Disciples of Steel, Iron, and Leather

I can no longer see a medusa without thinking about this SMBC comic.

    

An equipment system is so essential to my concept of what constitutes a "role-playing game" that I made it one of my three core rules. Equipping my characters is one of the things that I like most about RPGs. There's nothing quite like the thrill of starting a game like Oblivion clad in rags and finding your first bit of leather armor, then your first set of boots, then your first helm; nothing quite like dropping the rusty iron dagger you started with for an iron axe, and then capping the first dungeon with--like Excalibur thrust from the lake--a steel short sword.

Many hours later, when you upgrade your ebony blade that does 35 points of fire damage for an ebony blade that does 38 points of fire damage, it's not quite the same thrill. As hackneyed as the trope is, I almost like it when a game finds an excuse, mid-game, to strip you of your hard-won equipment and force you to start over like a rank amateur. It's the only way to revive that initial thrill.
   

The party picks through enemy equipment after a battle.

   

My enjoyment of equipment is such that it causes me to slightly prefer multi-character games, since you get 6 times (or, in the case of Disciples of Steel, 8 times) the number of people to outfit with helms, boots, and belts. And I particularly like games that give you lots of slots for equipping. I fondly think of Might & Magic VI through VIII, where every character could equip a helm or crown, a suit of armor, boots, a belt, an amulet, a melee weapon, a missile weapon, a shield, and up to ten rings. In the first 6 hours of the game, practically every chest gives you something new to make your team more powerful. Morrowind, in splitting armor into about a dozen individual pieces, ameliorated some of the pain associated with a single-character game.

With these preferences in mind, Disciples of Steel is definitely my kind of game. There don't seem to be any rings, belts, or amulets, but every character gets different pieces of armor to wear on the head, body, arms, and legs in addition to weapons and shields. That's 32 armor slots for the party. Almost every combat produces a list of loot at least worth looking through.
  

My ranger's current equipment. Note that his max armor is 67 and that all his body parts have exactly that. The red indicates that his armor is better than his skill. I could equip him with worse stuff and have the same protection. I think he'll grow into it, though.

  
The selection of armor available in Disciples is pretty standard (at least so far) among high fantasy games, progressing in protective value from things made of cloth to those made of leather, studded leather, ring, scale, chain, and plate in that order. But a game as statistically-oriented as this one has a few curve balls to throw at you.

• There is no total armor class but rather an individual armor class (and hit point total) for each body part. As attacks pierce armor, they deduct from the hit point total of the underlying body part.

• Each item has a "quality" rating, from "pitiful" to "perfection" that affects its statistics independent of its type or damage level. You have to pay attention to this, because a +5 item that's "adequate" is worse than a regular item that's "good."

     

These "shoddy" leather pants provide worse protection than better-quality pants of lesser material.

    

• The heavier the item, the greater the chance that it will screw up your chances of hiding or casting a spell.

• No matter how good the armor, the character might not be able to make full use of its protective value. The character's "armor" skill determines how effectively he's able to use a piece of armor. If you put a suit of plate on a character with 30 armor skill, it won't be more effective than a cloth tunic.

• If the armor has a + (plus) value, it not only increases the maximum protection but it effectively increases the armor skill of the character wearing it.

• Weapons and armor get damaged in combat and must occasionally be repaired. Items you loot from the battlefield come pretty dinged up already.

For weapons the considerations are more confusing, and again the manual is pretty bad about explaining what's happening. The key statistic associated with weapons is the "base hit," but I'm not sure if that governs accuracy, damage, or both. Whatever the case, the character's "base hit" increases with the quality of the weapon and his skill in that weapon type. As with armor, you can waste a good weapon on a character with insufficient skill to wield it. Someone with an "edged" skill of, say, 40 won't be able to do anything with a long sword +10 that he couldn't do with a regular short sword. He might actually do worse.

For a while, I figured there were no wands, potions, or scrolls in the game, but in some of the more recent dungeons, I've been encountering potions, so perhaps the other items eventually appear, too.
    

