Might & Magic Book 1
Not sure how I feel about this one, after playing Wizardry.
It starts out pretty amazing, where you feel like you have so many options as to what to do next. However, once you explore Sorpigal, the dungeon underneath Sorpigal, and the Sorpigal wilderness, you'll probably be around level 3-5 (depending on what kind of encounters you've lucked into, whether you've grinded levels, etc.).
My problem here is, once you reach this point, pretty much every area you have access to is extremely dangerous for a level 3-5 party. Exploring the wilderness seems to be the safest bet, but the encounters seem totally random- sometimes you'll get stuff you encountered back in the halls of Sorpigal, then suddenly you'll run into some super group of enemies that all have ranged/area attacks doing 5-15 damage to each character, each attack. There doesn't seem to be any clever way to get around any of this, and spells are pretty much useless at this point (1-5 damage against a single enemy??? lolz).
I spent a good 20 minutes rerolling, and I thought I had decent stats (15 or above in recommended stats for each class)... but my knight and paladin probably miss 75% of the time in combat. Pretty frustrating.
I figured you are just supposed to level up a bit by fighting fixed encounters, but 99% of the time I am encountering animals/undead which leave no gold when you defeat them, so I am sitting here earning experience and that's about it.
Someone had recommended to run through the fixed encounters in the Sorpigal jail to accumulate gold and magic items, but I am just encountering animals/slimes/undead constantly. Dunno what's going on.
[Edit] Forgot the other annoying thing. The only way to get gold or magic items at all is to open chests/bags, and even if you are using your Robber, there's a very high chance you'll trip the trap—which also has a high chance of poisoning you, which is 25 gold per character to cure. When you are struggling to earn even 100 FUCKING GOLD PIECES (?!?!??!!) that is like 5-10 minutes of encounters down the drain.
[Edit 2] Okay, I just spent 15 mins running easy fixed encounters in Sorpigal to get enough gold to get half my party to level 5. The other half are the "advanced" classes that require more experience, so I'll probably get them up to level 5 tomorrow, and then see from there if I can actually go anywhere without immediately getting wiped.