Game 491: Adventure Dungeon (1983)

 

       

Adventure Dungeon

Canada

Independently developed; published in March 1983 CLOAD magazine (a cassette magazine)

Released 1983 for TRS-80.
Date Started: 3 June 2023

Date Ended: 5 June 2023

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Very Easy (2.0/5) in the sense that every game is a "winner"; Hard (4.0/5) to get the top score and survive all dungeons.

Final Rating: 11

Ranking at Time of Posting: 38/508 (7%)

     

Adventure Dungeon is an interesting title that commenter Dungy unearthed a couple of years ago by going one-by-one through old disk and cassette magazines. It was written by David Lo of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Lo was a modestly frequent contributor to CLOAD, although this is the only game that's surfaced with RPG aspirations. It's not quite an RPG by my definitions, but at the same time, it offers an interesting approach that had me thinking a lot about optimal strategies.

   

The setup is that you're trying to join the Wise Council, which requires you to prove yourself in a contest. Asking the player for nothing more than a name and a sobriquet, the game dumps you on Level 1 of a five-level dungeon. (You can technically choose to start on a higher level, but I'm not sure why you would.)  Each level is 30 x 13 squares. Scattered across these 390 squares are 18 monsters, which do not move, and 13 treasures. Collecting treasures and defeating monsters increases your score. If you defeat all the monsters and collect all the treasure on one level, you move to the next level. If you clear all the levels, or die, the game ends and you learn from the Wise Council whether you earned enough points to join and, if so, at what rank.

      

I was "confused" because I thought the game was asking for my class and the instructions hadn't said anything about that.

         

While simple in concept, plot, and mechanics, Adventure Dungeon introduces one devilish twist: When you encounter a monster, you have to wager a certain number of your hit points against its hit points. If you wager exactly the same number as the monster has, your odds of beating it are 50%. If you wager double the number the monster has, your odds are 100%. In between 1x and 2x the monster's hit points is a linearly increasing probability of success.

     

Fighting an orc on Level 2. Wagering 340 hit points against his 271 gives me a 63% chance of success.

     

So why wouldn't you always wager two times the monster's hit points? Because character growth depends on how much risk you take. Both your maximum hit points and your score increase in proportion to your risk. If you play it safe and wager 2x, you get no increase at all (and values above 2x will actually drop your values). 

For instance, on Level 1, you meet a spider with 51 hit points. You have 300 hit points. You can attack it with any number of points between 1 (about a 1% chance of success) and 102 (100% chance). If you wager 101 points, the largest number that would give you anything in return, you would earn 1 hit point and 10 points to your score. But if you were successful when betting only 1 point, you would earn 101 hit points and 990 points to your score. Earning points is important because monster hit points increase depending on the number of monsters you've already killed. Enemies start as weak as 2 hit points (dwarves, trolls, and harpies at the beginning of Level 1) and as strong as 22 hit points (dragons at the beginning of Level 1). As you slay their fellows, each monster experiences a change in its hit points, but not in a predictable way. (These changes are solely dependent on the number of monsters remaining and not on your score or hit point total. I checked.) For instance, here's how the orc's hit points change depending on how many monsters remain:

         

Do you think anyone has ever made a chart with "orc hit points" in the title before?

       

I don't have a TRS-80 emulator with save states, by the way, so creating that chart meant starting enough new games in a row to encounter the orc after each number of enemies while surviving all those previous enemies. Yeah, it took a while. I couldn't possibly do it for every enemy on any level, but the highest hit point value I saw for any creature on Level 1 was the dragon at 519.

   

Obviously, 519 is well above the character's starting hit points of 300. The character needs to have earned 738 hit points on the level to be sure of defeating the dragon, if he encounters it last, and he can't possibly earn that many if he plays it safe with all the other enemies.

       

Every level has all of these monsters, randomly scattered. They are roughly in order of most difficult to least difficult.

      

On Level 1, you have the advantage that you can uncover the entire level before picking up any treasures or fighting any enemies. There are no barriers. Every step reveals the eight squares around you. You just have to walk carefully. The instructions tell you what symbols match up with what monsters. You could attack them in a strategic order. But as we've seen, the number of hit points that each monster has at each stage is unpredictably variable. You'd have to learn the "right" order through a lot of trial and error, perhaps creating a matrix of each monster's hit points at each stage.

      

And each level has all of these treasures.

     

There are a couple of other confounding considerations. If you wager less than 1.5x an enemy's hit points, the enemy automatically kills you if you lose the combat. If you wager more than 1.5x, the enemy "lets you leave" but you lose what you wagered. This is hard to recover from some combats. For instance, in the only session where I made it to Level 3, I met a balrog with 634 hit points while I had 2083. I wagered 1110, or about 1.75x the balrog's total, which gave me an 87.5% chance of victory. This was the standard I had been following. In this case, I lost the odds, and my hit points dropped to 973. The balrog was still on the map, but now I could only wager 973 hit points to his 634, giving me only a 72% chance of winning. Fortunately, I won the second time; otherwise, I would have ended up with 0 hit points. As it was, the number I'd lost hurt me when I next met a sphinx with over 1,000.

         

Without enough hit points to wager, I was "torned to bits."

   

If you're able to make it to Level 2, you'll note that every enemy has a couple hundred more hit points than on Level 1 (to start; again, it changes and generally increases as you kill their comrades). The terrain is also different, with walls blocking access at some point, making it more difficult to reveal the level before having to fight anything. That strategy becomes impossible on Level 3, where all enemies and treasures are nestled in a crosshatch pattern through which you have to move diagonally.

       

The weird Level 3.