I'm not reloading often, but I do occasionally have to reload. This was just gruesome.

    
I've made lots of progress on quests since the last post. It didn't start out well--I had to slink away from the orc outpost north of Cartha, where I had been trying to find out what happened to some emissaries to Pallasade. I ran into a fixed battle that I just couldn't conquer no matter what I did.

I made my way to the south coast, intending to curve back around to my origin point in Farnus. My final stop was at DeMata, described by the manual as the "youngest of the 8 true lordships within Lanathor," having won its independence from Farnus 45 years prior. Once ruled by Lord Antonio DeMata, the country's throne fell to his daughter, Valencia DeMata, upon his death. Although she took the throne when she was only 16, "she has become as strong a ruler as her father was." The description caps by saying, "she often uses her womanhood to her best advantage."

I wonder what the manual means by that.

    
Lady DeMata gave me a series of quests that were easy enough that it feels like I should have started here instead of several miles up the coast by Farnus. The first was to kill an outlaw in the nearby woods named Serius Teld. He was holed up in an outpost with a bunch of thieves and centaurs.

I usually think of centaurs as good guys.

    
The battle against Teld and a host of thieves was a lot of fun for a couple of reasons. First, the game started Teld himself in a room to the north of the main battlefield. As soon as I saw the positioning, I had my rogue lock the door to the room. Teld had no choice but to pass each turn uselessly as I mopped up his forces. Then, I unlocked the door, "Power Word: Stunned" him, and killed him in a few rounds.

The mopping up part was fun, too. I tested out my mage's newly-acquired "Fireball" spell. It performs much as in the Gold Box games, doing mass damage to a large group of monsters, except that it affects everyone on the visible screen. You have to be careful where you cast it.

This screen had several more monsters on it a second ago.

   
There was one door in Teld's dungeon that I couldn't open. Trying to pick it just made it worse.
    

Insult to injury.

    
When I returned to DeMata with Teld's corpse, she said that she'd found a key on it. She gave it to  me, I returned to Teld's dungeon, and I opened the previously-locked door. A treasure hoard behind the door delivered my first potion as well as the first item--a Cloak of Concealment--that directly influences a non-combat skill. It increased my rogue's "hide" ability by 10.

One of my best treasure hauls so far.

   
Simply returning and finding the treasure hoard was DeMata's second quest. Her third was to explore a swamp to the east of the capital and find the source of some undead who had been troubling the land. Many of the undead were ghouls, who (like in D&D) are capable of paralyzing on touch, so it was important to keep them at bay.
    

    

The dungeon was small, and the undead leader turned out to be a lich. He wasn't as hard as his ghoul and gargantuan bat minions. He was very hard to hit, but he didn't do anything most rounds, and when he did do something, it was usually a weak casting of "magic bolt." It took me three tries to win the combat, but all because of the several ghouls rather than the lich. When I returned to DeMata, she suggested that the lich was probably her own father, but this otherwise didn't go anywhere.
   

Fighting the lich, ghouls, and gargantuan bats.

   

Her next quest was to retrieve her father's sword, stolen by the ruler of Teal. I wasn't sure how to get it, but I reasoned that if I advanced far enough in Teal's quests, he might just give it to me. I bought a boat in DeMata and set sail for Teal.
   

I left with a steerage ticket on a cargo ship. I return in my own clipper.

    

When I'd last visited the island, Lord Rathbone had asked me to deal with a medusa in a southwestern swamp. I had left it alone at the time, fearing I wasn't strong enough. 

The random combats on Teal were bloody impossible and occasioned several reloads, but I eventually made my way to the swamp lair. Predictably, the game alerted me to a number of "statues" as I explored the lair.
   

    
The random combats in here were quite easy, usually one snakewoman or a couple of bats at a time. I might return here if I need to grind. I was worried about medusa herself and her petrification abilities, but as it turned out I was able to kill her in a single round, before she could act. The pirate king was pleased.

