Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[MRY]

So ever since I was a kid, I've wondered: is "Azure Bonds" the result of some designer learning of the country Azerbaijan (perhaps from the Nagorno-Karabakh War) and thinking it sounded neat, or is there some other explanation? A result of the limited CGA color palette?

 

[Ruhfuss]

Maybe if the bonds had a more reddish color compared to the blueish way they're depicted in the novel or game, it would have been "Curse of the Crimson Bonds" instead?

 

[Jo498]

I had no problems playing the embedded video on firefox.

In my case all characters were created in Pools and I am not aware of anything out of order I did (certainly not after party creation).

The only other odd thing I saw is that the "natural" protection 10 ft. from evil of the Paladin is shown only as protection from evil in the display menu whereas the rings of protection from evil (I got them for all members because they are fairly cheap and as always funds are plentiful) are displayed as giving protection 10 ft. radius. Cold resistance is rarely important but the ring of fire resistance seems to work.
The only similar problem I remember from about 3 playthroughs of most of those games (but within almost 25 years) was the complete mess with imported characters stats and stat changing items in CURSE mentioned several times in this thread. Of course with some things (like protection from evil) it is very hard to tell if there are actually effects.

In any case, even with the "broken" electricity ring it seems to work reliably if one checks before important battles the display screen (one usually does this anyway) and if it is not displayed un/equip should do the trick.

FWIW the party I am now playing with is not the one with the slow start (because 3 dual class chars) I talked about above and played up to Thorne and Myth Drannor but one I made similar to the first one I played this game with, i.e. NO dual class. To give me a break I gave most and especially the weaker characters (mage, dwarven fighter/thief, elven f/m/t) close to max HP. So compared to the pre-made party, Ranger and cleric are very similar in stats, the Paladin started with about 10 HP more (ca. 125), the fighter/thief is a little stronger and has more HP (but 1 less DEX) than the half-elf of the pre-made party. The pure mage has less HP and no cleric spells but will get to higher lvls slightly faster than the cleric/mage from the premade. Only the triple character will be considerably weaker (except for backstabbing) in most respects (and in HP) than the ranger/mage from the pre-made.
And I play on the middle (pre-set) level, not at the next higher one. And I am not going to do Kalistes first (as I crazily did 23-24 years ago) but Thorne (I am just before the Thorne dungeon now) and then decide what next.

 

[Ruhfuss]

I have to try it with dragons.
(Because the dragon's breath works differently than the spell - breath does not hurt other dragons regardless of color while the spell does.)

The way dragon breath is handled is just plain stupid. An electric spider is immune to any form of electrical damage, while a blue dragon is immune to any form of dragon's breath, but can otherwise be damaged by fire, lightning, cold, acid, poison gas, chlorine, toilet seat cleaner, as long as it doesn't originate from another dragon's frontal exhaust port? Sure.

But regarding the RoEI, it should make no difference. While I guess the Scroll of Prot Dragon Breath gives the same type of immunity that other dragons have regarding their own emissions, the RoEI should just mimic the electric spider's total immunity. No need to recode the same stuff on and on.

On the other hand, I can't remember seeing a blue dragon breathing at an electric spider, so of course all my reasoning might end up in bullshit.

EDIT/Addendum: Then again, blue dragon breath has to work differently than the spell, else it would be absorbed by a (Minor) Globe of Invulnerability; and if a Scroll of Prot Dragon Breath just gave immunity to all kinds of elements that can come out of a dragon's maw, it would also protect from e. g. a DBF. There needs to be a check for both damage source (breath attack, spell, item) and damage type (elemental type, melee blunt/piercing etc.). Go[o|l]d old times...

 

[Ruhfuss]

The only similar problem I remember from about 3 playthroughs of most of those games (but within almost 25 years) was the complete mess with imported characters stats and stat changing items in CURSE mentioned several times in this thread. Of course with some things (like protection from evil) it is very hard to tell if there are actually effects.

Not quite that similar, but I remember that once, when transfering from DKK to DQK, the Paladin originating from DKK lost her innate healing ability. Not that I acually used or even needed that ability, but I felt cheated. So I created a new Paladin in DQK with as close stats as possible, and figured out the differences in the characters' save files with hex-comparing.

I was quite proud of myself when my fix worked, and then prolly never used the LAY on hands ability...

 

[ProphetSword]

So ever since I was a kid, I've wondered: is "Azure Bonds" the result of some designer learning of the country Azerbaijan (perhaps from the Nagorno-Karabakh War) and thinking it sounded neat, or is there some other explanation? A result of the limited CGA color palette?

