Enchantasy: Never Tell Me the Odds

 

Chicken dinner.

        

At the end of my first session, my mage PC was joined by his fighter friend, Jared. This session joins the two characters on the road to Macino, in the north-central part of the game world, where their friend Rodell is supposed to be waiting. We win one combat on the way but get killed in the second and are forced to reload. Moments later, we face the exact same combat that killed us, in the exact same place, and get the exact same attack and damage rolls--which means it had the same outcome.

   

It turns out that the game must generate a bunch of seed numbers and store them in a file. Even entering a city, or quitting and reloading, doesn't break the pattern. Casting a spell like "Minor Heal" does, fortunately. Between pre-generating a list of seeds and simply generating random numbers when you need them, what programming advantage does the former offer?

        

Move over, Warren Buffet.

      

More on combat below, but for now we manage to make our way to Macino with only one more battle against a single warrior-bear. It gets us 4 gold pieces; the rewards for combat so far have been relatively pathetic. We spot a dock with a ship's captain just to the east of the city as we enter.

        

Macino's the first city so far to have its dock outside the city, on the main game map.

      

Rodell is waiting near the entrance and joins the party, telling us that we should find our fourth companion, Shyra, in the city of Tiernan. He's a Level 2 ranger. He comes with a bow and a few arrows but no armor. Jared doesn't have any armor, either. I find an armory in the city, but I can't really afford anything because of the need to constantly replenish food.

   

The game does something pretty cool with a beggar, Suffield, that we meet near the entrance. He asks for gold pieces and despite being relatively poor ourselves, we give him 4. He happily says that's enough to get a room at the inn for the night (the bastards charge us 10 gold pieces!). Then--and here's something I've never seen in an RPG before--he actually goes and gets a room at the inn. We encounter him there later, where he says that the innkeeper also gave him a job. I'm always complaining that beggars in RPGs never seem to improve their lives no matter how much gold I give them. What an awesome counter-example. 

      

I do wish the author had put keywords in bold or CAPS. It feels like NPCs are constantly using air quotes or making puns.

      

The city has a dungeon that we accidentally stumble into. We're driven back by a tough battle that leaves us all nearly dead. Rodell and his bow are the only reasons there's a "nearly" in that sentence. We find that paying to rest at the inn fully restores health and magic points. Oddly, the healer does nothing for regular wounds. When we try to pay her (while injured), she just says we don't need her services. She must be for poison or death or something.

       

A dungeon battle that left us in rough shape.

     

In the tavern, we meet a lumberjack named Worrell who says his job has become deadly with monsters now everywhere. We also meet a man named Corey who says that he repairs slot machines for the Slots of Fun casino. There's also a piano player who plays one of the game's tunes for a gold piece.

   

Because the game's economy has been so tight, I decide to analyze odds at the slot machine. Each roll costs 1 gold piece. There are three reels. Various combinations of five symbols pay off different amounts shown on the screen. The highest is three smiley faces at 50 gold pieces; the lowest is a heart with any two other symbols (except other hearts, which pay more) at 3 gold pieces. My first attempt at figuring the expected payout goes awry because I fail to realize that the first reel actually has six symbols. The sixth is a sort of hollow smiley face that figures in no winning combination.

   

Accounting for that extra symbol on Reel 1, and assuming that each symbol has an equal probability of appearing, there's a 0.16667*0.2*0.2 = 0.6667% chance of any of the first eight combinations appearing. Number 9 has a 2.6667% chance, and number 10 has a 13.333% chance. The cumulative probability of any winning combination is 21.333% Multiplied by their payouts, I come up with an average payout of 1.4933 for every gold piece spent. I track around 300 rolls, and my results roughly jibe with these calculations: I win 21% of the time and get an average payout of 1.38. 

     

I only get 3 on this one.