She was feeling fine before I blasted her with a 20-point "Magic Bolt."

   

He next wanted me to find a chest he'd buried on the DeMatan coast after a pirate raid years ago. I took my ship back to the mainland and walked up and down the coast until I found the chest. He was happy to get it back.
   

     

Next, he asked me to find a mate for his parrot, Folly, whom he had found in the southern tip of the island. I wandered around that area, reloaded after several deadly combats, and eventually the game told me that I'd caught a parrot.
   

The glorious life of a Disciple of Steel.

   

When I turned in that quest, Rathbone handed me a "+50 two-handed Sword of DeMata" and told me to "bury it so it can never be found again." I decided to take it back to Lady DeMata instead, partly since the game doesn't have a mechanism for burying things. DeMata took it and gave me another quest to find an "ancient holy city" called Terine on an island to the northeast.

But I returned to Rathbone instead, curious how he'd react at my disobeying his orders. He simply said, "thank you," gave me a reward, and moved on to the next quest. Apparently, taking the sword back to DeMata was close enough to burying it.

Rathbone's next quest was to clean out a thieves' guild in Teal. I found it, but...
    

     

I'll have to come back here later. I decided for now to head back to the orc outpost north of Cartha, where I'd started, and try to finish the Farnus quest. Since I left there at the beginning of this session, I've allocated several dozen skill points and am considerably stronger.

Miscellaneous notes:

• The experience point rewards for quest completion are pretty miserable. They start at 20 for each lord's first quest and go up by 20 for ever subsequent quest, but a single battle can easily deliver that many points. However, most of the best equipment is found in the final combats of these quests.

• Even though he's only "competent" in "disarm," my rogue has been doing a good job on traps now that my ranger's "perception" skill is high enough that he almost always finds them.

   

The disarm mechanism.

   

• I know I keep saying it, but I want to emphasize how much little messages like this make a difference in the quality of the game world and the atmosphere of dungeons.

   

Whether that fright translated into lower combat effectiveness, I cannot say.

    

• The dungeons have been small enough, and the auto mapper works well enough, that I haven't had to map. While I do enjoy mapping, I'm not going to do the work for no reason.

Navigating by auto-map.

    

• Since I filled up on food and water 12 game hours ago, the meters haven't budged an inch.

• I mentioned that you can talk to people in many of the shops. Most of them just say that their leader is the best leader that they've ever had, but I've had a few people "hesitate" and act like they wanted to say more before ultimately deciding not to. I suspect a higher charisma score might loosen their lips. I really wonder what that's about.

   

Or maybe I need to get him drunker first.

   

• Almost all enemies leave corpses. Some of them, you have to return to a lord as proof of the quest completion. I've become obsessed with the idea that some future lord is going to ask me to kill random beasts and return with their corpses, much like in Akalabeth or Ultima, so I've been saving one of each kind of monster in the guild vault.

• It turns out the next skill level above "competent" is "a disciple." I'm not sure if there are any levels above that.

  

      

I'm still enjoying the game quite a bit. I like that the quests are of varying length and difficulty and that so many of them are inter-related. The constant sense of character development is fantastic. But I'm starting to get a little antsy. So far, the quests don't seem to be tying together into a unified plot, and I haven't reached the end of any lord's quest thread yet (I assume they have an end, as they've all been customized, non-repeatable quests). I haven't even had a reason to explore the game's system of assassinating lords or besieging castles, although I suspect some of the quest threads are going to end with this, and I'll ultimately have to make a choice between lords.

Still, the idea that this game made someone's "worst" list is crazy. It's hands-down the best game so far in 1991, and it would have been a strong contender for "Game of the Year" in 1990. Anyone who would rate this game low doesn't want an RPG at all. He or she wants an adventure game with maybe some RPG-style attributes. Sure, the game could use a little more in the way of actual "role-playing," but for core RPG mechanics--character development, combat, spells (the subject of the next post), and equipment--I've rarely seen it done better.