Revisiting: Wizardry: Scenario #3 - The Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983)

I have a few reasons for returning to the wireframe halls of Wizardry III. The most obvious is that I didn't do a good enough job with it the first time, nearly five years ago, when I spent only the minimum required time on the game before getting frustrated with its character creation process and permadeath. I was still adhering quite strictly to my published rules, and it had only been a couple months prior that my party stepped over the corpses of dozens of failed colleagues to win the first Wizardry. Exhausted at the idea of going through the same process with the two sequels, I abandoned both the second and third scenarios in quick order. Later, I went back and re-won the first game and completed the second, in both cases by allowing limited backups of the party roster.

When I first played through the series, I lacked any sense of history. Now, with almost two decades of CRPG titles in my rearview mirror, I have a greater appreciation of Wizardry's status as a founding father of an entire CRPG line (including the Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, and Dungeon Master branches). Yes, Wizardry itself borrowed or plagiarized many of its elements from PLATO's Oubliette, but Oubliette owes its existence to Moria, which owes its existence to even earlier PLATO games, and ultimately it all goes back to Dungeons & Dragons (or even further, some would argue). It's a rare game, novel, movie, or other work of art that doesn't owe some of its elements to some progenitor. Wizardry still occupies a landmark place in the history of CRPGs, if nothing else as the first multi-character game.

The party in town. The names of the businesses don't change all the way through Wizardry V.

  
I also have a greater appreciation for how well Wizardry still works as an RPG. It is essentially the first game to have all the elements of a modern RPG in their most primeval forms: exploration through an environment, a main quest, tactical combat, a fully-realized spell system, a big variety of foes, role-playing decisions, and character advancement through both leveling and inventory acquisition. For these reasons, it is (at least for me) the earliest RPG that can still effectively satisfy the RPG craving. I gave Wizardry a 37 on the GIMLET scale. The average of every game before it was 19--nearly half--and no game came close to touching it until Ultima III came out in 1983 and ushered in the Golden Age.

 

The Wizardry series was the first to introduce this combat mechanism, in which each character decides on an action, and they execute (along with the enemies' actions) all at once. This dynamic continues through The Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, and Wasteland.

It's therefore been fun to re-visit Wizardry every couple of years and contrast it with whatever games I'm currently playing. In this case, it's particularly interesting to contrast it with the recently completed Dragon Sword, which does a reasonably good job copying Wizardry's interface and mechanics. In making this contrast, I've developed a much greater appreciation for the pacing of a game--a quality that doesn't really exist in my GIMLET except for a minor consideration in the "gameplay" category. When you distill a satisfying CRPG into its most basic elements, what you have is a reasonably regular system of challenges and rewards. "Challenges" include not only combat but also the more unpleasant aspects of RPG playing, like drawing 20 squares on a piece of graph paper, or spending 5 minutes hauling your party back through a map you've already cleared, or working out a logic puzzle. These things are work, and every once in a while you expect to get paid. Such "rewards" include literal rewards like gold and equipment upgrades, but also things like character advancement, uncovering the next plot point, or even seeing an interesting graphic. Until you've played both in a row, it's hard to appreciate just how much two tiny differences--the ability to save anywhere and the overwhelming frequency of random combats--make Dragon Sword a game I'll never play again and Wizardry a game I'll find a way to revisit again and again for the rest of my life.

Nothing in Wizardry is very sophisticated in content, but it still manages to get the challenge/reward ratio about right despite--and this is the key--being extraordinarily difficult. You fail a lot of the challenges. Characters die. If you're playing it "straight," you have to start over a lot. And yet you still feel a compelling sense of accomplishment at regular intervals, whether that comes from a level-up (which accompanies almost every return trip after an expedition), a new piece of gear, a special encounter, or some random message on the floor.

Graphically, the Wizardry series is very much "tell" rather than "show."

The difficulty is, of course, a key part of the Wizardry experience. You've heard me blather on about it repeatedly, but I think it's still worth emphasizing, because we've utterly lost it in modern RPGs except perhaps in the rare case of a Dark Souls. By including permadeath, but disallowing traditional "saves," and by offering no ability to restore spells while in the dungeon, each of the first three games maintains a marvelous sense of tactical tension. Each step feels like a risk. You find yourself carefully weighing whether to map a few more squares or start heading back to the surface for a refresh on spell points. There's a palpable relief when you get back to the castle and know you're temporarily safe. There are hard individual battles, yes, but the real difficulty comes from the accumulation of battles--the slow whittling down of your hit points and spell slots. A battle doesn't have to be hard to be ruinous; it just has to be unlucky. A die roll goes bad and a character gets decapitated. Unlike most games, you don't have the option to reload, so with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, you bring him up to the surface and try your luck with a resurrection. Another die roll goes bad and he turns to ash. Raised on modern RPGs, you find yourself unable to believe that that's the end--that there really isn't any other way out of the situation.
 

