Yendorian Tales: I'm a Miner, not a Fighter

I hear that copper is going to be worthless soon.

           

Yendorian Tales has either a brilliant early-game economy or an infuriating one. I spent most of this session trying to decide. I spent the entirety of this session trying to train my characters to the levels they had achieved before ultimately having to admit defeat. Normally, I'd excoriate a game for making leveling so expensive that you functionally can't do it, but here I think it's meant to be a strategic choice. Most RPGs that require "training" to level make it cost such a trivial amount that it might as well cost nothing. The authors of Tales wanted it to compete with equipment upgrades, attribute boosts, and other ways to spend cash.

          

The cost of education just keeps going up.

        

To my mind, a game with a perfect economy would have:

      

• A lot of ways to make money, roughly proportional to risk and effort.

• A lot of ways to spend money, none obviously better than the others, so that how and where to spend becomes a strategic or role-playing choice.

• An open economy, so that if you make bad spending choices, you haven't put yourself in a "walking dead" situation. 

       

So far, these are the valuable things you can spend money on:

      

• Weapon and armor upgrades. I still don't have the best shields for sale in the first town.

• Training characters to level up.

• Potions with a variety of effects.

• Mining equipment, including torches and tools, to offset what you lose while mining.

• Turning regular gear into magical gear, and increasing the enhancement of existing magical gear.

• One-time-only permanent attribute boosts. (I've only found one of these so far, which I paid for during this session thinking it would increase sale prices. I assume others exist in other towns.)

     

Time to hit the bars!

      

• Lodging for the night to fully heal wounds and restore mana.

• Maps of part of the world.

• Processed Nuore, vital for casting spells.

• Horses. 

   

As for ways to make money:

   

• Financial rewards attached to quests, as discussed below.

• Fighting monsters for both direct cash and incidental cash when you sell their loot.

      

My accumulated loot after a visit to Thieves' Guild.

       

• Mining for ore and fixing mine tracks, both of which are slow but endlessly repeatable.

• Gambling, but as we saw last time, either at poor odds or with low betting caps. 

• Selling Ancient Scrolls, keys, and magical artifacts to the archivist in the Athaneum. (I just found my first Ancient Scroll in a random treasure mound during this session.)

    

Cha-ching.

     

Through either careful testing or luck, the authors managed to hit the mining balance just right. If ore were just a little easier to find, or sold for a bit more, or if picks didn't break so often, mining could easily wreck the economy. But like a good farming or crafting system in a modern RPG, the effort/reward ratio is calibrated so well that even though it provides reward for virtually no risk, it isn't the obvious thing to do.

          

I never thought I'd be angry to see my characters ready for the next level.

        

I have to praise the gambling system as well, with the caveat that it's easy for an unscrupulous player to save-scum his way to riches. The developers shouldn't have allowed saving in the town. They put the gambling hall at the end of a long, twisty building that takes a few minutes to reach. If the player had to reload from outside every time he lost a game of "Twenty-One," he'd probably think twice about walking all the way back to the tables instead of just heading for the mine.

      

In any event, as in real life, there is an enormous attraction to gambling. More than once during this session, I was in Helsingor (the town with the casino), I had leveled up one miner, and I had discovered that I was just a few hundred gold pieces shy of leveling up the other one. Knowing I could walk a few buildings away, drop 1,000 pieces on the table, and win enough to prevent me from having to come back to the city (for now) was hard to resist. 

        

Outfitting myself at the mining shop.

       

Everything in the early game tells you to head for the mines. The governor of Saccate specifically asks for help clearing monsters out of the mines, and the first town is full of miners who sell tools, torches, and carts. There's even a mining shop that will sell ore. All you have to do is go north. I, of course, went south, visited the Athaneum before the developers probably intended, then visited the Thieves' Guild, and got into an unending cycle of having enough experience but not enough gold for the next level.

   

The Thieves' Guild is a reasonably good place to grind, since its enemies (rogues, pickpockets, etc.) have weapons and armor that can be sold for a lot of cash. The problems with this approach are:  (a) thieves never drop Nuore, so I depleted my supply very fast; and (b) while grinding against them for money, you're simultaneously grinding against them for experience, which keeps you in the trap.

