Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[octavius]

It's still an arbitrary rule. I can't see any game balancing reasons.

It also makes typical Mage equipment like Bracers and Elfin Chain more valuable for a Human Fighter/Mage than for the other spell casters mentioned, which strikes me as odd.

 

[Cael]

It's still an arbitrary rule. I can't see any game balancing reasons.

It also makes typical Mage equipment like Bracers and Elfin Chain more valuable for a Human Fighter/Mage than for the other spell casters mentioned, which strikes me as odd.

It is not a game balance thing. It is a historical artifact.

Plus not allowing rangers to cast mage spells in armour would mean they are locked out of their own ability for no reason. In 2nd Ed, they got rid of the mage spells altogether, which was a good thing, IMO.

 

[DavidBVal]

Okay I think I have a plan for POR then.

1 - Elf Fighter / MU
2 - Elf Fighter / MU
3 - Hal-Elf Fighter / Cleric / MU
4 - Human Cleric
5 - Human MU
6 - Elf Fighter / MU / Thief

Once I reach Azure Bonds I'll ditch characters 1-3 and replace them with Paladins/Rangers to maybe dual class them. I might be missing a secondary healer at that point though... maybe I could dual char 5 to cleric when I feel char 6 can be the primary party MU.

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

Okay I think I have a plan for POR then.

1 - Elf Fighter / MU
2 - Elf Fighter / MU
3 - Hal-Elf Fighter / Cleric / MU
4 - Human Cleric
5 - Human MU
6 - Elf Fighter / MU / Thief

Once I reach Azure Bonds I'll ditch characters 1-3 and replace them with Paladins/Rangers to maybe dual class them. I might be missing a secondary healer at that point though... maybe I could dual char 5 to cleric when I feel char 6 can be the primary party MU.

It all depends on how far in the series you want to go. Characters 1,2,3 and 6 will start becoming redundant by Silver Blades due to level limit rubbish. Only a Thief of any race can continue leveling, otherwise it is Human single class characters all the way.

 

[DavidBVal]

Self-correction: an elf MU (capped at L11)can never cast level 6 spells, only level 5. Damn hiccup in the table.

 

[Cael]

Okay I think I have a plan for POR then.

1 - Elf Fighter / MU
2 - Elf Fighter / MU
3 - Hal-Elf Fighter / Cleric / MU
4 - Human Cleric
5 - Human MU
6 - Elf Fighter / MU / Thief

Once I reach Azure Bonds I'll ditch characters 1-3 and replace them with Paladins/Rangers to maybe dual class them. I might be missing a secondary healer at that point though... maybe I could dual char 5 to cleric when I feel char 6 can be the primary party MU.

A standard party I roll with in the two Savage Frontier games is:
Human Paladin
Human Ranger x3
Elf F/M
Human Cleric

The inability for anyone other than humans to be effective clerics is pretty rage inducing, though.

 

[Null Null]

Agreed, the class/race rules make no sense and have a lot to do with Gygax's resentment of races from Tolkien. Why can't elves be rangers? They live in the woods according to all the lore. Why can nobody except humans be effective clerics? What the f*** are gnomes good for? There's a reason the level limits were revised upward in 2nd ed and eventually removed in 3rd.

1 - Elf Fighter / MU
2 - Elf Fighter / MU
3 - Hal-Elf Fighter / Cleric / MU
4 - Human Cleric
5 - Human MU
6 - Elf Fighter / MU / Thief

Once I reach Azure Bonds I'll ditch characters 1-3 and replace them with Paladins/Rangers to maybe dual class them. I might be missing a secondary healer at that point though... maybe I could dual char 5 to cleric when I feel char 6 can be the primary party MU.

1. Due to Party Strength calculations (see Stephen S. Lee's FAQ on GameFAQs), you'll be slogging through lots of huge combats for a long time before you can fireball them. This may make the game drag for you. If you like grinding, go for it.
2. When dual-classing, you (almost) always dual the higher-HP class to the lower-HP class, not vice versa. The reason is that the character retains his old HP but doesn't gain any new HP until the old class is surpassed. A 5th-level mage who duals to cleric will still have fewer HP when he reaches 6th level than a 6th level cleric created as a cleric would. The classic 9th level ranger who duals to mage will, upon attaining 10th level as a mage, not only be able to cast spells in armor, but have 10d8 HP (likely with a bigger CON bonus, and remember rangers get 2 HD at level 1) rather than 10d4.