Azure is variation of the color blue. Azure, according to Wikipedia, is noted as being the color of the sky on a clear summer's day.

 

[Jo498]

"lay" is very useful if the party is otherwise low on clerics (like a PoD party is far more likely to be than a DKK or DQK one). I am not sure about the electric spiders. Probably no battles with them and dragons on the same screen?
I am quite positive that the globe does not help against breath weapons.
It does not make a lot of sense but I guess they handled the breath weapons differently because otherwise in many battles the dragons would suffer a lot from friendly fire (especially the less precise poison gas), so the party would only have to run away behind the next wall or corner and watch...

 

[MRY]

Yes, I obviously know what the title means. What I'm not sure of is whether the color of the bonds (indeed, even the whole concept) flowed from someone liking the sound of "azure bonds." I guess it flows from blue tattooing, though.

 

[Dorateen]

Curse of the Azure Bonds was based off the AD&D Finder Wyvernspur novels. Are you familiar with the story?

 

[GarfunkeL]

And the title is lifted straight off the novel (well, Azure Bonds -> Curse of the Azure bonds). In which Alias is the only one affected, because SPOILER stuff. And the novel is pretty old - published in 1988. It was one of the first Forgotten Realms books I read, alongside Spellfire (1987).

So I doubt that Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb thought Azerbaijan at all, just figured a groovy name for their book.

 

[ProphetSword]

I suppose they could have went with alternate titles, like:

"Controlled by Blue Tattoos"
"Curse of the Sky-Colored Markings"
"What's This Blue Thing on My Arm?"
"Look, Ma! Blue Sigils!"
"Bondage in Blue"
"Pool of Radiance, Part 2 - Back in Blue"

 

[octavius]

It is. I did my fair bit of item shuffling, but couldn't get the RoEI to break, no matter what. So I was thinking that maybe the RoEI on occasion might spawn with broken item properties. For example, the RoEI in TSF, which is Pools' nearest relative engine-wise, didn't work for me.

Did you import a RoEI from TSF (I seem to recall you played the FR GB games in an unconventional sequence)? And if so, did it work differently from the one found in PoD?

 

[Jo498]

I have not found the rule but the RoEI apparently drops from the display menu (and presumeably loses its power) very quickly. Maybe any gaining of experience, any spell, a certain number of steps or other in-game events make the game "forgetting" about it. Apparently unready/ing revives it but one should probably check before every major battle. Note again my experience is only within PoD, no imports. The ring is found in one of the first dungeons (I can't find exactly where in the cluebook right now). The ring is strange anyway. Most other rings only give resistance, not immunity, I think. There are also only spells against cold and fire, none to help against electricity or the breath of green and black dragons. (I wonder if this is due to AD&D restrictions or would have been to complicated to program. There are so many useless spells (ray of enfeeblement, Reduce, has anyone every used them?) that some more resistance spells could take their slots

(Another display menu oddity I noticed is that a fire resistance spell seems to have "stuck" to a character...)

 

[Null Null]

Most of the oddities were imported directly from 1st ed. AD&D--the weak healing spells (a fifth level spell cures 6-27 HP? wtf?), the way attack spells suddenly become more powerful at 3rd level (fireball!) and barely progress after that, the near-useless attack spells (cause blindness as a third level spell? why?), and so on. (Don't recall seeing a ring of electrical immunity anywhere in the 1st ed DMG). There actually were spells to protect against acid and electricity that came up in later editions.

The ring is found near the end of Taydome's Keep.

As for spells 'sticking' and items unsticking when they should be stuck...well, no game is immune to errors, and these poor guys had to work within Bill Gates' 640K which, of course, should be enough for anyone.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

In college we made non-trivial programs on VAX using 4KB of memory including compilation... AND WE LIKED IT.

 

[Jo498]

There are some spells where I could imagine a creative game master using them to interesting effect in a pen & paper game round. But the battles in the GB games are usually not done that way. E.g. there could be monsters with immunities and strong attacks where a good strategy would be to cast reduce, blindness or enfeeblement to weaken them because it would take long to take them down. But that's usually not worth it because they are either far more efficient spells or the monster is just too dangerous with spells, breath, whatever that a weakening spell would be relevant.

Altogether the games are remarkable for what they did in the late 80s and comparably stable and unbuggy. Did anyone ever play the Dragonlance game "Shadowsorcerer"? This looked nice but was buggy and also fairly impossible, I think, because of that timer. I never got very far, apparently one has to do exactly the right things from the start otherwise one will never make it in time.