   

Still, my attempts to grind my way out of the problem had one positive outcome: While on my umpteenth trip through the guild to pay for training for my thief, I happened to notice an object on the wall that looked different from the other tapestries and wall decorations. It was the stolen painting from Helsingor. When I returned it to Olga in that city, she gave me 1,500 gold pieces—and enough experience for another level. Goddamn.

       

The thieves should have considered putting more than one work of art on their walls.

           

A couple of interesting things happened when the characters hit Level 4. First, their classes changed. My two miners  became "fighters." My rogue became a "thief" (I'm not sure that's better). My two cleric/pupils and my wizard/pupil lost their "pupil" status. I wonder whether there are further "promotions" at higher levels.

    

More importantly, the first time someone hit Level 4 (in this case, my rogue), I triggered a bit of a cut scene. It began with a pop-up message:

         

This was a bit of a bonus. Getting out of the Thieves' Guild can be perilous.

      

I was in the Thieves' Guild at the time, so I guess this weird train of people marched all the way to the Athaneum. There, we assembled in the Great Hall, where according to earlier dialogue, the wizard Zamora was due to give a big presentation.

        

I feel like "Zamora" ought to be a woman. Maybe "Zamoro" for a man? "Zamorax?"

        

Zamora began speaking, noting that lately, monsters had been becoming "stronger and more numerous." He said that he had found a solution to the problem. He produced a black orb and said that "once enchanted," it would "vanquish all evil creatures from Yendor." This is the kind of thing that you just go along with in an RPG, where "evil" is a real thing, but that would set off all kinds of alarm bells if it happened in real life.

   

Suddenly, an invisible figure appeared in the hall. Okay, that's an oxymoron. A figure that could only be seen as a vague outline appeared in the hall. It cast a spell that disabled Zamora, levitated Zamora's orb over to itself, and disappeared.

    

That's awfully lazy. You're standing like three feet away.

           

The Governor of Saccate jumped up to quiet the terrified audience, promising that the healers were on their way and the number of guards would be increased. "If any of you is courageous enough to set forth and return the orb," he said, we could join him and the other governors in the Council Chambers upstairs.

    

We did so immediately, of course. The Council is made up of the governors of Saccate, Port Hope, and New Devon, the latter two of which I have not yet visited. NPC dialogue confirms there are only three council members, but I note:

    

• There are 13 seats at their table.
• Where there ought to be a fourteenth seat, there is instead an empty gap. 

       

Were there once more Council members? Was there a fourteenth city, now lost? Am I just overthinking it? Time will tell.

     

"Why is there a missing chair?" "We don't talk about that!!"

        

Each of the governors gave us 1,000 gold pieces to help cover our expenses, but they had no leads or clues. So I headed downstairs to see Zamora in the hospital. All he could say was: "Talk to Norman."

          

"Tell him to clear my browser history."

      

Norman is Zamora's assistant, the smart-ass who gave me a picture of a musical note when I inquired about the NOTES he took for his master. This time, he had more to say, including the fact that Zamora kept a journal in his room.

   

I went to Zamora's room and found his journal—helpfully glowing—on a shelf. Unfortunately, it was locked.

     

I might have found the missing stool, too.

        

I talked to a few other people on the second floor and noticed that some dialogue had changed since the incident with Zamora. I was mildly curious what the workers preparing the Great Hall for Zamora's presentation would say now that the presentation was over. One of them, Conrad, after recapping the events I had just witnessed, told me that he saw something shiny fall out of Zamora's cloaks as the healers carried him away. "If I was going to sell something like that," he said. "I would probably try to sell it in the Thieves' Guild." I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn't spoken to Conrad. I probably would have visited every other city in the game, taking notes, fighting monsters, leveling up, never getting a bead on the main quest.

       

We already covered this. An "invisible person" cannot "show up."

      

Sure enough, I discovered—after fighting through several more groups of thieves—the Thieves' Guild shop was now selling a Golden Key. I bought it, used it on the journal, and got the following message:

         

Wait, why do we want to disable the Orb?

