Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Jo498]

I don't remember: Does one "naturally" get to lvl 39 or 40 without "grinding" in PoD or would characters usually only get to early 30ish lvls? Or will e.g. a pure cleric already get to 40 before the endgame?

With a single character one could still have bad luck with initiative and fall victim to a "hold person" spell.

 

[octavius]

I don't remember: Does one "naturally" get to lvl 39 or 40 without "grinding" in PoD or would characters usually only get to early 30ish lvls? Or will e.g. a pure cleric already get to 40 before the endgame?

My single class Ranger was lvl 33.
My dual Ranger/Mage was 15/25.
No grinding.

 

[Jo498]

thanks. If I read the tables correctly a pure cleric will have maxed out (reached lvl 40) with so many (> 8 Mio) XP, the cleric should reach lvl 40 with about 7.5 Mio XP or so.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Still, way too much stuff to carry around with standard opponents all have decent +1 or often +2. The core problem was explained by some commenters on earlier entries in the Addict's blog: Especially the gems and stuff are there to give the party experience according to some old/stupid D&D rules.

It's not a stupid rule, it was there to cut down on combat. BECM-rules and 1st edition only awarded XP for two things: monsters slain and treasures recovered. Without the treasure rule, you would need insane amounts of combat to reach high levels - amounts that were not feasible on tabletop P&P for non-autists. So you get 1 xp for each piece of gold you loot. DM's guide/manual had massive lists of the GP worth of everything possible.

 

[Jo498]

It may be a great rule in tabletop RPGing but as it is handled in the gold box CRPGs it automatically leads to the complaints about "economy" by the likes of the CRPG-addict blogger. Because except for the first 20% of PoR (and maybe the early portion of some other games where one starts with a rookie party) one can usually easily afford everything. And PoR is even better than most later games in that Training and Healing cost money and there are hugely expensive bows to buy. Treasures has quite a few magical shops but one can easily afford what they offer. So it is the combination of that rule with always getting lots of magical equipment from battles and the lack of sensible occasions to spend the money. Even wands of ice storm for 5000 or how much are affordable.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Well that's true of course. P&P had way more money sinks and the amount of treasury could have been cut in half or even more because A) there is no real need for that extra XP because you fight so much and B) there's not that many things to spend it on.

 

[Jo498]

I finished "Treasures". It's pretty good and it almost seems that they tried to do something different in several respects. The battles with backups are certainly a new challenge and comparably hard if one is not prepared for them. Of the 4 Goldbox games I played in the last few months (DKoK, PoR, Gateway, Treasures) it had the most challenging battles (by some margin if one discounts the final sequence of gateway). Partly due to the re-inforcements, partly to the frequent inclusion of high initiative magic users, often grouped so that it is impossible to hurt all or most of them. The magic users are also a little smarter than in some older games (or prefer spells that are not quite as often hurting their own friends).
There were also some very nasty combinations or stacked battles. (Having your "heroes" run away from Yetis for 2-3 rounds, so that some flee the battle is very annoying. I had to replay some of them and re-distributed and un-equipped the boots of speed, but one character fled anyway, fortunately they come back automatically for the second stage).

The balance between guidance and discovering stuff by oneself was also decent, although it can be played fairly linearly. I used the clue book in the last portion to get some stuff I had missed (but this was not possible for everything). One can feel lost in some dungeons, the worst for me was Fireshear where I did not quite understand what I was supposed to do and it was annoying with those two connected levels. Before the endgame there is not much loot and the good stuff is fairly easy to miss. In the last portion there is too much extraordinary equipment to be had from enemies.

I tried for the first time a dual character at fairly low lvls and dualed a ranger to mage at lvl 8. I had created a new party for the game, they start at about lvl 4-5. Therefore only my cleric and a half-elf cleric/fighter/mu reached their caps. It was still good to have the latter because more hold person and dispel magic spells come VERY handy in the endgame. Before the 40k XP or so from the final battles and rewards, single class characters were in the low 400000s. After the finale the fighter/mage elf had 266000 or so but the Paladin was still at lvl 9 (lvl10 at 700000 seems unreachable with fresh characters.) And I did not do the dwarf mazes, so missed some XP there as well. Still, except for maybe some better saving throws, this did not matter for the endgame.