Death is frequent and not even paid resurrection is guaranteed. This one failed.

To achieve the same tension in modern games, you have to purposefully delay saving. I was playing Fallout: New Vegas about a week ago, traveling the interminable canyon path between Jacobstown and Red Rock Canyon. The place has so many cazadores (giant mutated wasps that will definitely make my "most annoying enemies" list when I get to 2010) that it's crazy. I had plenty of ammo going in, but towards the end I was reduced to fighting with a BB gun and a tire iron. I kept thinking that I'd finally killed all of them, but then I'd round the next bend and there would, unbelievably, be three or four more. As the likelihood of death increased in proportion to the expenditure of my ammo, I was continually cognizant of the fact that a quick, simple save would ensure that I didn't lose all of my progress. Preventing myself from doing that was a Herculean feat, and I really wish developers would make that decision for me, like they did in this early era.

Wizardry admittedly goes a bit too far, particularly in the second and third scenarios, when death is not only permanent, but creating a new character means firing up the original Wizardry, creating him, and importing him into one of the sequels. (Neither II nor III has an internal character-creation process.) III is slightly better in this regard, since imported characters are supposed to be "descendants" of the I or II party members, and thus start the game at Level 1 no matter what level they were in the previous game. Starting over in II, on the other hand, meant trying to survive the advanced dungeons of that game with a Level 1 party or spending time re-building a character in the first game just so you could import him into II at a higher level.

I paid my dues winning Wizardry straight, burning through dozens of characters before defeating Werdna with my umpteenth party, so I don't feel compelled to adhere to such difficulty in III. Instead, I'm following the same rules that I use when playing a modern game like Skyrim or New Vegas: set my iPhone timer for 30 minutes after each save, and don't allow myself to save again until it goes off. In the case of Wizardry III, that means allowing myself to back up the scenario disks. It still maintains a lot of the tension, but with slightly less disastrous consequences.

Just about time for a reload.

Scenario #3 is explicitly not a sequel, but rather the second of two expansions to the original game, but later entries in the franchise kept the numbering system as if it really was Wizardry III. The gameplay is so unchanged from Wizardry that its section in the Ultimate Wizardry Archives manual is only 4 pages, all describing the back story and the import process; all other mechanics and spells are the same as the original.

As for that back story, again we see that story-telling wasn't Sir-Tech's strong suit. If the era is famous for trite "kill the evil wizard" plot, Sir-Tech is famous for nonsensical embellishments on it. The game nominally takes place in Llylgamyn, the same setting as Wizardry II. A generation of peace and prosperity followed the recovery of the Staff of Gnilda and quelling of the rebellion, but now the world is threatened by an inexplicable increase in earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, and other natural disasters. To determine the source of this new evil, the city's leaders have asked the party to find the Orb of Earithin, a powerful scrying stone hidden deep in the lair of the great dragon L'kbreth.

Each imported character goes through a "rite of passage ceremony."

The party members are explicitly given as the descendants of the victorious Proving Grounds and Knight of Diamonds adventurers. After importing the characters from the previous games into Llylgamyn, they have to go through a process of "legation," which is presented as a kind-of blessing from the ancestor to the descendant. The descendant keeps the name and attributes of the original character but is re-set to Level 1, gets only 500 gold, and can re-select an alignment. They also keep the symbols that indicate whether they won the first game and what role they had winning the second.

The ">" indicates Gideon won the first game; the "G" is Gnilda's symbol for his retrieval of the pieces of the Knight of Diamonds. I don't know what the "D" is about. Everyone has it, even the character I just created.

My party had finished Knight of Diamonds alive, but as you may recall, my thief had accidentally been changed to a lord by a Ring of Metamorph. I needed someone to disarm traps, so I jettisoned him and created a new thief character to join this party. (Later, I realized it would have made more sense to keep the lord and get rid of one of my two fighters.) After that, it was off to the equipment shop to buy the standard gear (500 gold per person was more than enough) and into the dungeon!

Checking my old "WIZ3" folder, I was pleased to find that I already had all of Level 1 and much of Level 2 mapped, so I could concentrate on character development during the first stage of the game. This is good, because the hardest part about this game is surviving Level 1. Each character's 8 hit points are easily obliterated by a single attack from some of the level's foes, and the 2 Level 1 spell slots allotted to the mage and priest barely help. I spent most of the first few hours reloading from my save disks when my characters died (easier than creating new ones), and saving at every successful combat after the iPhone marked the 30-minute point. Eventually, I was able to stabilize the party at Level 4.

