Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Jo498]

Yeah, but there is also the non-power-gamer perspective.
This perspective says that dualling is a hazzle (because one has to build up those characters often with some grinding because one needs to stay reasonably close to a training hall etc.) and that for e.g. Treasures or Curse a party like Paladin, Ranger, Cleric, Mage, dwarven fighter/thief, Elf Fighter/mage/thief is sufficient to win the game. This also holds for Secret and Pools although in those cases I admit that the endgame becomes harder and some dual-classing might be in order.

 

[Dorateen]

Pool of Radiance back in 1988, and those awesome resting restrictions. IIRC, that entire first area had just a tiny room that you had to hold up in because it was the only place you could rest and gain health/recharge spells. They sure don't make games like that today, at least not casually.

While it's certainly not a game of today, Pools of Darkness offers many maps where the player has to find a safe place to rest, and may not even try to rest anywhere else.

Resting restricted to a specific spot, designated or to be discovered, is the best method from what I've experienced. A wandering monster system is certainly more intricate and I respect authors who take the time to implement such. But I still recall the desperation going through the Gnome citadel in Dark Queen of Krynn, and thanks be to Reorx finding a place to rest at last. There is an old school charm in seeking out broom closets and other out of the way tiles in a dungeon, in order to hunker down and recuperate.

 

[Joonas]

You can't fight Manshoon in Pools of Darkness but did you know that the game data has stats and a combat icon for him?

He needs to be put in the game so I made a small hack to replace the monsters in the boss fight against Kalistes with Manshoon clones.

Here's an article with some screenshots:
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/gbc/manshoon.html

Also has the mod file if you really want to try it but he's just mostly spamming delayed blast fireballs.

 

[Ruhfuss]

Almost 4 more months until I grow a fist and can properly .

 

[Null Null]

You can't fight Manshoon in Pools of Darkness but did you know that the game data has stats and a combat icon for him?

He needs to be put in the game so I made a small hack to replace the monsters in the boss fight against Kalistes with Manshoon clones.

Here's an article with some screenshots:
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/gbc/manshoon.html

Also has the mod file if you really want to try it but he's just mostly spamming delayed blast fireballs.

Heehee...after 23 years I get my chance. I remember going through the list of monsters (if you open MON1CHA.DAX up as a test file it looks like MANSHOON CULTIST) and wondering why I never ran into any Manshoon Cultists.

It's sort of poignant because you spend so much time in and out of Zhentil Keep in the Pools series, and you get to banish Soth and Kitiara in DKK, but he gets away in PoD. He was also mentioned in the journal entries as an overarching villain in the Savage Frontier series (he criticizes Vaalgamon for failing at a few points) so he would have been a good final villain for the unproduced Savage Frontier Treasures sequel (which I am thinking of making in FRUA as a final project). I suspect between DKK and PoD TSR had a chat with the designers about killing off their intellectual property.

Hey, he's got clones, but you could still have a nice climactic fight. You would also get to storm the Hosttower and kill the High Captains of Luskan and the kraken in the Kraken Society. You know, all the guys they set up as ongoing villains in the first two games.

 

[Jo498]

Does anyone know if they had planned the game differently first with a larger role for Manshoon?
And is the summoned "Gelt" with the painful gaze a known AD&D creature?

 

[octavius]

Does anyone know if they had planned the game differently first with a larger role for Manshoon?

I guess they did, but TRS didn't allow them to kill off Manshoon.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

So I guess the optimum way to play Gold Box games & FRUA would be in a window so you can use the external mapping utility. I fired up some of the FRUA modules to see if they still play okay, and was pleasantly surprised to hear some of the MIDI music in these modules sounding like a frickin' 50 piece orchestra Then I realized I had the Timbres of Heaven soundfont installed using BASSMIDI replacing Microsoft's GM under Windows 7. Btw, what cpu cycles do you use guys use under DOSBOX with Gold Box games? The default 3000 cycles seems a tad fast.

 

[Ruhfuss]

I guess they did, but TRS didn't allow them to kill off Manshoon.

This "intellectual property" stuff can be so braindead.

You offer your customers a setting to play a role in a game with heavy combat background. Then you kind of violate the players' freedom by adding more and more stuff to the setting, like big bad evil NPCs with the usual attitude problems. And then you wonder if said players want to take their own PCs, which they developed under the rule set you sold them, on a quest to teach your IP-NPCs a lesson in humility. No no no, that can't be good. Great move to bully your customers into a position of impotence in a fucking GAME that they originally started to play to escape from some of this reality-related shit in the first place.

Also one has to wonder who's the one with the escapist attitude here. The players, who might find it fun to have an interactive experience where they can kick some arse against the big established villains, or the IP holders, who are concerned that players might become "confused" if they can read about an NPC in a static novel - all hail the holy grail of canon! - while also risking possible player "confusion" by offering counter-canon stuff to do in interactive games.