 

[Ruhfuss]

I am not sure about the electric spiders. Probably no battles with them and dragons on the same screen?

I have vague memories of such an encounter existing in either Pools or DQK. Since I'm at the beginning of the Web Dimension in Pools, that's a good place to look for it.

I am quite positive that the globe does not help against breath weapons.

I didn't make such a claim, at least not intentionally.

It is. I did my fair bit of item shuffling, but couldn't get the RoEI to break, no matter what. So I was thinking that maybe the RoEI on occasion might spawn with broken item properties. For example, the RoEI in TSF, which is Pools' nearest relative engine-wise, didn't work for me.

Did you import a RoEI from TSF (I seem to recall you played the FR GB games in an unconventional sequence)? And if so, did it work differently from the one found in PoD?

In my current Pools campaign, I've got a fully working-as-intended RoEI, originating from Pools. I also did a TSF run, where I've found a "broken" RoEI.

What I was trying to say/show is that I don't think that the RoEI itself is bugged, but that the game's engine has trouble with certain types of spell(-like) effects. Some consumables have permanent effects, and some permanent items lose their intended effect after some incident.

(EDIT/Addendum:

(Another display menu oddity I noticed is that a fire resistance spell seems to have "stuck" to a character...)

Another nice example, this time not even item related.)

And sometimes the "fix" for the one issue has the second issue as side effect.

in TSF, the Potion of Giant Strength has a permanent effect, which can be resolved by deleting the character's corresponding EFX files.

Which I did for a savegame in Pools, for the whole party. Which then caused the RoEI to reliably break, with all the need to re-ready it between combats, and failing to DISPLAY after combat. Also, the permanent Protection from Evil for Paladins was gone and didn't come back; tried resting, transitioning areas, even REMOVE, SAVE, QUIT, LOAD and re-ADD to party. Couldn't find a trigger to have the game re-evaluate the spell effects stuff on characters.

 

[Ruhfuss]

As for spells 'sticking' and items unsticking when they should be stuck...well, no game is immune to errors, and these poor guys had to work within Bill Gates' 640K which, of course, should be enough for anyone.

I find it rather amazing what they were able to do with very limited ressources back then. Only one of the Gold Box games had a possibly game-breaking bug (DQK), and that game wasn't even an in-house development. Compare that to current AAA "fun", with ultralarge patches required to make the titles useable at all.

Maybe thanks to my aversion to some of the Gold Boxes' features (hello level draining), and due to current party composition, I didn't find the need to use many some game features, and as "reward" have a relatively unbroken gameplay experience. For example, for my current Pools campaign, a list of items that I didn't/needn't do:

• restore lost levels (possibly fuckup of total HP after restore + REPAIR; I reload every time when a drainer hits, seriously)
• use of Dispel Magic on a party member
• Neutralize Poision, Raise Dead or Resurrection (use Power Word: Reload instead)
  
• usage of non-offensive consumables (EDIT/big exception: Scroll of Prot Dragon Breath)

I've got a weird feeling that there should be more items on the list. Maybe some of the abstraction shortens it. I also hardly ever buff, and when I do it's usually only Haste and Globe of Invulnerability. Then again, the big battles are yet to come.

As a result, regular combat boils down to opening with (a) nuke(s), and then shredding the remains, if any, in melee. A bit bland perhaps, but neglecting to use certain game features seems to keep the party free of lice.

 

[Joonas]

Here's a list of all Pools of Darkness effects & states:
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/gbc/tmp/pod_effects.txt

I pulled the strings from the main executable. Most of those effects are not accessible for player characters but are still listed in the exe. Very modder friendly I must say. In Secret and Pools, effects codes seem to be the same as character / monster states.

I tried to create some rings in Pools, like ring of haste and ring of immunity to fire, and they seem to work ok.

In most of the games, one effect in the character savefile is 9 bytes long, where the first byte is the effect ID. I'm not sure about those other bytes but clearly there are some bytes dedicated for duration / permanent effect. PoR has some annoying bugs related to paralyze effect duration not working correctly.

While trying the effects I also experimented extracting monsters from the data files so that you could add them to your party. In some games, the graphic icon wouldn't load properly in combat but in Pools you could have for example Thorne, Gothmenes and an iron golem in the party.

Gothmenes for example has following effects:
+3 weapons or better to hit, +4d6 fire damage, immune to cold, immune to electricity, immune to fear, immune to fire, immune to gaze attacks, sees invisible

 

[Ruhfuss]

I wondered why "empty" Rangers in Pools have an EFX file at all, hinting at some kind of non-DISPLAY-ed effect. "69 / invisible to animals" - WTF?!?

