Legend: Getting Nowhere

My depressingly small map of the second dungeon.

               

The spell system described in hyperbolic terms by some of my commenters is indeed impressive, and it's made me think a bit about magic in general. This game treats magic as a series of effects, intensities of those effects, and systems for delivering those effects, and it's up to you to string them together into recipes that we think of as "spells." Most games just offer only the spells themselves. That's never made a lot of sense to me. If your Dungeons and Dragons wizard truly understands magic, he should be able to cast a "Double Bless" that increases the "to hit" rolls by 2. If he knows how to create fire, he ought to be able to mold it into a single small projectile or a large explosive ball, and in the latter case vary the size of the ball, not just cast a single ball of the same size and intensity every time. But he doesn't. He's like a cook who only knows how to make things from a set of defined recipes and can't figure out for himself even how to double or halve the ingredients, let alone how to add new ingredients.

I suppose this is explained in-universe by saying that the adventuring wizard isn't much of a researcher. He's on a quest--he doesn't have time to study and catalog spell effects. The only thing he can do is take the recipes developed by others and cast them exactly.

Oblivion offered something like Legend's approach to spellcasting. You could buy pre-determined recipes, but you could also make up your own, deciding for yourself the target of the effects, how far to extend them, and how to combine them. It was too bad Skyrim didn't keep the system.

              

Another key, another door. When will it all end?

           

However, there are a few problems with this system. First, the more effects you attach to a single spell, the less flexibility you really have. Sure, it's nice in theory to be able to craft a spell that first heals the caster, then casts "Anti-Magic" on everyone around the caster, then blasts the approaching enemy. But it's somewhat rare that I'm going to encounter a situation in which I need all those effects in that order. It's much more common to encounter situations in which I want just one of those effects independently. And since there's only a slight delay between casting, and mixing a complicated spell requires the same number of reagents as a bunch of individual spells, it hardly makes sense to combine multiple effects in one spell. Better make the spells individually and cast them in rapid succession when you need to.

The worse problem, however, is that the nature of the combat and movement systems makes it nearly impossible to do what you want with spells in combat. Consider these variables:

               

• Most rooms are small and offer little maneuverability.

• You cannot control what paths your characters take to destinations. You can only set destinations. Often, they are blocked from reaching them, give up, and just do their own thing.

• Characters can only move at square angles. And I'm not sure about this part, but from observing them, I think they can only change facing direction as part of a movement. So if a character kills an enemy and another one attacks him from behind, he can't just turn around. He has to walk forward into an empty square, turn around, and come back.

• You cannot exempt characters from negative spell effects.

• You cannot exempt enemies from positive spell effects.

• You cannot identify the enemies even by name, let alone by armor class, combat effectiveness, or magical capability.

             

These factors come together to create an utterly chaotic combat experience. Chaotic combat does not well-serve a spell system in which the spells must be carefully targeted. It's cool that I can cast a "Paralyze" spell that affects every enemy in a radius, but I'm almost never in a situation in which only enemies are in my radius. Similarly, it's theoretically useful that I can "rally" characters around a single character and then heal them all with a single spell--except there's virtually no way to avoid catching enemies in the healing effect. Any ranged spell is almost certain to hit an obstacle before it hits is intended target.

           

Mixing my first "Surround/Paralyze" spell.

             
Let's say I want to cast a targeted healing spell on a fellow party member. First, I have to identify the right character in the sea of combat. The "pause" option helps a little with that, I admit. Second, I have to hope that he's not behind any of the physical obstacles in the room. Then I have to find an unobstructed path from the caster to the character--no objects, room gaps, enemies, or other characters in between. I might try to maneuver the caster around the periphery of the room to get a clear shot, but while I'm doing that, the position of the enemies and characters in the melee is constantly changing. Also, the character I'm trying to move doesn't necessarily follow the clear, unobstructed path to the destination. She might just wander directly into the melee that I'm trying to avoid. At this point, enough time has passed that the original character is probably dead.

The same considerations are true of targeting enemies, with the additional consideration that I don't really know who to target. I don't want to waste my spells on trivial mooks, but I can't distinguish them from their harder leaders. I could try to watch them, but enemies are always moving and teleporting and whatnot, and the overall chaos of combat makes it difficult to track what any one enemy is doing. Maybe some of you will be better at it than I am. My colorblindness and general . . . whatever . . . make me less responsive to visual cues. Tell me that I'm facing a "ghoul," and I think, "Oh, hell. Those guys can paralyze. I'd better be prepared." But just show me an image of a ghoul that's barely distinguishable from every other undead image in the game, and I don't have the same reaction.