On the other hand...
1. Tossing multiclass characters when you get to Curse is a time-honored way of dealing with level limits.
2. Ranger->mages are pretty powerful, as others have said here--you can cast spells in armor. If you're going to do it in Curse or Secret, dual at 9th Ranger, the earliest you can switch and still get mage spells. If you're waiting till Pools, do it at 15th to max out your attacks.
3. The elf FMT can be brought to Pools of Darkness--he serves well enough as a thief when necessary, but still can use fighter armor, and even an 11th level mage can cast Haste, Hold Monster, and Fire Shield himself and walk into combat. Make sure that (a) he is a he (females have lower Strength and hence lower fighter limits) and (b) he has maxed-out STR and INT or your level limits will be even lower (another bit of Gygax peevishness).

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Bah. Never included the original Never Winter Knights and that's an odd play solo on dosbox. I doubt I'd ever grt through all the FRUA modules. It was far more popular than BTCS; ACS was more popular than BTCS.

 

[Cael]

Agreed, the class/race rules make no sense and have a lot to do with Gygax's resentment of races from Tolkien. Why can't elves be rangers? They live in the woods according to all the lore. Why can nobody except humans be effective clerics? What the f*** are gnomes good for? There's a reason the level limits were revised upward in 2nd ed and eventually removed in 3rd.

I think Gygax tried to be "true" to Tolkien, actually. In Middle Earth, the Rangers of the North, which the original DnD Rangers were based on (hence the only Good alignment requirement) before Driz'zt came along, were not elves but Dunedain, which were really half-elves. Only full humans were crazy enough to have priest-like figures in Tolkien's works, but, of course, the lore of Middle Earth is far different than what DnD is about.

Gygax's failure, really, was that he was too worshipful of Tolkien's works, not the other way around.

 

[DavidBVal]

I think you guys are reading too much into the race level caps. It's not that Gygax hated elves, I think it was the idea of balancing things out back then, with disputable choices but I think it was the motivation.

Just to go back in context for a moment: Strahd Von Zarovich was (among other things) a 10th level mage. He also had a THAC0 of 10 and around 70hp. Other than his unique powers, he's not that far from a capped Elf Fighter/Magic-User (level 7/11).

A multiclassed with the racial limitations roughly gets the same 20 level-ups a human single-class gets, simple as that. Of course you reach that cap much sooner than a level 20 character and never ever reach the high level spells, but in AD&D the levels about 13 or so were mostly for NPC bosses, weren't them? I believe most of the game design and polishing assumed characters below level 13 anyways, so class caps between 7-11 were not significant. Cleric however is particularly low.

 

[Cael]

I think you guys are reading too much into the race level caps. It's not that Gygax hated elves, I think it was the idea of balancing things out back then, with disputable choices but I think it was the motivation.

Just to go back in context for a moment: Strahd Von Zarovich was (among other things) a 10th level mage. He also had a THAC0 of 10 and around 70hp. Other than his unique powers, he's not that far from a capped Elf Fighter/Magic-User (level 7/11).

A multiclassed with the racial limitations roughly gets the same 20 level-ups a human single-class gets, simple as that. Of course you reach that cap much sooner than a level 20 character and never ever reach the high level spells, but in AD&D the levels about 13 or so were mostly for NPC bosses, weren't them? I believe most of the game design and polishing assumed characters below level 13 anyways, so class caps between 7-11 were not significant. Cleric however is particularly low.

In 1st Ed, over 10th level was pretty much Epic tier.

Remember that Raistlin was level 29 and considered the most powerful mage ever and could take out gods.

 

[Null Null]

Y'all are right about the level inflation over the years--it's a pretty natural progression as people keep going for more and more powerful characters. They were principally selling to teenage boys after all.

Fzoul Chembryl, the head of the Church of Bane in Zhentil Keep was 13th level in 1st ed, 15th level in 2nd ed, a 17th level cleric/2nd level hierophant in 3rd ed, and finally became a demigod in 4th. Manshoon, the evil wizard who ran the Zhentarim in the first few editions, went from 16th (1st) to 19th (2nd) to 20th/5th level archmage (3rd); I don't have his stats in 4th (I think he was split up between the clones) but in 5th they seem to have brought him down to 13th. Elminster, who was kind of the gold standard for overpowerful wizard (and Ed Greenwood's Gary Sue), was 26th in 1st ed, 29th in 2nd ed, 24th wizard/5th archmage/3rd cleric/2nd rogue/1st fighter (!) in 3rd, and got knocked down to 19th level controller in 4th. (They have stats for him in 5th?)