I may not remember this properly from other games, but mage spells were a little difficult to get. One can buy several scrolls but they have always the same (and sometimes not very useful) spells, but never? finds scrolls as loot and I really had to remember which ones could be bought and which ones to learn while training, and still lacked a few nice ones.

Spoiler

Other than the beholder fight in Fireshear, I managed to win the finale battle at the first serious attempt (before I had once stumbled completely accidentally with un-rested characters not at full health into the final battle), with only one casualty (NPC Kriiador hit by a nasty blast of cold). Actually I survived the beholder battle at first attempt as well but I wanted to do better and then someone was disintegrated at the 2nd attempt and I had accidentally saved over the first, so I had to do it a third time...

 

[Ruhfuss]

Before the 40k XP or so from the final battles and rewards, single class characters were in the low 400000s. After the finale the fighter/mage elf had 266000 or so but the Paladin was still at lvl 9 (lvl10 at 700000 seems unreachable with fresh characters.) And I did not do the dwarf mazes, so missed some XP there as well. Still, except for maybe some better saving throws, this did not matter for the endgame.

Curious. Coming from POD with freshly dualled PCs (0 XP), my PCs had 640K XP (651K the one who trained at Malchor's) right before the final battle (party of 6 PCs + 2 NPCs). After the final battle, the numbers were 702K / 713K XP. No intentional grinding, sometimes even CTRL+C when not in the mood for random encounters (Luskan sucks with random encounters). But otherwise doing a 100% playthrough. I think that fight when trying to enter the Host Tower gave some nice XP.

 

[Jo498]

I didn't do that fight at the host tower either; I chose some other option or didn't even go there. Just lots of pirates in Luskan but not even all the captains because I figured those mansions were all very similar. Characters rolled in Treasures start with 22,600 XP, so this hardly matters for the end count.
And my numbers above were not quite right, I now checked after the final battles and rewards:
Cleric 573,634
Paladin 506,906
Elf Fighter 7/Mage 9 266,094 this one, the dwarf fighter 8/thief 10 and Siulaja (lvl 10 fighter) would gain another level after the finale.

Still, you gained about 150k more per character which is a lot. I do not know how much finishing all the dwarf mazes yields.
I only got the clue book around the last lucky paper quest in Mirabar. I missed quite a bit in the waterdeep tunnels (spiders and loot) and also the bloodaxe etc. on that island. In the endgame I also just walked through that first village on Ice Peak without any fights and I didn't clear out the cloud giants completely and missed maybe some other bits in the final dungeon (I did the vampire, though). I wanted to finish...

 

[octavius]

Checking my own Treasures party I see my Paladin has 650,000 XP, my Fighter/Thief 300,000 XP, and the rest about 550,000 XP.

For me the penultimate battle with all those high iniative spell casters was the most difficult one in the game.
The final battle against the the big white dragon was much easier.

 

[Jo498]

If one transfers a party from Gateway one will probably start with 40-50 k XP more. I created a new party at the start of Treasures with only ca. 22 k XP. Still, there's a difference of about 100 k XP which seems a lot (like a 5th or 6th of the game...?) Because I do not think I missed/skipped anything major.

Yes, the battle with all those spellcasters must be one of the more difficult ones in any GB game, partly because they are so distributed. Fortunately, fighters can use wands. I expected to try it several times and lost one important character to hold person, but could successfully dispel one or two other held characters and was somewhat lucky myself with hold person. I also charmed two enemies (that's what the clue book recommends to do first, I am not sure). I helped to have two mages who could cast hold monster and charm monster and two clerics with dispel and hold person. Theoretically, silence 15 ft would be a great spell but it fails more often than hold person and with such a distribution of enemies
And later on the dwarfen reinforcements drew some of the spells of the remaining blackrobes.
The Dragon was somewhat disappointing (except that he probably had the hardest physical attack of any dragon I remember, >30 damage and two around 5 (apparently bite and claws). I hardly ever hit him, he breathed on my paladin who could take it, on some dwarves and killed Kriador with 140 breath attack (this was on Adept lvl). I basically wore him down with magic missiles (although he has some resistance against them) and the few hits my fighters landed.
I also kind of wasted a haste spell while prebuffing. Haste does not help much when almost everyone is casting or using items for a few rounds and when I faced the dragon, it had worn off, but the fighters hardly hit him anyway.