      

I had already met the Hermit in a previous session, but instead of returning to him now, I finally decided to check out the mines. The map shows two entrances near Saccate. I went to the northwest one first. The designers did some fun things with the graphics to suggest elevation even when the party is still walking on a flat surface. This gimmick continued in the mines, too.

         

Walking "up" to the mine's entrance.

       

The mines had a lot of insect enemies, including caves in which we fought fixed battles and could "clear" them. It reminded me quite like The Magic Candle in this regard.

       

Aside from these battles, the primary reason to visit the mines is to mine ore from the walls. You need to have at least one mining tool to do this, but the more you have, the more characters can mine, which increases the yield. You also repair bits of broken track with the same tools; the game keeps track of how many sections you've repaired and rewards you back at the mining shop. Both broken tracks and ore are randomized every time you leave and enter the caves, so you could do this effectively indefinitely—except that the mining tools occasionally break. You want to enter the caves with dozens of them, which is a non-trivial up-front investment.

    

I became somewhat interested in figuring out the overall mining "yield." This is tough because it's tough to determine the most optimal way to search the mines, plus some walls never seem to yield certain types of ore. But to take an example, if I just entered the mined, searched the nearest wall until I found something, and exited (which resets the mine), I calculated from 50 sample runs that I would find ore about 50% of the time in my first search and about 75% of the time within two searches. The average yield per search (accounting for finding nothing sometimes) was 10.5 units of lead, 2.0 units of iron, and 4.7 units of copper. Lead and iron sell for one gold piece each and copper sells for two, so that means the average search produces about 20 gold pieces' worth of ore. It takes maybe 4 seconds to enter, search, and exit, and there's a roughly 6% chance that the mining tools will break (cost: 20 gold), reducing the average yield to around 18.8 gold pieces. If I did this boring task for about half an hour, I'd have roughly enough gold to get my party members from Level 3 to Level 4. Again, you can see how a slight change in these variables would either break the economy or make mining not worth the effort at all.

      

One of the fixed "room" battles.

          

Anyway, I fully searched the two non-hermit mines. I don't know that I found everything; the caves are big enough that you could easily miss a chunk. But following the right wall all the way around, I cleared out all of the fixed battles that I could find. The Governor of Saccate didn't acknowledge this victory in any way. I'm not sure that the opening quest to "save the miners" can be completed at all, given that plenty of random battles still spawn.

    

Miscellaneous notes:

 

• The game has the laziest approach to borders that I've ever seen. The land doesn't end at the water's edge. There isn't an impenetrable mountain range. It just . . . ends.

      

What's beyond the fog?

       

• In addition to paying 8 gold pieces per section of repaired track, each party member gets 4 experience points.

     

Banging spikes into track, fighting monsters . . . it's all the same thing, really.

       

• The game frequently glitches when I (L)ook at random items. For instance, looking at a particular skull in a mine caused all the graphics to go haywire. The party icon changed to a mining pick and walls disappeared. 

• Many sections of the mines require a mining cart to navigate. A party that runs out of mining tools could be trapped behind sections of broken track. If the player saved the game, I'm not sure that there's any recourse.

• Trying to pick up a crate in one part of a mine (a crate that the party cannot pick up) somehow triggered a battle with two dragons. There was no chance I was going to win that. 

           

Hey, I didn't think the crate was that important.

       

When I was done exploring the mines, I traded in the ore and finally had enough money to finish leveling my characters to Level 5. My spellcasters have a lot of spells I haven't explored yet, but I'm wary of doing so until I build up a greater stock of Nuore. You can supposedly find Nuore in the mines and pay to have it processed, but I haven't found any yet except from battles with insects.

     

Sure. We're not trying to save the world or anything.

      

I capped this session by re-visiting the hermit in his cave to the northeast of Thieves' Guild. When I showed him Zamora's journal, he said he'd help—but only if I killed a wyvern to the north of his cave. We'll continue with that exciting adventure next time.

   

Time so far: 10 hours

   

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