Small nitpick: Raistlin was 20th level in 1st ed. This is supposed to reflect his breaking normal boundaries, as characters in Krynn are supposed to get kicked out of the game world at 18th level. (This was completely ignored in Dark Queen of Krynn, except perhaps for Knights of the Crown and Sword being capped at 18.) He had a lousy 44 hp and a 17 INT (odd for a character who's supposed to be learning spells others can't understand); I do wonder how he took on the gods. I was never able to find the stats for him in 2nd ed--Dragonlance did this weird thing where they went to a card-based system (shortly before the company went out of business; this was when Lorraine Williams was making them churn out Buck Rogers games nobody wanted so she could use the license she inherited). In 3rd, he's a... 7th wizard/7th black robe wizard/8th loremaster/5th archmage. His Int has reached a more suitably superhuman 22, and he gets 10th level spells, so it's a little more credible. They don't seem to have used Dragonlance much after 3rd ed.

 

[octavius]

IIRC you could be up to lvl 36 in the original D&D.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Shit DQK & POD you could get to lvl 40. So they make Raistlin look like a punk ass bitch.

Bloodstone throne up to lvl 100. FEEL THE POWER!!! Munchkin Power!

 

[Cael]

Interesting. I recall seeing him as level 29 in one of the very old books (this is about 25 years ago, IIRC). In the same books, the gods themselves were basically level 40 characters with special powers.

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

I remember playing the odd game of first edition (and 2nd) back in the day, and to be honest, our characters rarely topped level 6-8 before they were taken out in some asinine plot, or a dragon poking its head through a door and blasting a character (after they poked fun at the DM one too many times...). We rarely thought of 'what lay beyond' back then, because surviving the monsters, traps and inevitable squabbles between the players was quite rare. New DnD seems to be a level fest, where back in the early editions a level was a feat in itself (and then you had to scrape up the coin to pay for it, and get to a trainer. Fun times.)

They should have just dropped the level limits for the DnD computer games, or better yet, made the experience points needed higher depending on the advantages of each race. After all, they didn't include the 10' pole in the shops. Or the tinderbox...

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

You talking whitebox/woodgrain times of just a few classes?

CHARACTERS:
There are three (3) main classes of characters:
Fighting-Men
Magic-Users
Clerics

Fighting-Men includes the characters of elves and dwarves and even halflings.

Magic-Users includes only men and elves.

Clerics are limited to men only. All non-human players are restricted in some aspects and gifted in others. This will be dealt with in the paragraphs pertaining to each non-human type.

I had played in games where the DM didn't allow demihumans nor clerics.

 

[Cael]

You talking whitebox/woodgrain times of just a few classes?

CHARACTERS:
There are three (3) main classes of characters:
Fighting-Men
Magic-Users
Clerics

Fighting-Men includes the characters of elves and dwarves and even halflings.

Magic-Users includes only men and elves.

Clerics are limited to men only. All non-human players are restricted in some aspects and gifted in others. This will be dealt with in the paragraphs pertaining to each non-human type.

I had played in games where the DM didn't allow demihumans nor clerics.

Heh. I was in one where the DM refused to allow magical healing. Forget about Clerics. ANYONE with a healing ability? Well, it doesn't work any more. He had no problem with arcane magic, though. His reason? HP going up and down like a yo-yo is stupid and so it must not happen. This is a 3.5 game, so you can guess how well that game went.

 

[Elex]

D&D was born as humancentric: things like level progression make sense on human lifespawn races, not much on elves and dwarfs “you start as a 150 year old wizard” first edition logic of givin them a class have a point.

the human race was the one fitting for the adventurer life: die fast get powerfull fast get rich fast, get a castle etc etc...

5e have deflated levels and very few campaign go beyond level 13-14 where adventurers already face world ending menaces.

 

[NJClaw]

You talking whitebox/woodgrain times of just a few classes?

CHARACTERS:
There are three (3) main classes of characters:
Fighting-Men
Magic-Users
Clerics

Fighting-Men includes the characters of elves and dwarves and even halflings.

Magic-Users includes only men and elves.