Thank La-La for the KATINO (sleep) spell. Almost everything is susceptible to it. Unfortunately, a Level 1 mage only has two of them.

The first few Wizardry games have several quirks that are worth remembering:

• When you find items in treasure chests (which is rare), they are usually unknown, annotated with a question mark before their names ("?ARMOR"). Unless you want to pay Boltac to identify the items back at the trading post, you have to have a bishop in the party. In Wizardry V, I created a bishop but kept him in the tavern, swapping him into the party only when I wanted something identified, but it didn't work well because the bishop really needs to level to identify things successfully. In this party, I have a bishop.

• Bishops are one of four "prestige" classes offered by the game. The others are lords, samurai, and ninjas. It's very hard to create characters of these classes because they require high attribute values and you'd have to get very lucky during character creation to get enough points. Theoretically, you can switch to these prestige classes later, once you level up and increase your attribute scores. The primary advantage to the bishop, other than identifying items, is that he can cast both mage and priest spells.

Paul prepares to identify a bit of clothing.

• When leveling up, there's a good chance that you'll lose points in some attributes while gaining in others. In fact, it appears to me that every attribute has basically a one-in-three chance of increasing, decreasing, or staying the same. This makes it very hard to ever get enough points to switch to the prestige classes. This may only happen in the DOS version; I'm not sure if we've ever come to a solid conclusion on that.

I'm so glad I leveled up.

• The series is the first I know to offer the mechanic, now somewhat commonplace, by which you can hide the command options and status windows while exploring the dungeon, theoretically creating a deeper sense of immersion as you explore.

• Equipment-based improvements are very slow in the early Wizardry series. A +1 weapon or armor is an advanced piece of gear; +2 is epic. I'm not sure +3 even exists.

• If you want to find equipment at all, you have to open chests. Only a thief has a chance of disarming traps on the chests, but he often fails. This was responsible for an accelerated ending the first time I won Wizardry.

Lone Wolf identifies the wrong trap.

• When you first encounter a group of enemies, there's a chance that they'll be friendly. If they are, and you attack, there's a chance your party (or just some members) will become evil. Conversely, if your party is evil and it declines to attack a "friendly" bunch, there's a chance that they'll become good. See this post for one of the consequences of this.

• When you enter combat, there's a chance that you surprised your enemy or that they surprised you. The party that surprises the other gets a free round of attacks. Oddly, if your party is the one surprising, mages can't cast spells in that first round.

Level 1

Level 1 of the dungeon (or tower; the levels work upwards instead of downwards) is dominated by an area shaped like a castle with four turrets in the corner. The castle is surrounded by "moat monsters" who provide a reliable 50 experience points each and were responsible for a lot of my grinding, particularly since they were susceptible to the KATINO sleep spell. Near the entrance to the level is a "lake" with an island that I can't reach. I'll have to check it out later when I have the MALOR spell.

Inside the castle are repeated fixed encounters with "Garian guards," who would be reasonably tough except for their tendency to run away in the middle of battle. At least one such group drops a pouch of gems every time I defeat them. I don't know if this is a quest item or just something to sell.

Why?! You're winning!

The castle culminates in a message from L'Kbreth that "neither good nor evil alone can triumph here." This is an indicator of the game's little gimmick: some levels are only accessible to some alignments. I don't know if the entire party has to be of that alignment, just a majority, or just one of the characters, and I don't know how the game treats neutral characters on those special floors. Beyond the message, however, are three staircases, two of which kick my entirely good-aligned party (save one neutral thief) back to the town. The third one lets me up to Level 2. At some point, I'm going to have to create new characters or somehow switch the alignments of my existing ones.

This is about as far as I got in my first attempt to play Llylgamyn back in 2010. Shortly after this, my entire party was killed, presumably on the last square I mapped of Level 2, and I gave it up. I look forward to finishing it this time. It might take a few weeks and a few posts in between MegaTraveller and other games.

Wizardry: Won! (Seriously!)

Wow. Sit down for this one. I just won Wizardry. Trust me, I'm as surprised as you are. I thought it would take all night. My characters were only Level 11--I didn't even have the top level of spells yet.

I know it's a little hard to believe, but there it is.

The first thing you have to understand about how this happened is that for all the mapping you do, it's frightfully simple to get to the end game. Once you have something called a blue ribbon, which which lets you use the elevators, you can go all the way down to Level 9 in about 15 moves. And once one party has the ability to get the blue ribbon, it can get multiple copies of it, holding some in reserve with dummy characters for new parties. Fortunately, that's what I did.

After you get to Level 9, it's exactly five moves and one battle to get to the chute that dumps you down to Level 10. From there, in theory, you make your way through the level to the evil wizard Werdna.

