I also got 2 Gauntlets of Ogre Power, that's also very noteworthy as it makes non-Fighter quite good at physical attacks.
Seeing the demo of Curse, I can see a cleric using a staff sling, something I didn't see in Pool. That's going to fix my lack of range weapons for clerics. However, the AI tries to take down a black dragon with it...
The game tries often to be too close to the source material and it ends in ridiculous situations. The whole "helpless + any physical attack = OHKO" is one of them. The other is to award XP for treasure, it's usually good as finding set treasure by the designers is good XP wise so you don't have to endure endless random encounters to level up. However, you end up with questionable situations where random encounters in the castle were giving 3.5K XP while the final boss gave something like 700. Again it's following the rules blindly too much, yeah, Ettins (or whatever giant they were) might have a lot of riches but if they are on patrol duty, they are probably not carrying 1K+ gold pieces on them... which ends up massively booting the XP awards at the end of the fight that is trivial to deal with 2 Fireballs in the first place.
Still, having encounters that can be bypassed with proper behavior (parlay, wait, etc...), having opponents surrenders or flee when the battle is not in their flavor are all things that should be in RPGs nowadays but it simply isn't. That the random encounters that stops after a while or an event is deal with is also cool. I also like the having to find a training hall to gain a level, it put more pressure on your cash reserves (at the beginning of the game at least) but this is done better in Might & Magic where the training cost is proportional to your level and each hall has a level limit so you must find better one in your explorations.
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