Fate: Dialogue

Man, life must be rough where you come from.

    
I spent more time than it took me to write this post debating whether I should keep going or start over. The arguments for not starting over were that I already had 29 hours invested in the game, I still remembered most of what was happening despite not having played in several months, and I had spent a lot of time in boring dialogue and combat getting to where I was. The arguments for starting over were that most of those 29 hours had been spent mapping, which I wouldn't have to do the second time, that I hadn't faithfully recorded all of the hints at the beginning of the game (because I didn't understand the system yet), and that I could use the excuse to assemble an ideal party earlier in the game. A commenter warned me that new party members are scaled to Winwood's level but don't have the training points they would have accumulated if they'd been leveling up with Winwood all the time.

Of desired party members, I was primarily lacking a witch. I decided to return my existing party to Larvin and wander around for as long as it took to find one and add her to the party. Winwood was Level 9 at the time, and I decided that if in the process of trying to find a witch, he hit Level 10, I'd start over. In fairly short time, I got a banshee, whose spells I like better than my magician's, but the witch remained elusive.

I used the time to try to codify what I know about interacting with NPCs. As I noted in previous posts, any humanoid creature can potentially be an NPC, even ones that would normally be hostile, like robbers and black witches. You just have to talk with them. Usually, they spit on the ground or demand your money, but sometimes they'll be happy to have a chat. Other classes, like commoners, noblemen, priestesses, valkyries, and mercenaries, are always friendly, and attacking them counts as a "sin" that you have to pay to absolve yourself of.

Occasionally, normally-friendly NPCs will accidentally wander into a party of evil creatures and end up fighting alongside them. It doesn't appear to be a sin if you kill them in such circumstances.
    

That "swordsman" would normally be friendly, but he's hanging with the wrong crowd.

     
There are three beneficial things that NPCs can do for you: give you a hint, train you (thus increasing one or more attributes), and join your party. But to get them to do any of these things, you first have to get the NPCs to like you. Sometimes they don't do what you want even if they like you, but they never do what you want if they dislike you.
   

A commoner hates me.

   
There are a number of things that you can do to get an NPC to like you depending on the NPC class. For instance, giving "alms" (basically, just handing over money) almost always works, although it insults knights, gladiators, swordsmen, valkyries, and perhaps some other classes. Simply introducing yourself works on everyone. Almost everyone responds to "adulation" (flattery), although it occasionally insults them. Bragging, telling jokes, and telling fibs are riskier strategies--they only work about 40% of the time--but you need to try something if the NPC won't take alms. You can give alms as many times as you want, but other actions you can perform only once.
   

Bragging fails to work.

   
Each successful action adds to some behind-the-scenes score, and with luck, you eventually trip the threshold to "like." What I don't know for sure is whether liking and disliking are binary measures or whether you can get some NPCs to like you more than others, thus increasing your chances of getting some beneficial result.
   

Winwood tells a fairly stupid lie. These people don't have access to your world's literature, Winwood.

    
The hint system works by giving you a series of hints in a specific order. A certain NPC class always has the next hint in the list, so you have to talk to a lot of NPCs before you find the right one. Eventually, the topic is exhausted and you have to do something in the game world if you want to move on to the next topic. No one has given me a hint in a long time, which I suspect means that I need to solve the Cavetrain quest before I get any more topics. I also need to find my way to the "southern isle" in a walled-off part of Larvin, where there's a druid named Mulradin.

The other thing I figured out about NPCs is that when you're "done" with one, even if you immediately dismiss him after talking to him, he disappears from the game and the game seeds the area with a new one. Thus, if I want to find a witch, rather than bypassing all the non-witches, I need to talk to them and get them out of the game to increase the chances a witch will show up in the next random selection. Since Larvin is so large and the "new" NPC could show up anywhere, I decided to head to the smaller city, Laronnes, instead.