How did I win the game so fast? It was all thanks to my useless, stupid thief. You see, the monsters on Level 9 aren't all that hard, and some of them are giants, which give absurd amounts of experience points for little effort. After I achieved level 11 with my characters (which took almost all day), I figured I'd just hang out on Level 9 slaying giants until I reached level 15.

Well, I accidentally wandered onto the invisible chute to Level 10. I was going to head for the nearest teleporter (Level 10 is full of them) to return myself to the town, but I was attacked immediately by a party consisting of one priest. I dealt with him with no problem.

The priest left a chest, and my idiotic thief identified the trap on the chest as a poison needle, so I tried to disarm it. As usual, my thief was wrong--the trap on the chest was a teleporter. Teleporter traps, as you might expect, teleport you to a random place on the same level. In my case, it teleported me directly into the lair of Werdna!

Werdna came at me with a vampire lord and three vampires. I started attacking him with everything I had. By the time I realized I might win, and thought to record it, I was halfway through the battle, but the video below shows the rest.

At 00:25, I kill the remaining vampires with some high-level spells, leaving only Werdna. I assailed him with fighters and powerful area effect spells. There are a lot of pauses in here as I try to figure out the best spells to use. Werdna whacks me with a MADALTO at 01:30, killing two of my characters, but at that time he's pretty weak, and my bishop kills him with a very weak MOLITO. I get the Amulet of Werdna.

At 02:25, you see me try to raise one of my dead characters--it never feels right to win the game when some of your characters are dead--but as usual it goes wrong and he turns to ash. Then I spend about a minute trying to figure out how to get off the level before I realize that I have to use the Amulet of Werdna to teleport myself. I haven't used teleport yet--it's one of the last spells you get, and I never got it--so it took me some time to figure it out. But ultimately I return to the castle and get the coveted "you won" screen at 03:50.

For reasons I don't understand, only two of my characters are around at this point, and I spent a few seconds trying to heal the others before saying screw it, I won the game. And I never had to map Level 10. As much as I'd like to do that and get those last spell levels--I really wanted to have the experience of clearing out multiple groups of monsters at one time with a TILTOWAIT spell--I know that upon my first death, I'd get frustrated and move on--so I think I'll do that preemptively.

Closing Thoughts

It helps that there's only one dungeon in Wizardry and the dungeon is relatively simple to navigate. If Wizardry had been the size of, say, Might and Magic VII or Neverwinter Nights and insisted on permanent death with no reloading, I wouldn't have lasted very long.

As I said in my introductory post, I like games that are a little difficult. And when they aren't difficult enough, I make them more difficult by forcing myself to save only once per screen/level or something like that. But Wizardry goes a bit too far. I'm glad that its attitudes towards death and saving did not propagate to later CRPGs.

But let's give Wizardry the credit that it deserves. It is, as far as I can tell, the first CRPG to feature:

• Multiple characters in a party
• Experience points and levels the way we think of them in CRPGs today
• Multiple foes at the same time
• A complex magic system (on both the sending and the receiving ends!)
• Separate spells for mages and priests
• Tactical combat
• Multiple types of items--weapons, armor, helms, accessories--that you can find and wield.
• Items that must be identified
• Cursed items
• A full list of D&D-style races and classes
• Classes restricted based on ability scores
• Alignments (I could be wrong about this)
• The ability to change classes (which I didn't do)

 

Many of these features, of course, are derived from the pen-and-paper role-playing games (primarily Dungeons & Dragons) that existed in the era, but that's the point: Wizardry proved that complex D&D style role-playing could be adapted to a computer environment.

As a landmark in the history of CRPGs, it was fun and interesting to play. I'm not sorry I did. But neither am I sorry I played it only once.

On to Telengard.

One Last Edit

I was closing out my map file, and I suddenly realized why the architecture of Level 9 struck me as so weird: the creator of the game put his initials in the map: RJW. I think I remember something like this in Might and Magic I.

Wizardry: Battle Tactics

It's the dying that gets you in this game. If you could avoid dying--if you could save before battles and re-load if they went poorly--then I'm convinced you could beat Wizardry in a single long day of playing (I say this without having attempted Level 10 yet). We're only talking about ten 20x20 dungeon levels, after all. But without cheating, Wizardry is a real nail-biter. Some review, with new material I've discovered since then:

• The game saves your progress for you. There's no way to "reload" after a bad battle.
• If one character dies in combat, you either have to raise him with the DI spell or haul him back up to the surface to get raised at the temple.
• If you use the DI spell, there's a chance it will fail, turning your character to ash, requiring you to pay even more to get him resurrected. I say "there's a chance," but in fact DI has not worked a single time I have tried to use it. I finally just gave up. Every death requires a trip to the surface.
  