      

Level 4 is like Level 2, but without the dots that mark the tiles. Level 5 has a proper maze, albeit a small one. The wall squares are chaotic and unpatterned on Levels 2 and 4, but they create corridors and rooms on Level 5. After you leave each level, whether by clearing it or by defeat, you have the option to have the game reveal the rest of the level before you move on.

       

Viewing all of Level 5.

     

If you choose to start on a Level higher than 1, the monsters have the same hit points as if you had started on Level 1. You still have to clear five levels to completely win the game, so the game just adds as many re-iterations of Level 5 as is necessary depending on where you started. For instance, if you started on Level 4, you'll face four iterations of Level 5 after you complete it.

   

In six hours of playing--admittedly, a lot of that was recording data for the preceding chart--the best score I could accomplish was 8,693 points. According to the instructions, that should have been enough for me to achieve the fifth rank, "Eldar of the Outer Council," but the game screen said I had only achieved the fourth rank, "Member of the Outer Council." The highest rank, "Lord of the Wise Council," requires at least 27,000 points. 

        

What I received . . .

     

Versus what I was supposed to receive.

         

What consumes me now is what strategy you would have to adopt to get that high of a score. The obvious thing is to first carefully map the levels, avoiding monsters and picking up unguarded treasure. Treasure gives you points with no risk. Then, I guess you want to take on the monsters in roughly descending order of difficulty. Although the hit points are variable, in general, dragons, balrogs, wyverns, and hydras are the strongest monsters and dwarves, trolls, harpies, orcs, and black unicorns are the weakest. The trouble is determining how much to bet. Even betting enough to give you an 85% chance of victory gives you only a 50% chance of winning 4 combats in a row and a measly 5% chance of winning all 18 combats on a level. A 95% chance of victory gives you only a 40% chance of winning all 18 combats on the level. 

     

Here, I've uncovered most of Level 1 before attacking anything.

     

I actually set up an Excel sheet to start modeling different strategies and likely outcomes. Ultimately, because your score increases in a linear manner with risk, your expected payout from battle alone is identical no matter what strategy you adopt. But the presence of treasure encourages you to play conservatively to increase your chances of staying alive for the next level, where the treasure can add to your score for no risk. But as we've seen, playing too conservatively means that you don't have enough hit points to take on some of the tougher monsters. The whole thing is tying me in knots. I need Ahab to help tackle this one. (Ahab, by the way, is racking up game totals scarily fast. He'll hit 500 before I do at this rate.)

    

In some ways, Adventure Dungeon really isn't different from any other RPG; it just has fewer variables with more transparent odds. If you were to analyze Ultima III from the same year, you'd have a much more difficult time deriving a single probability of success from any one combat. You'd have to consider enemy and party hit points, attributes, accuracy and damage statistics from weapons wielded, armor class, and the dice rolled for each attack--and that's without any consideration of spells. But if you had all the numbers, the expected probability of success would be determinable.

         

How do developers properly balance games with so many considerations?

     

This makes me wonder, in turn, if game designers do create master spreadsheets for individual battles (or combat overall) and tweak the variables to aim for a particular chance of victory, perhaps even accounting for the average player making x errors. I was thinking about this recently in relation to Gloomhaven, to which Irene is addicted. Every battle must have a few thousand variables to consider. Every character card is different, and there are something like 15 character classes, which might appear in any combination of two, three, or four in any battle. Each character enters a battle with 9 or 10 cards out of a deck of maybe twice that many, each card offering a variety of offensive and defensive options, including spells (which depend on various elements having been "infused" during previous turns). The characters' levels determine enemy levels, but characters can have equipment and augments to which enemies have no analogues. Every attack is accompanied by the equivalent of a die roll, but complicated with curses and blessings and various special cards achieved through success in battle objectives.

This is all a lot for the players to keep track of, but it must have been even more difficult for the author, Isaac Childres. I find the game generally well balanced. We started playing at normal difficulty and then moved up to "hard" and "very hard" as we got more experience, but no matter what, we've always had a success rate of about 85%. Either we've been extremely lucky in this consistency or Childres had some way of distilling every advantage and disadvantage, every card, token, and pip, into some kind of standardized value that resulted in roughly the same odds for every battle no matter what combination of characters, levels, and other factors. Which do you think is more likely? And whether Childres had such a formula for Gloomhaven, do you imagine other developers do when writing CRPGs? Or do they just wing it?

   

When and how often you allow a player to save makes a huge difference, of course. With no ability to save in Adventure Dungeon, even extremely favorable per-battle odds translate poorly into long-term success. A game like Elden Ring can offer much worse odds, at least for boss battles, and still engage players simply by not making defeat the end of the game.

   

GIMLET? Bah. It gets an 11. The probabilistic strategy element is worth a couple of points, and it's short and replayable. It's not really the sort of game I started my blog to play, but it does pose some interesting questions about the types of probabilities that underlie many other games, and I'm thus grateful to David Lo for prompting an interesting topic of discussion.

    

****

   

Ed. from 06/08/2023: A few days after publishing this entry, I heard from author Dave Lo. He says that his primary influences were Dungeon (1979) for the Commodore PET (which I reviewed 10 years ago), which Lo played at his high school, and Monster Combat, a type-in game published in the February 1981 Creative Computing, which offered the same kind of risk/reward system.

Lo verified that he thinks the best strategy is to collect treasure first, then attack the monsters in descending order of difficulty.

I asked him about the business of writing for diskmags in the early 1980s, and he said it was "very casual--just submit something when it's done." The pay varied from $100 to $200 per program. Lo continued to work on Adventure Dungeon, changing some of the math and adding a spell system, but he never published an updated version.