 

[octavius]

One very annoying thing about Treasures is that Dispel Magic does not dispel Hold Person, which made the penultimate battle extra hard.
It was a bizarre experience to watch a Let's Play of that battle on YouTube by DOsBoxMom. She did nothing to prevent their casting, but the spells had no effect on her characters.

I checked my notes and I see I killed Freezefire with six swings from Hasted and Enlarged warriors.

 

[Jo498]

? It does not? I am sure dispel worked for me yesterday. Or could it only have been "hold monster"? Of course, I do not remember if the character was held by hold person or hold monster (the mages cast the latter). I did waste some dispel magic spells on my first trials in the two big yeti fights in Fireshear because the "Yeti fear" apparently does not count as a magical effect and is not dispelled, it fairly reliably wears off after 2-3 rounds, though.

As for the dragon, maybe the enlargement had worn off; as I said, the haste certainly had. They missed almost all the time, and I mainly killed him by flamestrike, magic missile and lightning bolt, although he did not always take damage. In similar fights, like the Death Dragon in Death Knights a couple of hasted and enlarged warriors are fairly reliable for killing it quickly. For some reason, I was extremely unlucky with physical attacks in several battles in Treasures. But it probably was simply (bad) luck because in other (usually less decisive) battles they hit normally.

Does anyone know if also beneficial spell effects are dispelled by dispel magic? Maybe I dispelled some enlargement along with hold person/monster (Siulajia was such a case in my fight).

 

[octavius]

Yes, Dispel Magic will also dispel beneficial spells.

 

[Ruhfuss]

One very annoying thing about Treasures is that Dispel Magic does not dispel Hold Person, which made the penultimate battle extra hard.

? It does not? I am sure dispel worked for me yesterday.

I'm also quite sure that Dispel Magic worked for me vs. PCs beeing held on multiple occasions in TSF.

It was a bizarre experience to watch a Let's Play of that battle on YouTube by DOsBoxMom. She did nothing to prevent their casting, but the spells had no effect on her characters.

Good saves due to optimized equipment*? Or maybe just good luck. Or both.

* TSF has Cloaks/Belts/Rings of Prot +2, all of them (should be) adding saving throw bonuses when using Bracers AC2. Not sure about the "crazy boots".

 

[Jo498]

I gave such equipment to all but one or two of the party (the paladin used the armor with fire protection and boots of speed), so most were at AC -8 to -11. But with ca. lvl 9 characters some of those holding spells are effective, unless you are very lucky. To some extent, these battles are very dependent on initiative and luck because there is not so much one can do if surrounded in such a fashion.
Fortunately I realized earlier that fighters could use wands in that game. The ranger/mage got held and went down despite mirror image (or he had lost images before) but I could un-hold Siulaja and another person and my own cloud/hold/charm was comparably effective.

There are somewhat similar battles in other games. If one does the drow regions in PoD rather early one will also have to depend on some luck (and it's worse there because the drow are more resistent to all kinds of magic than the black-robed bunch, but of course the ca. lvl 20 or higher party is also more powerful). Later on I always buffed fighter types with mindblank in PoD and probably Dark Queen as well. In a way holding/charming are among the most dangerous spells because fighter types with 100 or more HP can take a lot of other damage.

I think a friend of mine never finished CoAB because he kept losing a rather early battle against lots of clerics. My memories of that game are dim but because the party is at about the same level(s) as in Treasures it has similar challenges. Death Knights is definitely easier; there are only two somewhat bad battles and one, the Death Dragon, is almost pure luck, the final battle is not hard with resist fire because hasted fighters will take down the Death Knights rather quickly. And one usually has more magic users/clerics in the Krynn parties.
I found at least four battles/sequences in Treasures harder than anything in Death Knights: the Finale, the Beholder/Yeti fight, the pirate ship (apparently easy if one can handle the cannons, I failed there but by then I had enough mage power so it was not too bad...), probably the other big Yeti fight (because of fear/fleeing characters) and the Way Inn (but this was probably due to my weak mages because I did not have a single class mage). Maybe also a few earlier (around ice peak) encounters with a black robe bunch.