• There's a spell called KADORTO that allows you to do your own resurrection, but if it fails, your character is gone for good. Not worth the risk, especially since DI never works.
  
• If your entire party is killed, you have to send a search party down into the dungeons to retrieve their bodies. Problem is, most deaths will occur at locations of fixed battles, so your relief party will have to fight the same battle that wiped out your first party. You therefore have to have relief characters as strong as the original party.
• If your relief party is similarly wiped out, you're screwed. It's back to Level 1 with a brand new party.

The specter of permanent death consequently makes Wizardry the most tactical game I have ever played. You can't half-ass any battle because, trust me on this, you really, really don't want to die. This means that you have to carefully contemplate every action.

Consider this screen shot from the beginning of a battle.


As with every battle, my goal is to wipe out these foes while minimizing damage to myself. There are two other considerations to add to the mix:

• My spellcasters have a limited number of spells. You only replenish spells when you revisit the surface (which is kind of a pain in the neck). So you want to use as few spells as possible in each battle, saving your high-level spells for the battles that really need them.
• For a few rounds, I won't know what groups 1 and 3 are. The "mean in leather" are some kind of thief class and the "men in armor" are some kind of samurai or fighter class--I can tell this easy enough from the pictures. But I don't know what levels they are or, hence, how powerful they are.

So how do I approach this? My first characters, Karsa and Gruntle, are fighters, and as such they can pretty much just attack. But who should I attack first?

Crokus is a thief. His options are really just attack and parry. His hit points are quite low, so perhaps I should parry this battle, although I hate to lose out on the chance to make an attack.

Itkhovian is my priest. He can't attack, since he's not in the first three ranks, but here are a lot of things he can do, and all of them seem like good options. First, he could cast a healing spell on Crokus and limit the odds that Crokus will get killed this round. Or he could cast MANIFO to try to paralyze one of the three groups. I could also have him cast MONTINO to silence the arch mages, but if I'm more concerned about the fighters perhaps I should have him cast BAMATU to lower my party's armor class. Or I could ask him to cast LATUMAPIC to identify the monsters, but I'll probably identify them automatically next round anyway.

Tattersail is a mage. Almost certainly the best use of her is to cast a spell that damages all members of a group. The question is: what level do I want to cast? MAHALITO does 4-24 damage, LAHALITO 6-36, and MADALTO 8-64. I have fewer of the high level ones, so I don't want to waste them. But I also don't want to cast an underpowered spell and leave a group of six archmages alive to cast the same spells against me.

Feather Witch, finally, is a bishop, meaning that she has both mage and priest spells but at lower levels. Good options for her are KATINO, which attempts to sleep a group, MOGREF, which reduces everyone's armor class, or MORLIS, which makes monsters easier to hit. She can also cast one or two MAHALITOs, so perhaps I should use her for that.

In this case, I decided that the archmages were the top priority, but I'd try to wipe them out with spells. The "men in armor," if high-level, could do some serious damage, but the "men in leather" were probably thieves and low priority. I had Tattersail MADALTO the archmages, told Itkhovian to paralyze the fighters, and had Feather Witch MAHALITO the archmages just in case some survived Tattersail. Gruntle and Karsa attacked the thieves while Crokus parried.

I forgot to take screen shots of the rest of the battle, but basically Itkhovian's paralyze only worked on a couple of the fighters. Crokus, despite his parrying, was killed by the fighters. Tattersail's spell did its trick and killed all of the mages, meaning Feather Witch's spell was wasted--I should have had her heal Crokus instead. In the next two rounds, I finished off the thieves and fighters and headed up to the surface to raise Crokus.

It's not only in battle that tactics come into play. The aftermath of every battle involves an agonizing decision about whether I should try to open the chest or ignore it. On one hand, if I don't open it, I won't get any better equipment (gold isn't a problem any more), but on the other hand, there's a really good chance that my worthless thief will either misidentify or fail to disarm the trap. The possible consequences of this are:

• Everybody gets poisoned by a gas bomb (requiring, yes, a trip back up to the surface)
• My entire party gets wiped out by an exploding box trap
• Crokus, Itkhovian, or Tattersail are taken out of commission by a crossbow bolt, a priest blaster, or a mage blaster, respectively
• A teleport trap tosses my characters into part of the dungeon I haven't mapped, and therefore don't know the way back to the elevator to the surface (very dangerous; the way back to the surface is a constant lifeline for me)
• An alarm trap summons more parties of monsters

I've learned not to even try to open chests when my party is weak.