The horror. For both sides.

Then of course we all know the truth, especially that no one never ever would consider to bitch on a forum about novels giving a crap about canon that was established by said one's own gameplay decisions.

 

[octavius]

Btw, what cpu cycles do you use guys use under DOSBOX with Gold Box games? The default 3000 cycles seems a tad fast.

How is it too fast? If it's too low the flavour text takes too long to appear on the screen.
The speed of the combat text can be adjusted in-game.

 

[Dorateen]

And is the summoned "Gelt" with the painful gaze a known AD&D creature?

The Gelt is mentioned as being invisible, right? Which leaves a lot to the imagination. For no particular reason, I always envisioned the creature as a Grell.

 

[Null Null]

Searches for 'gelt' and Dungeons and Dragons (it's hard to exclude the old German word for money or the Chanukah coins) mostly seem to turn up PoD. Probably they wanted a chance to make Traned useful and/or give some of the noncombat spells some use.

 

[Null Null]

I guess they did, but TRS didn't allow them to kill off Manshoon.

This "intellectual property" stuff can be so braindead.

You offer your customers a setting to play a role in a game with heavy combat background. Then you kind of violate the players' freedom by adding more and more stuff to the setting, like big bad evil NPCs with the usual attitude problems. And then you wonder if said players want to take their own PCs, which they developed under the rule set you sold them, on a quest to teach your IP-NPCs a lesson in humility. No no no, that can't be good. Great move to bully your customers into a position of impotence in a fucking GAME that they originally started to play to escape from some of this reality-related shit in the first place.

Also one has to wonder who's the one with the escapist attitude here. The players, who might find it fun to have an interactive experience where they can kick some arse against the big established villains, or the IP holders, who are concerned that players might become "confused" if they can read about an NPC in a static novel - all hail the holy grail of canon! - while also risking possible player "confusion" by offering counter-canon stuff to do in interactive games.

The horror. For both sides.

Then of course we all know the truth, especially that no one never ever would consider to bitch on a forum about novels giving a crap about canon that was established by said one's own gameplay decisions.

I agree killing a few biggies off in a video game should be no biggie, but I think TSR was still in their era of aggressively defending their copyright and going after people publishing D&D netbooks on Usenet. Nowadays everyone does fanfiction and it's no big deal (J.K. Rowling doesn't worry about Harry Potter's image just because someone writes a BDSM Harry/Draco slashfic), but companies were still adjusting to this stuff.

There was definitely a shift, though...

Spoiler

Dexam, who we've never heard of, kills Fzoul Chembryl in Curse, Lord Soth and Kitiaria get banished in DKK, but in PoD Manshoon gets away, and in DQK Trandamere gets away. So something must have happened between DKK and PoD.

 

[Hitoshura]

Oh boy that stats management is buggy in Curse. My imported Cleric from Pool with Gauntlets of Ogre Power now have 18 (00) STR and this looks permanent. While that bug is a net positive for me, my 18 CON Level 8 Fighter equipped the Girdle of Dwarven Constitution (or something of that nature) which makes him CON 19. Except... he lost about 32 HP doing so (8 * 4... did I lose my bonus HP?). I saved with this (didn't notice the HP drop) sadly but said to myself, bah, next time the character will level up, the game will realize the mistake and give me all my bonus HP back... which of course didn't happen...

In the same line of stupid bugs, equipping an Ioun on the same Fighter increases his STR to 100. It's really written that, not 18 (100). Looks like that at 100 STR, you don't get any bonus to THAC0 or damage. Thankfully I'm getting "stats savvy" and do review a lot of stuff before saving if I mess around with stats modifying equipment.

Is there a list of such bugs somewhere and how to avoid them before I screw myself up?

 

[octavius]

Imported characters are more prone to being bugged by stat changing items, like Ioun Stones and Girdle of the Dwarves. Haven't experienced problems with the Gauntlets of Dexterity.
Always remove such items before transfering characters.
Save before equipping such items. Then equip and unequip and check if stats have changed.
If characater has been bugged, fix with Gold Box Companion.

 

[Jo498]

It's terrrible. I mentioned it further above in the thread when I played Curse last fall. The safest thing is to use the stats-enhancing items only with characters created in Curse, not with imports, i.e. give the girdle to a paladin or ranger. (The girdle of the dwarves has even worse effects so it was not possible for me to test whether a CON 20 dwarf regenerates HP because it messed up his stats completely.)
To my recollection this bug occurs only in Curse (maybe some kind of curse... )

 

[Ruhfuss]

A quick update on my Pools campaign. I wasn't in the mood of playing that much in the last days, therefore this will be fairly brief.