 

[Jo498]

I regret that I did not get the crazy boots (apparently casting dimension door or something similar). As there was some "souvenir Kraken" equipment in Yartar or one of the Eastern towns, I was sure that this was simply another mediocre joke...

 

[octavius]

I'm also quite sure that Dispel Magic worked for me vs. PCs beeing held on multiple occasions in TSF.

I didn't test Dispel Magic scientifically. But I know that when I tried it on Held characters it's didn't work.
I assumed it was because it worked differently/was bugged in Treasures. But maybe it only has a percent chance of working (though I think that was first introduced in the IE games), or there is a difference between targeting area or character directly.

Good saves due to optimized equipment*? Or maybe just good luck. Or both.

* TSF has Cloaks/Belts/Rings of Prot +2, all of them (should be) adding saving throw bonuses when using Bracers AC2. Not sure about the "crazy boots".

All my chars had Bracers + Belt, Cloak and Ring of Prot +2. But they were still held. According to my calculations they should have close to max saving throws with buffs + all the protective items.

I think a friend of mine never finished CoAB because he kept losing a rather early battle against lots of clerics.

Hmm... no Clerics in Tilverton, so the earliest such encounter must the a room in the caverns under Hap which has wall to wall Drow Clerics. That, and the similar room with Mages, is optional (you even get a chance to back out), and are pretty much impossible for a low level party, without using the Dust or abusing the weak AI.
If if was that battle, tell your friend that he doesn't have to kill every monster group.

 

[Jo498]

This was 20 years ago or more. I had not played that game back then and I don't even know if I remember correctly what he claimed then. Maybe it was the Moander cultists (not early, but not optional)? I don't remember myself, although I think I played CoAB twice through and it definitely is one of the harder games of the series.

I am still puzzled by "Dispel magic" failing you. I always thought that it had some possibility for failure but it usually worked well against hold/charm person/monster. Heck, to release held characters is the main point of that spell and a good reason to either have a second cleric (or high lvl Paladin) or sometimes even have a mage waste a slot with dispel magic...
As we discussed above there apparently are cases of paralysation by touch or poison, not the hold spells where dispel does not work in some games (or only works with low probability)

I doubt that I feel like it, but maybe I'll try to re-play the final Treasures battles tonight for research into hold/dispel...

 

[Jo498]

[Curse of the Azure Bonds]
On an unrelated subject, the magical items that can increase your stats seem kinda bugged. During the first part of the game, I found a girdle that increases Constitution, but when I gave it to one of my PCs, it ended up lowering her HP a lot. I also found a ioun stone increasing charisma, but the PC who equipped it saw his charisma rise to 100 (it stayed that way even after I removed the stone).

These are already found in the Tilverton sewers (the first/second dungeon of the game). The Girdle of the Dwarves gives +1 CON and, I guess 1 extra HP/lvl if equipped. If someone loses HP WITH the Girdle this is a bug.
That ioun stone set CHA of my mage to 50 and it stayed there even when unreadied! I wonder if anyone remembers if this can cause problems later in the game, because this is outside any reasonable range. Is it probably safer to just sell the stone?

After some trying around I managed to import 4 characters from PoR. Two observations: If one does not want to have set strength to 18/00 permanently one should remove/unready gauntlets of ogre power before removing a character from a PoR party.

And apparently HP for multiclass characters are calcultated differently in PoR and Curse: As 3/4 imported characters could train right away in Tilverton before any adventuring I did this. But my fighter/mage did not gain any HP! He had 58 HP at lvl 7/6 (which is probably close to maximum possible). I trained a mage lvl, could pick a 4th lvl spell but the HP stayed the same! I suspect there are some differences in rounding/constitution bonus or so for multiclass characters between the games and my character was above some cap.... I hope he will gain HP later on...

 

[Null Null]

I remember I had a F/M/T in COAB who was level 7/6/9 or so, and didn't gain any HP from training mage levels until he got to level 9; I think it has something to do with the way it handles XP for characters who are 'behind' due to the level-6 mage cap in Pool of Radiance.

 

[Jo498]

Could be. I imported fighter/thief (who had not enough XP to train right away), pure cleric, pure mage and the mentioned fighter/mage. The cleric and mage lost a bunch of XP because they would have had enough for lvl 8 or 9, but they could be normally trained for lvl 7 (gaining HP) and the XP were set to one point below lvl 8. (Which is o.k. in this case because new CoAB characters start with 25000 XP whereas those guys from PoR had around or more than 100k.