Since I blogged about Wizardry last time, I lost both my main party and my relief party and had to start all over. It's not as bad as it sounds. Mapping took longer than actually playing, and with the maps already done, I just need to build up my character levels. There are a couple of ghosts on level 1 that give a lot of experience while doing very little damage, so I've basically been killing the ghosts over and over while doing other things in the background.

My last party died on Level 9 and I had almost finished mapping it. I actually did touch Level 10--the last level--when I got dumped there by an invisible chute, but a teleporter brought me immediately back up the castle. The lower levels started to introduce a lot of nastiness, including dead-magic zones, pit traps that did serious damage, level-draining monsters, and constant teleporters. For someone who likes mapping as much as I do, teleporters are a constant annoyance.

My plan for now is to carefully build my characters up to level 15, then finish mapping Level 9 of the dungeon and try my luck against Werdna. I'm rotating my characters again, with three complete parties this time, so it will take a while, but if I keep at it all night (read the name of my blog again), I still might be able to win this thing by tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Wizardry: Making Progress

Yay! After 20 hours of playing, I can start my quest!

I can't fully decide why I'm still playing Wizardry (although perhaps the title of my blog is a bit of a hint). It's a great example of an early CRPG, sure, and as I've mentioned before, I like mapping on a grid. But it's been a while since I've had what you might call "fun." Am I really going to insist on playing this all the way to the end?

When I last blogged, I was struggling with Level 3 of the dungeon and in particular the ninjas that kept decapitating my characters with one blow. I spent all my money raising these characters and was short on funds, so I decided to spend a while on earlier levels building experience so that my priest would finally get the DI (restore life) spell and be able to raise characters himself. Fortunately, there's this little nook on Level 1 where you can repeatedly search and encounter one or two "Murphy's Ghosts" (I wonder if there's a story behind the name). They're hard to hit, but do very little damage themselves, and they reward you with a reasonable amount of experience. After I finally slaughtered an entire legion of them, I had not only the DI spell but, at last, the LATUMOFIS spell, which cures poison.

Well, anyway, joke's on me. While the DI spell does occasionally raise your dead characters, equally as often it fails and turns them to ash! You then have to spend absurd amounts of money fully resurrecting them from the ash state. I nearly deleted the game at this point.

Fortunately, I persevered, and finished mapping Levels 3 and 4. A few important things happen on Level 4:

• You have an inescapable encounter with a party consisting of two high-level fighters, two high-level mages, two high-level priests, and one high-level ninja.

Although things seem to be going ominously for me at this point, I actually won this encounter.

• If you can get by this encounter, your money woes are over, because one of your slain foes carries a "Ring of DEATH!" (yes, the exclamation point is part of its name) which sells for 250,000 gold.

God knows why a cursed ring that kills you is worth so much.

• On the other side of this encounter, you reach the end of the "proving grounds" and receive your quest from Lord Trebor, the screen shot of which I posted at the beginning of this entry.
  

Not having to worry any more about how to pay for resurrection is a bit of a relief, as is not having to climb all the way up to the town every time one of my characters gets poisoned. I've been able to map the rest of Level 4 and most of Level 5. It's probably a bad idea, but I've stopped rotating my characters, too, since I no longer encounter battles in which my entire party is wiped out (and is unable to flee).

On the bad side, there's a certain paucity of valuable equipment in this game. Almost halfway through the levels, the best weapon my party has is a sword+1. And my worthless thief still trips practically every trap.

On the latest level, I started encountering shades, which drain your levels. Until now, I thought poison was the most annoying effect. Unlike with, say, Dungeons & Dragons games, there's no spell to restore your lost levels. God, I hate that.

Finally, I'll mention that a little late in the game, I figured out why I'd bother to carry around scrolls of HALITO (flame) and KATINO (strength) when my mages can cast these spells about 20 times. It turns out that when you stumble upon an encounter and you surprise the monsters, your spellcasters can't cast any spells for the first round, in which the monsters can't act. However, they can use magical items. I wish I'd realized this ages ago.

Having typed all of this, I have a feeling I'm getting way too much into the minutiae of the game to be of any interest to anyone reading this blog. If I'm wrong, let me know. I'm going to try to make a push to win it over the next few days. If all goes according to plan, I'll be back on Saturday with the good news.

Wizardry: Going Slow, Mapping

I'm really having trouble picturing this encounter.

I hope no one feared that my lack of posting this week signaled a waning interest in this project. It was, rather, a result of some unexpected business travel arriving right after some expected business travel. It's one thing to play games when you ought to be working on the quarterly report; it's another thing to do so when your colleagues are waiting for you in the bar.