After having dealt with Thorne and Tanetal, the party's Magic-Users finally felt confident enough in their ability to overcome Drow magic resistance, so the party entered Zhentil Keep. Starting directly at the front gate when being confronted by some smug Drow guards, the party decided to throw subtlety to the wind and entered rampage mode instead. In the city part, at every encounter with Drow, the party immediately attacked. The Drow barely ever survived the first round of combat. Only after returning from Manshoon's tower, realizing that the guard barracks got restocked with new mooks, they decided that again raising a noisy alarm wasn't worth the effort. The party was running low on ear plugs.

Speaking of Manshoon's tower, of course they took the front door approach, killing - or blinding - every form of resistance whenever possible. When they encountered Manshoon at the top level of his short tower, they were very disappointed that they didn't get a chance to tell Manshoon that his tower was so, so much shorter compared to the nice red one down in the south-eastern forest. But then again, Manshoon's tower, while still only of diminutive stature, at least was still standing.

Manshoon tried some lame ass magic mumbo jumbo to get rid of the party, which resulted in the summoning of even more unwanted company to his tower. Said additional summoned unwanted company seemed to be inspired by the party's actions down in the city, and started its own rampage, which caused Manshoon's tower to decline to even shorter proportions.

The cowardly Manshoon couldn't take all that discomfort that the attack on the symbol of his magical manhood was causing to him, and cheated the party of the ACHIEVEMENT of ridding the Realms of a well known villain by casting Power Word: Save Intellectual Property.

Being in a fairly bad mood after all of this nonsene, the party remembered that there was a passage that's supposed to lead them down to where more Drow are waiting as potential stress relief.

 

[Null Null]

One of the things that game did well was a vaguely realistic post-apocalyptic Realms story. You find embassies from the other power groups in every major area and local warlords like Manshoon are willing to sell out their own people to curry favor.

 

[Jo498]

In my copy of PoD 1.10 for PC (downloaded from somewhere) the ring of electrical immunity does not work (as someone said above). It is not shown in the "display" menu and it does not help against dragon's breath or a lightning spell. I am quite sure that it worked in the Amiga version and pretty sure that it worked in the Macintosh version.

 

[Jaesun]

 

[Mustawd]

murmurs*

 

[Ruhfuss]

In my copy of PoD 1.10 for PC (downloaded from somewhere) the ring of electrical immunity does not work (as someone said above). It is not shown in the "display" menu and it does not help against dragon's breath or a lightning spell. I am quite sure that it worked in the Amiga version and pretty sure that it worked in the Macintosh version.

Now you made me record and upload a video to the internet. Grats, you popped a cherry.

Let's see if this works.


EDIT: Direct links:
https://vid.me/3Bgv
https://sendvid.com/3mrm1yoj

 

[Jo498]

thanks, this is fairly incredible.
I can only re-state that the ring never showed up in in the display menu of my version but I first thought it worked anyway. But then last night I had to play a few Dragon fights in the Aerie about three times (first time went incredibly smooth but then a character was killed in a later fight without me having saved the game - these fights are extremely dependent on initiative and whether the dragons decide to cast shield or breath on someone, probably invisibility would help) and I am positive that the cleric was hit both by a Blue dragon's breath as well by a lightning spell (the dragons love to cast them despite lower damage than breathing)!

I am not sure I can do videos but I could try screenshots in a few days when I have more time.
This is really odd. I just did another little try with casting my own lightning (once using a wand as well) on the character. The character is damaged by lightning if she has the ring equipped before battle. If I unequip-equip the ring WITHIN the battle the ring protects (against friendly fire). 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.)

But I assume this might be the explanation. One has to equip the ring after the battle starts (which sucks but is better than nothing).

 

[Jo498]

I was hasty. It seems even more complicated. The problem seems to be having two rings equipped. If she has the ring of protection from evil sometimes only this effect is shown unless I equip/unequip the electricity ring as well. But know I can make the electrical immunity show up in the display as well. regardless of the other ring. And it does not seem to matter when equip/unequip takes place. But I swear that it did not work before. So if for whatever reason immunity is not displayed equip/unequip and it will eventually work. Apparently there is some problem if the ring is equipped after another ring/item with a similar effect.
So it DOES work, I guess, but one has to be really careful about having other items equipped.

 

[Ruhfuss]

It seems even more complicated.

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. Which could be investigated further by comparing the respective inventory files (the THG ones, I guess).

Then I remembered that either during Secret (more likely; wasn't able to reproduce this for Pools by testing), or the very early parts of Pools, I once had Dispel Magic remove spell effects granted by items and/or class. And that 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.

Kind of reminds me of a playthrough of BG2 way back, when my Monk protagonist permanently lost his increased movement speed during the Underdark part. Fucking beholders.

SSI clearly was ahead of the times, it seems...

My vague conclusion is that something is fucked up in the way the Pools engine handles spell(-like) effects on characters caused by events unknown to me, which I guess I was lucky to circumvent in my current campaign.

Addendum: What may look like an embedded screenshot in my last posting is in fact an embedded video, that for whatever reason lacks a play button. With Firefox, video playback can be started from the context menu by right-clicking the thumbnail.