     

In other words, good odds. By the time my experiment is over, I have over 300 gold pieces from a starting point of about 40. But the favorable gambling odds don't break the economy as much as you might think because the game forces you to watch the reels spin and pauses for a couple of seconds after each outcome. It takes me almost an hour to earn my 260 gold (artificially prolonged by the fact that I'm recording the results, but still). Sure, I could cheese it by putting the emulator into warp mode or writing a macro, but the point is that the author tried to limit the amount of gambling a player would do by making it boring. There's a modern analogue, I suppose, in games like Red Dead Redemption, where you can reliably make money at a lot of gambling games, but you actually have to play the full game, including watching the players' moves, taking time to shuffle and deal, and so forth--and even then, there's a maximum to what you can win. This is gambling done mostly right. No one would take the time to save and reload to win these slots.

   

With my newfound wealth, I go back to the armory and buy a short bow for Jared, a sling for Chester, cloth armor and wood shields for Jared and Rodell, and more arrows and food. There are a few things about the purchasing and inventory process that I like. First, when you buy something, even though equipment all goes into a common pool until you equip it, the merchant asks who you're buying it for. He alerts you if that character can't equip the item because of strength or class. Second, I like that the game uses a common pool for unequipped items, arrows, food, keys, and so forth, so that you don't have to micromanage each character's unique inventory.

       

Thanks for letting me know!

      

It turns out that the maximum number of common items, including food and arrows, is 99. We'll see how I feel about that later. The number feels small; a single combat can easily take 10 or 15 arrows. Food depletes somewhat slowly, but I still think that maximum might put an artificial limit on, say, dungeon exploration. Maybe it's meant to add to the challenge in some way.

 

I also buy a pick-axe, because it seems like something you should have, and something called a "telegem." I assume it's going to be an auto-mapping tool, like the gems of Ultima, but when I use it, it seems to be looking for a portal nearby. I really need a place to buy keys and picks, as I'm constantly encountering locked doors.

         

Sigh. You were not "robbed." You were "burgled."

       

Upstairs, I find a house belonging to a married couple, Grace and Bo, who used to run a jewelry store. It is now closed, as their stock was stolen in a burglary. They suspect a notorious thief named Blaze, and they're offering a substantial reward for the recovery of their property. Everyone in town has an opinion about Blaze. Corey and Suffield think that he's hiding in the dungeon.Worrell heard that he died and was buried on an island by fellow thieves.

   

Rather than search the dungeon right now, I decide to head to Tiernan and pick up our fourth party member, who I assume is going to be a thief. Tiernan is in the far southeast of the game world, and we're in the far north, so I try to reach it with ships, even though my funds are somewhat low again. I pay the captain outside Macino to take us to Keldar. From Keldar, the only other place to travel is Hazlett, which gets us about two-thirds of the way to Tiernan.

    

Between ports.

      

Hazlett is a floating city, full of wooden docks, and not much else to do. Odolf is the retired captain of the SS Minnow, whose ship went down after it was torched by flames from the sky (I suspect a dragon). Lester is an aspiring scientist who wants to become as great as Leo, the greatest scientist in Savallia. Leo lives in Riisa Village. Edwin is a small boy who lives in a house with his mother, Silvia, a healer's assistant. Edwin has recently learned in school about the knights who used to guard the king's castle. The greatest of them was Sir Kenway (who I also heard about in Macino), who wore a powerful set of silver armor. It was lost when Kenway was trapped in an underwater cavern.

    

I've been exploring the cities somewhat cursorily, as I know I'm going to have to do it again when I have a proper supply of picks and keys; every city has a lot of locked doors. For now, there are no ships heading to Tiernan or any destination to the south, so I leave Hazlett to finish the trip overland.

      

Finding our way across the land. The signs really do help.

          

Predictably, we face several battles along the way. The game uses a relatively simple turn-based combat system on a tactical grid. It echoes both of Enchantasy's major influences--Ultima V and The Magic Candle--while not being quite as complex as either. Enemies start some distance from the party, and some (magicians and archers in this example) can attack at range. If the party is surprised, enemies go first; if not, the party goes first. Each character gets one action (though that may change as we level up): move, attack in melee range, shoot a missile weapon, cast a spell, or apply first aid to another character. Assessing monsters and equipping items can be done freely and don't count against the character's turn. Movement can be done in eight directions instead of just the four that you can use in the exploration window.