One thing is certain: Wizardry isn't going to go as fast as Ultima I. I have finished mapping two of what I guess are 10 levels, which sounds like I'm about 20% done, but I have a feeling it's going to get harder as I press forward. A few things I've discovered:

• My strategy of rotating my characters is working well. On the couple of occasions in which my entire party has been wiped out, it's been relatively easy (albeit slow and expensive) to rescue and resurrect them. Hopefully this deals with the permanent death problem through the rest of the game.
• Getting poisoned gets old fast. My useless rogue seems to trip every poison needle trap, and there are several creatures that poison you. My priest hasn't acquired the cure poison spell yet, so every poisoning means a trip back up to the surface. Thankfully, paralysis wasn't the problem that it used to be.
• Your characters age in this game, when they change classes or spend a week resting in the inn. I'm guessing there's a danger (if somewhat remote) if getting too old and dying. I remember that happening decades ago in Might and Magic. I can't think of other games where the characters get older.
• When you embark from the castle, your spellcasters have a certain allotment of spells per level. As far as I can tell, the only way to refresh this allotment is to return to the castle. This forces you to "budget" your spells as you adventure because there's no "resting" in the dungeon.
• Leveling is a bit odd. You have to rest in the inn to gain levels, and when you do your statistics change--not always for the better. Sometimes you gain strength but lose vitality, or gain agility but lose intelligence. I'm not sure how the game decides what you gain and lose. One theory is that it's based on what you used (e.g., someone who "(f)ights" a lot gains strength), but that seems awfully advanced for a CRPG of this era.

What I really want to talk about tonight is mapping, though. It's one of the things I enjoy the most about old CRPGs and one of the things I miss the most when playing new ones. It would of course be functionally impossible to map Oblivion or Baldur's Gate without the automap, but manual mapping works great in these older, "tile-based" games.

Wizardry levels are arranged on a 20 x 20 Cartesian grid and the DUMAPIC spell tells you where you are on the x- and y-axes. Games that I remember sharing these square, limited grids are the "gold box" Dungeons & Dragons games and the Might and Magic series through #5. This makes mapping them somewhat easy. As I posted before, I'm using Excel to draw the maps on the computer screen, although it's been hard to find a border style that makes a good door. I use letters to indicate special encounters.

Level 2 of the Wizardry dungeon.

If I recall correctly (and I could be wrong), the Might and Magic games used every square, so if you found yourself walling off an area, it was a sure sign of a secret door. Wizardry doesn't seem to use every square, although walled-off areas are sometimes signs of secret doors (I didn't have any on this level). If you have a walled-off area, you have to test it by (k)icking at every wall square around its perimeter (something I have fun picturing my characters doing). If, having done so, you can't find a way in, it's a good sign that those squares aren't used. I color them in at that point. But there's always a chance that some alternate staircase or teleporter will toss you into that area (perhaps with a one-way secret door for an exit).

The maps in Wizardry also have another odd characteristic: they double back on themselves. If you look at the one above, space 0,10 is theoretically at the westernmost extent of the map. But there's an opening to the west. Take it, and you find yourself at square 19,10. Without the DUMAPIC spell, this would all be a little tough to figure out.

I suspect I'm going to run out of things to say about the game long before I win it, but I don't want to wait too long between postings. So here's a discussion topic for the next post: coming up with character names. How do you do it? Probably some of you can figure out where the names of my party at the top of this post came from, but this isn't my usual modus operandi.

Later edit: I was getting cocky, apparently. Level 3, in addition to featuring numerous pit traps, plays host to legions of ninjas who can decapitate your characters with a single blow. I've run out of money to use for resurrection, and it will take hours of killing low-level monsters to build up my finances again. I'm going to sleep on it, but Telengard (the next game on my list) is starting to look really good right now.

Wizardry: Dead Means Dead

In my introductory post, speaking about the difficulties of balancing CRPGs with my busy schedule, I wrote, "If my problem was that CRPGs were competing with my to do list, they would become part of my to do list." My success in this area was made manifest over the last few days. Traveling on both pleasure and business, I didn't have any time to play, let alone blog, and (absurdly) I started to worry about how far beind in CRPG playing I was falling. I'm back, thankfully, and continuing to try my hand at Wizardry.

Through some experimentation, I figured out how the game's "save" works. Basically, every time you end your session and leave the game, it saves whatever has happened to your party through that point, including if your entire party is dead. You cannot choose when to save and, therefore, when to reload, so death is more-or-less permanent (more on that in a sec). The really odd thing: Wizardry saves the game even if I force DOSBox to quit instead of leaving through the normal method. How does it do this? Isn't forcing DOSBox to quit essentially like killing the power?

Whatever the mechanism, the only way to preserve your save game, apparently, is to make a copy of the save file before you go adventuring. That way you can restore it if things go ill. That would be cheating, though, and cheating is against my rules.