Literally as I was approaching Laronnes's front door, a combat with a snake put Winwood to Level 10. But by this time, I was so comfortable with my existing party that I decided to press on. This was a good decision, because minutes after entering Laronnes, I got my witch. And yes, she has the "magic ears" ability, though this hasn't done anything for me so far.
     

Well, I'm glad that you think so.

   
Later, I filled the last slot in my party with an assassin. (So overall, I have a fighter, a witch, a priestess, a banshee, an assassin, and a warlock.) I'll dump either my fighter or my magician when I need to take on a specific NPC.
    

Perhaps I should have held out for an assassin with a name other than "Derek."

   
With my party complete, I finished mapping the starting area. This took me about 6 hours. The resulting map represents only a small portion of the game world, and it's hard to imagine that I'll fully map the rest of the world, once I get to it. Fate really is quite enormous. In a regular game, the "opening area" of Fate would still be quite large.
   

The entire opening area.

 
I was continually annoyed by combats in the wilderness. As I noted last time, Fate can apparently hold only one monster type in memory at a given time, so you end up fighting variants of the same monster (e.g., snakes, giant snakes, serpents, swamp snakes) over and over until something triggers disk access again. I don't mind fighting the same creature so much as the fact that the game absolutely swarms you with them. Fate will decide, "it's rat time!" and soon you meet 4 giant rats. You kill them and 3 steps later, you encounter 6 swamp rats. You kill them, and then the game decides, "You like rats? Have some rats!" and you encounter a huge party of 7 giant rats, 8 swamp rats, and 4 regular rats. This continues until the enemy parties get so large that someone inevitably dies. You reload and the game leaves you alone for a while before deciding, "it's snake time!"
   

This is my reward for a couple successful battles against smaller groups of banshees.

     

I found a couple of new treasures but no more special encounters. I still have to solve the one with the body at the bottom of a pit. Some commenters suggested I do this by having my witch create strength +1 potions until I have enough (apparently, they stack infinitely) to get someone's strength up to around 50. That's going to require 25 potions, and my witch seems capable of creating only 3 per day before the spell just fails, so it will be a while.

Some miscellaneous notes:

• "Grals wizards" are my most hated wilderness foe. Almost every other enemy you encounter in the wilds is survivable (except in huge numbers) but these bastards are capable of wiping out the entire party in a couple of spells, and they simply won't die.

    

     

• I'm discovering that the game awards both individual experience (for successful actions like casting spells) and party experience. We've had games that have done one or the other before, but I'm not sure we've ever seen a game that does both.

• Having not played in several months, I forgot that food and water was important. After many hours and several in-game days of exploring the wilds, I suddenly remembered that my characters needed to eat and drink. When I checked their statuses, sure enough they were "starving" and "parched." It didn't seem to have been affecting their combat ability.

• There are a couple of islands in the middle of bodies of water that I wasn't able to visit and map. I believe you've all told me that there are no mechanisms for crossing small bodies of water in this game, so I guess that land will forever go untrod. Let me know if that's not the case, because it's starting to bug me.

   

How do I get there?

    
A short post, but the game-hours-per-blog-material ratio is quite high with this one. I won't write about Fate again until I've solved that Cavetrain quest and gotten out of the opening area. My next post will either focus on the equipment system or the economy. I have way too much money, probably because I haven't been spending it enough.

Time so far: 36 hours
Reload count: I give up

*****

Moonstone, which looks interesting, may have to wait a while until I get back home for a few days and attempt once again to get my controller working with DOSBox. It doesn't require a joystick, but I'm having an impossible time playing without one.

Maze Quest was supposed to be the next game after that, but I think I have to render it "NP." The game is really just a shareware tease for a full game called City Quest, but the full one doesn't seem to exist any more. Maze Quest's characters can only achieve Level 2. Moreover, when I tried to play it, it didn't emulate well. It froze frequently and wouldn't respond to my navigation commands, instead spinning my party around randomly. It otherwise seems like a competent dungeon-crawler, so if anyone comes across City Quest, I'd be happy to give it a try.

That has us starting Pools of Darkness much earlier than I intended, but hey, I'm not complaining.