     

Again, there are some neat touches here. I like that you can quickly see the status of the enemy party in the upper-right corner; you can also use the A)ssess command to get more specific statistics about each of them. If you try to equip a bow when you have a shield equipped, the game warns you that you can't do that--and then asks if you want to unequip the shield. That's something I've never seen. It's almost as if the author of this game wanted to make the interface as helpful as possible rather than to punish the player for every mistake.

   

Missile weapons really improved our survivability, and we get through the battles without much trouble. As our hit points start to drop a bit, we find a delightful surprise on the way to Tiernan: a little inn on the side of the road. I like that the game doesn't make it too easy to restore all your health and magic but occasionally provides conveniences like this.

     

Nailing a bat from a distance.

      

While fiddling with the controls looking for some way to turn off the music, I find that there's a "combat frequency" setting that you can use to increase or decrease the number of random battles. It's already set pretty low, though.

   

If I'm getting attacked this much at 3, I'd hate to see what 10 looks like.

     

The game mixes good and bad sound. I like some of the effects, like the creaks of the doors opening and the smash that accompanies hitting enemies in combat. Some of you might like the opening theme, which seems to pay homage to The Terminator, but I find it a bit too emphatic. The dramatic tune that introduces each combat is too bombastic. The game doesn't give you any options to turn off sound that I can find, let alone turn off music independently of sound. I've thus been mostly playing with my headphones hanging on their hook next to my window. This caused a bit of farce the other night when I heard some clanging and thought that the raccoons were tearing apart my bird feeder again. I went charging outside in the middle of the night to find that Irene had brought the feeder indoors. 

        

We grab the last party member.

      

Shyra is waiting as soon as we enter Tiernan. She's in the city looking for someone named Boris, who supposedly has a treasure map. She joins the party at Level 3 and, as I expected, she's a thief. She also joins with no armor. There's an armory in town that sells leather suits, but none of my characters are strong enough to wear them; I hope strength goes up with leveling, then. 

    

The full party.

       

With the team together, I have a couple of options. I can head back to some of the earlier cities and try to start solving some of their side quests, or I can pretend that I'm starting anew and just begin exploring systematically. I decide to play by to-do list in order of priority. This is what I have now, organized by importance and urgency:

       

• Kelder: Re-explore. Explore dungeon, looking for Joey (missing child).
• King's Castle: Re-explore, explore the dungeon, looking for king's tiara.
• Macino: Re-explore. Search dungeon for Blaze and the missing jewelry.
• Tiernan: Fully explore, looking for Boris and his treasure map.
• Udim/Forest of No Return: Explore, looking for the magic horn.
• Aramon: Explore. Try to find Wade, who was researching the legend of a Mystic Bow.

The above task came from a diary entry in Macino that I forgot to mention.

     

• Keldar: Bring healing ointment to sick NPC.
• Dalia: Explore and buy a Locator, then explore Jack's Cave and the cave near Tiernan for gold.
• Mountains???: Search for Jamal/missing prince.
• Kadaar: Explore
• Shaaran: Explore
• Hawthorne Land: Explore city and castle, talk to Duke Hawthorne.
• Portsmith: Explore
• Sonora: Explore
• Haskett: Re-explore.

      

"Explore" and "re-explore" includes searching just about all stumps, shrubs, and pieces of furniture for items. Almost every time I do, I find food, a key, a pick, or something else. Gods know what I missed in the early cities. 

      

I need to do this more often.

     

I am really liking this one. Although it looks at first glance like a bog standard Ultima clone, it offers a delightful surprise almost everywhere you look. This is the second time in the last year or so that I've been surprised, in a good way, by an Ultima clone, the first being Antepenult (1989). It feels like I've been happily surprised a lot lately. Fifteen years into this project, it's finally serving its purpose.

Time so far: 5 hours

 

****

 

I know this is going to upset some people, but I'm going to kick Betrayal at Krondor a couple of notches down the list, so as to give me time to finish reading the novels on which the game is based before my first entry. I expect Quest for the Holy Grail and Syndicate will be quick, so it won't be that long.