But here's the thing that makes Wizardry unique among role-playing games: when your characters die, their bodies remain in the dungeon, and another party can "find" them! I discovered this quite by accident when my third party wandered into the room where the second party had been killed, chose to (I)nspect (I thought it was for secret doors) and found their brutalized corpses.

"Let's just check over here and see if there's any treas--....oh, yuck."

Apparently, I can recover these dead characters, get their equipment, and take their bodies up to the temple for resurrection. Unfortunately, this only helps to the extent that your new characters can survive long enough to reach the dead ones. And by that time they're probably about the same level as the dead ones, so you don't need the dead ones anymore anyway.

Still, a strategy becomes clear. I must create double the number of characters as the party will accommodate (6). Every time I leave the dungeon, I'll rotate a few out and a few more in, keeping their experience levels as equal as possible. That way, if one party is slaughtered, the other can go rescue them. Unlike Rogue, I won't need to keep starting over at level 1.

I thought you might be curious what the gameplay looks like, so I took a movie of about 4.5 minutes. When you see the cursor moving around, I'm not actually clicking on anything, of course--the game is all keyboard-driven. I'm just trying to give you a sense of what options I'm choosing.

I'll keep playing away at Wizardry and let you know what other cool things I find.

Wizardry: This Is Going to Take a While

Yeah, so Wizardry is a bit of a bitch. Here's what I've discovered bumbling my way through the first level:

• There's no real way to save the game. When you come out of the dungeon and return to the town, your characters are saved, but the dungeon itself is reset. There is no way to save your progress while in the dungeon. And here's the kicker: if your characters die, they die permanently. You cannot quit the game and reload to save them.
• When you encounter monsters, only your front three characters can directly engage them. The back characters can use spells, but they only get a couple of spells each at the first level, and these run out quickly. There doesn't seem to be any missile weapons in the game.
• Practically every chest is trapped, usually with a poison needle, and half the time my thief trips it and gets poisoned.
• The magic system is interesting. To cast a spell, you must type its name. Luckily I found some spell cards online.
• When you engage in combat, you tell the game what you want each of your characters to do in the next round, such as (f)ight, (p)arry, or cast a (s)pell. You then execute these actions all at once.
• There are fixed encounters at certain points on the map. Sometimes these encounters turn out to be with "friendly" monsters, but otherwise there is no way to avoid them.

 

I must admit, though, I'm a sucker for games that allow me to map on graph paper. I just enjoy making these maps and annotating what I find in each square. Lacking any graph paper, and not really wanting to carry it around with me, I hit upon the solution of using Excel to create the maps. I'm making each worksheet a level, and using the border options to draw the walls and doors.

Modern-day graph paper

You can see I didn't get very far. First trip out, I mapped the bottom corridor and killed some kobolds. So far, so good. I went back up to the surface to save and identify a piece of armor at the store. Second trip, I went back to the same place, got ambushed by two groups of "small humanoids," and all of my characters were slaughtered.

Party 1 about to enjoy its first--and only--successful battle

I generated a second party and had a little more luck, winning about six battles.


 
But none of my characters had even leveled before the inevitable happened:


 

Damn. This is a little discouraging. Well, when I have time I'll generate a third set of characters and try again. Having to buy the same equipment over and over is getting a little old, though.

I shouldn't even be playing this. I should be practicing crosswords. No more posts this weekend, and I mean it this time.

Game 5: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981)

And yet somehow I started playing without making a scenario disk.

At last: a multi-character game! First released in 1981, Wizardry would seem to be the precursor to all first-person multi-character games, like Bard's Tale and Might and Magic. I couldn't find an original manual for Wizardry, but this site gives a basic breakdown of the plot: Lord Trebor, the "mad overlord" of the title, has become obsessed with a powerful amulet that he briefly possessed, only to have it stolen by the evil wizard Werdna (one guess where those names came from). Werdna has fled to the depths of the dungeons beneath Trebor's castle. Trebor's heroes have managed to secure the first four levels of the dungeons but no one can survive below that; the first four levels, seeded with monsters and laced with traps, are the "proving grounds" of the title: a place where would-be heroes can demonstrate their worth to venture deeper into the dungeon and recover the amulet.

I spent a little time tonight making a party of six characters:

Yes, I know I could stand to be a little more clever with character names.

But this is as far as I got before sleep beckoned. When I return to the game, I may keep these characters or start over. I'm not sure I did it right.

Thanks to everyone who has followed my new blog during its first week. I will probably not post for a few days, as over the weekend I will be playing games of a different sort: I am going to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in New York City. Come next week, though, I'm back in the dungeons.