It certainly helps to look at the hex nummbers, instead of looking at the line numbers. "$69 / bonus damage from rangers"

So deleting the whole EFX files is even worse than I thought.

Joonas, do you have an idea how to force Pools to re-evaluate a character's effects? "Hey game, this is a Paladin. There's supposed to be a permanent $08 (even better: $2d) effect on it, but it's missing." It would suck if the effect only got applied at either character creation or when re-enabling an original class ability for dual-classes. And if the permanency got miscoded in the EFX, I can see how Dispel Magic could destroy a class ability.

 

[Ruhfuss]

Wow, that list of character effects & states certainly helps to mess around. Some things I figured out so far; no warranty if my conclusions are 100% accurate.

One effect consists of 9 bytes; I'm counting bytes from 1 to 9.

1 = effect ID
2 = rounds remaining for temporary effects
4 = FF: effect is permanent; 1C: effect is temporary, source is spell (I only tested spells)
5 = 01: permanent effect from item (byte 4 is FF) - setting this to 00 still removes the effect when the item is un-readied)
6 = no clue so far; seems to be always 00
7 = no clue so far; seems to be always 00
8 = 00 for the last item in the EFX file; various values if another item follows - used for ordering or chaining?
9 = 00 for the last item in the EFX file; 5B if another item follows - some kind of word stop byte?

So a technical explanation for why a Paladin has only "Protection from Evil" as a class ability, while the Ring of Prot from Evil offers "Protection from Evil, 10' radius" might be that the Paladin's class ability would've been destroyed by removing an item which offers the same effect.

Seems to me like this implementation sucks. Permanent effects from either class or items (only permanent as long as the item is readied) could be easiliy distinguished, so that they wouldn't affect each other detrimentally.

Next I'm trying to break a save and have a look at the RoEI effects in its broken state.

EDIT:
In a broken state, an effect's byte 9 changes from 5B to 5C (stays 00 for the last item). Unfortunately, just changing 5C back to 5B doesn't fix the save. So I guess now at least there's an indicator for the bug, if no fix.

 

[octavius]

So a technical explanation for why a Paladin has only "Protection from Evil" as a class ability, while the Ring of Prot from Evil offers "Protection from Evil, 10' radius" might be that the Paladin's class ability would've been destroyed by removing an item which offers the same effect.

Surely it should have been the other way around with the Paladin having the radius/aura? I've always assumed that the display just worded it wrongly.

 

[Ruhfuss]

Re: the RoEI issue. Now my game is perma-broken, like "it should be" from other people's experiences regarding the RoEI issue. All I did is coming back from the Web Dimension, right after entering, and discarding my Drow items. The RoEI was safely stored in the vault, no dimension travelling with it in the backpack. I not even took it from the vault when the game interface was still in Web-Dimension-style, but re-entered the Realms first, went to the Red Tower, entered Limbo from there and then got my inventory back.

An update on the EFX byte stuff:

1 = effect ID
2 = rounds remaining for temporary effects
3 = no clue so far; seems to be always 00
4 = FF: effect is permanent; 1C: effect is temporary, source is spell (I only tested spells)
5 = 01: permanent effect from item (byte 4 is FF) - setting this to 00 still removes the effect when the item is un-readied)
6 = no clue so far; seems to be always 00
7 = no clue so far; seems to be always 00
8 = 00 for the last item in the EFX file; various values if another item follows
9 = 00 for the last item in the EFX file; various values if another item follows

 

[Ruhfuss]

So a technical explanation for why a Paladin has only "Protection from Evil" as a class ability, while the Ring of Prot from Evil offers "Protection from Evil, 10' radius" might be that the Paladin's class ability would've been destroyed by removing an item which offers the same effect.

Surely it should have been the other way around with the Paladin having the radius/aura? I've always assumed that the display just worded it wrongly.

A quote from the Adventurer's Journal: "Paladins are also always surrounded by the equivalent of a Protection from Evil spell."

The "10' radius" aura is a 2nd edition change, I guess.

 

[octavius]

Re: the RoEI issue. Now my game is perma-broken, like "it should be" from other people's experiences regarding the RoEI issue. All I did is coming back from the Web Dimension, right after entering, and discarding my Drow items. The RoEI was safely stored in the vault, no dimension travelling with it in the backpack. I not even took it from the vault when the game interface was still in Web-Dimension-style, but re-entered the Realms first, went to the Red Tower, entered Limbo from there and then got my inventory back.

It is one of the few items that survives going through Limbo. Can it be the traveling that breaks it?