I just fought a large battle with what looked like a bunch of little guys in stocking caps. Some had green pants and some had blue pants. Was I supposed to carefully note which enemies were fighting which characters and write down "green pants=easy; blue pants=HARD!" If so, that's more effort than I'm willing to put in.

         

A reminder of what combat looks like. I can barely distinguish enemy from friend, let alone position characters carefully in such a cramped room, or identify a path from my spellcaster to a particular enemy that won't be blocked by another person.

          

Thus, I find I only get use out of a couple of spells: First, those that heal the caster. Since the runemaster has the smallest number of hit points, she's always in danger of dying, and a simple healing spell can keep that from happening. Second, I get some use of out of spells that affect the square directly in front of the caster. There's no targeting necessary with that one. As soon as you see that your runemaster is facing an enemy, you can cast "Damage" or "Paralysis" knowing that no one else will be hit. Third, a "Surround Speed" spell is a good option for when the enemies start entering the room, just before the party breaks up in whatever direction to go fight them. But that one's pretty expensive, reagent-wise, so I almost always make sure a combat is actually going to be hard (by someone dying) before I reload and cast it.

I do occasionally cast a "Surround" healing spell, figuring it's better to heal both my characters and the enemies than let the characters die. Beyond that, I don't know. Maybe there's something I'm missing? Maybe I just need more practice? I don't have all the runes yet, either. I should also point out that reagents aren't cheap, so the game doesn't encourage a lot of experimentation.

When I last wrote, I was in Fagranc, but I wasn't getting very far. I got tired of getting my ass kicked in every combat, so I decided to march all the way back to the starting point to see about buying more runes. I soon found that I couldn't even get back to the entrance of Fagranc without save-scumming. The random encounters kept overwhelming me. At last, I had to move carefully from one screen to the next, save if no random combat appeared, and reload if it did.

Back on the surface, I marched back to Treihadwyl and then to the mountains to the east. I attempted a couple of banner encounters along the way, but they were way too powerful for me. I notice that sometimes evil forces capture a city, but then good forces often liberate it again. I assume that the worst that happens is the enemy holds a city and I can't enter it until I can defeat the forces there or some other good army comes along and does it for me.

             

I would, but I can't.

          

I found The Ancient without much trouble, but his runes were way too expensive (especially after I spent most of my accumulated funds on bard songs). So I returned to Treihadwyl and grinded for a while, earning enough experience to get most of my characters to Level 4 and enough gold for all of the directional runes plus several new effects: "Speed," "Paralysis," and "Anti-Magic."

On the way back to Fagranc, I tried a few more banner combats and won a couple, although almost always with my runemaster dying. Fortunately, resurrection is free. It will be nice when I can afford the "Vivify" rune, but of course that won't help the runemaster herself, who needs to be alive to cast the spell.

Fagranc was a little easier on my return, but still not easy, and my reload count would horrify most of you.

Some other notes:

• The only guild, where you can level up, seems to be back in Treihadwyl. That's a little annoying, since I seem to be earning some solid experience in Fagranc.

• The game shares Dungeon Master's tendency to give you cool-sounding equipment and tell you nothing about what it does. I found a pair of "Chaos Gloves" that only my runemaster can equip. The only thing they seem to do is reduce her armor class by 2. Surely there must be more to them than that?

            

Of course, this entire game is chaos.

            

Fagranc is much like the first dungeon, though larger, where the purpose is to find the right sequence of keys to find the right sequence of doors. There are fewer puzzle rooms so far. One of them required me to step on a couple of pressure plates, but invisible squares throughout the room teleported my characters back to the beginning. I had to mentally remember the right path to avoid the squares--and still couldn't figure out any way to open the chest in the room, since it has a teleport square right in front of it. But there must be some way to open it because I'm out of keys and can't progress anywhere in the level.

         

The room in question.

          

I really feel like I'm getting nowhere with this game, which despite all my negativity has some good points. The economy is well-structured, for instance. I like the contrast between dungeon exploration and the strategy-game-like mechanics happening on the surface. And, of course, in a game where you could more effectively position your characters and target spells, the spell system would be wildly innovative and fun.

Time so far: 10 hours