I do suspect that the calculation of HP for multi-class works slightly differently in each game. In Treasures my 7/9 F/M had only 59 HP and my 5/8/8 C/F/M half-elf had 56 whereas the similar character in PoR had 58 at lvl 5/6/6! And I am pretty sure that the dwarf F/T got sometimes more HP when training as a thief than should have been possible if the calculation worked the way I naively assumed. (OTOH I think especially triple class characters run the risk of gaining not enough HP unless you "save scum", because of rounding down or a similar effect

 

[Ruhfuss]

Re: the Dispel Magic stuff. I can vaguely remember that Dispel Magic failed me in the past now and then (not only with regard to Hold Person), although rarely, and not so especially in TSF, but some other Gold Box game. Maybe (isn't it fun how the inner workings of such old games still provide so many mysteries?) there are different factors coming into play?:

• Dispel Magic not having a 100% chance of success (which I consider highly likely)
  
• the target(s) having a stack of enchantments/magical effects on it
• direct targeting vs. area targeting (like with Hold Person getting a harder save if only single targeted)
• engine screw-ups when other protective spells are in effect (Mirror Image comes to mind)

Ah crap, just nuke 'em before they hold you.

 

[Ruhfuss]

Re: the broken character stats stuff. In TSF, I remember some should-be temporary boosts (Potion of Giant Strength and Potion of Spell Enhancement) beeing permanent. This can simply be fixed by deleting (make backups!) of the .EFX file(s) from the savegame as needed. Of course, all other temporary effects will be gone to, and some items might need to be re-readied.

The following I think isn't widely known, because it only comes with the later games; I think it's been there since POD. The temples have been added with an aptly named REPAIR function, which I guess was meant as a feature of convenience, like the FIX command. I noticed that using the REPAIR command, sometimes raises some characters HP. Permanently.

More recently, I noticed this in TSF with a Dwarf Fighter/Thief with 19 CON. I like to save scum to get max HP per level up (or I can't resist the compulsion to not do so); with 19 CON, a 2-class character should get 7.5 HP/level of fighter, which from experience always get rounded down to 7 HP. On one occasion, I noticed the tiny, but permanent increase of 1 HP when using REPAIR on a respective dwarven PC. I explained this to me as retroactively gaining 2*0.5 HP from past level-ups. The respective PC was never drained, which I'm mentioning because of the following.

Ages ago in POD, I had several PCs which had been drained in the course of the adventure once or several times. I usually fixed repaired took care of this manually by casting Restoration as needed (which the FIX command doesn't get straight AFAIR). Then on some occasion, I curiously tried REPAIR in a temple on a (from my perspective) fully healthy party, and was surprised by a notable increase of HP on some PCs (can't remember exact numbers, but a Paladin ~level 30 with 218 HP @ CON 18). I figured this was an after-effect of level draining.

Which lead me to dislike level draining even more so than before. I like optimized characters, but not broken characters. Until today, when one of my PCs (don't care enough for NPCs...) gets hit by a level draining monster, I immediately quit the game and reload. I KNOW that I don't NEED to use REPAIR, but on the other hand just KNOWING that a PC might be gimped...

 

[Jo498]

These are very curious effects. I never used repair because I think in some games the temple would cast raise dead, not resurrection and the character would lose constitution and HP (I think s/he will basically lose all the boni from the extra point of CON while advancing levels, so a lvl 6 PC will lose 6 HP after having been raised). I still do not understand how "repair" would achieve *more* HP in your case. Apparently the game keeps track of the advancement in HP.

The games I played recently were not so bad with draining (except Vaihingen Graveyard) and I am also fond of "power word reload" in such cases, so I do not remember the details. But I think in later games (like PoD where draining is hardly avoidable and one would have to do a lot of re-loads) Restoration restored exactly the old HP and XP. So one would usually not permanently lose HP.
In any case, I will watch what happens with my dwarf if I give him the girdle to achieve 20 CON. Apparently according to the D&D rules such a character should regenerate HP but it seems unclear if this was implemented in the GB games.

The persisting buffs from items or spells are only if one removes a charcter from the party, right?