Clerics are limited to men only. All non-human players are restricted in some aspects and gifted in others. This will be dealt with in the paragraphs pertaining to each non-human type.

I had played in games where the DM didn't allow demihumans nor clerics.

Heh. I was in one where the DM refused to allow magical healing. Forget about Clerics. ANYONE with a healing ability? Well, it doesn't work any more. He had no problem with arcane magic, though. His reason? HP going up and down like a yo-yo is stupid and so it must not happen. This is a 3.5 game, so you can guess how well that game went.

Better than usual because healing is useless?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Hmmm no lvl 1000 like my euo pd characters. Ahhhhhhb!!!!

 

[Cael]

You talking whitebox/woodgrain times of just a few classes?

CHARACTERS:
There are three (3) main classes of characters:
Fighting-Men
Magic-Users
Clerics

Fighting-Men includes the characters of elves and dwarves and even halflings.

Magic-Users includes only men and elves.

Clerics are limited to men only. All non-human players are restricted in some aspects and gifted in others. This will be dealt with in the paragraphs pertaining to each non-human type.

I had played in games where the DM didn't allow demihumans nor clerics.

Heh. I was in one where the DM refused to allow magical healing. Forget about Clerics. ANYONE with a healing ability? Well, it doesn't work any more. He had no problem with arcane magic, though. His reason? HP going up and down like a yo-yo is stupid and so it must not happen. This is a 3.5 game, so you can guess how well that game went.

Better than usual because healing is useless?

Healing during a fight is wasteful. Healing afterwards? Ah well, at least it didn't last long.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

But people love the FIX option esp when it rememorizes all spells. (Way back it was your spells memorized 1x a day i think... talk about 1 pump chump MUs)

"well, my mana is spewed out.. i need a rest. ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz....."

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

IIRC you could be up to lvl 36 in the original D&D.

The BECMI Mentzer version of Dungeons & Dragons had rules for levels up to 36, by which point player-characters were expected to quest for immortality, detailed in the "Black Box" Master Set, and then transfer into the "Gold Box" Immortals Set, which was almost a different game from D&D (the 1992 Wrath of the Immortals box set replaced the Gold Box rules with something closer to D&D). Moldvay/Cook 1981 B/X D&D had similarly intended to include a Companion Set covering levels from 15-36, but this was never published.

I don't think original D&D, Holmes D&D, or AD&D 1st edition specified any upper level limit for human characters, but it was always intended that player-characters, after reaching name level, would move into dominion rulership and eventually retire from adventuring. Even adventure module Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits, where the player-characters confronted Lolth herself, was intended for character levels 10-14.

 

[DavidBVal]

Alfter beating Pool of Radiance decades later, the feeling has been wonderful. What a magnificent RPG, every bit as good as I remembered it.

PoR is more than a mere game to me. I was around 14 when I began playing it, and even "multiplayed" it with friends; we'd each roll characters and played it like if it was an adventure, handling each of our chars in combats and voting or arguing to split the loot or deciding where to go. We made challenges like, let's go to the Graveyard before level 5 or stuff like that, or we tried to go early for some other uber-reward the game offers (the lizardman +2 shields or the buccaneers insane loot are some examples). We had a pirated version and only knew a few of the passwords, so we often had to wait a very long time even to open the game (each try was like 10 minutes of "Loading... Please Wait", or so it is in my memory). Because of this, for me there will never be a cRPG like Pool of Radiance, ever. It's just a part of me, so it's not easy to find wrong things in the game.

Clearly Pool of Radiance belongs to the "Tier 0" of the RPG ranking, the handful of games that were a milestone in cRPG development and inspired both players and creators forever. From a historical perspective, it is groundbreaking: full party, tactical combat, complex rulesystem, non-linear exploration, open world. Combines the 1st person dungeon crawling from Wizardry or M&M with Ultima-style TB combat, but with the AD&D system implemented with an accuracy that had never been seen before. The fact it is just the first title in a multi-saga Gold Box family only makes it a greater achievement. The adventure itself is just brilliant, gives great feeling of progress and invites to explore.

Still the game is not perfect. The mid to end game progression feels boring, it really needed level 4 spells. And the events and little details in dungeons become very sparse in most areas. Of course it also shows the engine is new, because some shortcuts and quality of life to be introduced in later Gold Box games is sorely missed. Still, it is just too good. Too damn good.