The Bard's Tale III: Swan Song

He's going to make me play Bard's Tale III...forever. (Screenshot courtesy of YouTube user girldrinkdrunk1.)

The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate

United States

Interplay (developer), Electronic Arts (publisher)

Released 1988 for Apple II and Commodore 64; 1990 for DOS; 1991 for Amiga; 1992 for PC-98

Date Started: 1 February 2011
Date Ended: 4 March 2012

Total Hours: 42 (not completed)
Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: 33
Ranking at Game #368: 240/368 (65%)

          

I'm departing from this game just as it admittedly started to get more tolerable. Thanks to ronaldsf's comment pointing me to the right patch, I finally had a version where I could type in spell names. This made a huge difference. I should mention that the patch brought some problems, though, including text appearing in the wrong locations.

The second dimension, Gelidia, was shaping up to be a little more interesting. Inside a ramshackle outpost, long-abandoned, I found a journal, written by someone named Alendar, that detailed the fall of the realm via some kind of invasion. The invasion apparently succeeded because their hero, Hawkslayer (my NPC from Arboria) was absent, and their god, Lanatir, was killed in the first wave of attacks. The journal mentions that Lanatir's sphere and wand (which I was sent here to find) are safe in his tomb behind a series of wards. Alendar died after using all his energies to cast a freezing spell over Gelidia to destroy the invading horde.

This isn't the first example of a expository journal entry in a CRPG, but I can't honestly remember where the first one did appear. They're a bit of a trope. The Elder Scrolls is famous for them, even when they barely make sense (e.g., a paper journal having survived 1000 years in a damp tomb). It adds a new dimension to The Bard's Tale III by actually instilling the land with a bit of lore.

Things got even better after that. The world's one dungeon, the Ice Keep, featured a series of warded doors with strange messages on them:

I wasn't sure what to do with them, so I mapped the keep, including an entire level that had not a single message or special encounter--I walked around it twice, just to be sure--before I realized the solution was in the journal:

The solution was to cast a series of spells against the warded doors. After some trial and error, I figured out that "bright light" referred to the "mage flame" spell; "loud thunder" resolved as "shock sphere" (that one took a long time); "whispered terror term" was "fear"; and "flaming guide" was "summon fire elemental." Finally, the note to "join the wall" was a hint to cast "spell bind" on it.

Unfortunately, by the time I was done with all the trial and error, my spell points were so low that I had to go outside and wait around for hours while they recharged. It literally took all day. I left the computer running while I went about my business, and when I returned about 6 hours later, the spell points were almost back to maximum. This is not a game that rewards experimentation.

With my spell point arsenal available again, I re-entered the tower, went through the opened portal, and explored four levels of a "black tower"--running away from almost every combat--before I finally encountered the dungeon's bad guys, a pack of wizards. They proved difficult enough that I had to blast away with my MAMA spell to defeat them, cast HEAL once, and turn a bunch of stoned characters back to flesh. By the time I made it out with a "black lens," my spell points were nearly exhausted again, and that's when I decided to call it a game. I honestly don't know if I'm missing something, but there doesn't seem to be any way to buy spell points, nor any faster way to recharge. The plot points in Gelidia were interesting, but only in comparison to what the game had offered so far, which was essentially nothing at all.

Like many games on my list, The Bard's Tale III might have been reasonably fun to play, map, and win when I was 15, didn't have any other responsibilities, and only bought one game every three or four months. It isn't addictive enough for modern gamers. Despite an interesting premise, the worlds are too empty, the gameplay too long, the mapping too unrewarding. I've quit a lot of games because of bad interfaces, or absurd difficulty, or inadequate documentation; this is one of the few that I've quit because I was just bored.

I admit to having some interest in the dimension where you travel to various cities on Earth, but that's the sixth world, so I wasn't willing to stick it out. Scorpia (whose review I reference below) barely makes any note of it, so I'm guessing it's not as interesting as it sounds.

Understanding that I can only rate the part of the game I played, let's see how it stacks up:

1. Game World. The premise of the series hasn't changed since the first game. In The Bard's Tale, you faced an evil wizard; in The Bard's Tale II, you faced a tougher evil wizard; in The Bard's Tale III, you face an evil god. In all three, these characters just sort-of exist; they're not explained in the context of any larger pantheon, and you don't really get anything about the history of the world or its people. In this game, you travel to different dimensions, but it's a little unclear why, how they're linked, or really how they're different from the dimension you start in (except for one case in which you visit Earth). The monsters and characters are just random names. The outdoor maps are extremely small--laughably so, given that they double back on themselves, and there isn't enough stuff in them to register any changes to your quest or progress. I was a little intrigued by some of the lore in the other dimensions, and I wanted to see what would happen with Hawkslayer, but it wasn't enough. If the game had rewarded my progress with the restoration of Roscoe's Energy Emporium, I might have stuck around a bit longer. Score: 4.
 

The only background info you get on this game.

 
2. Character Creation and Development. The creation process is no better or worse than the average CRPG of the era. You select a race, class, sex, and name. I give the game some credit for some interesting classes, and for featuring more classes, and with different strengths and weaknesses, than you have the ability to accommodate. The races and attributes are essentially the standard D&D set. My biggest problem, as I've discussed, is that leveling is unrewarding. You're expected to bring in characters from The Bard's Tale II who are already at around Level 30-40, and if you don't have them, there's a starter dungeon to get you there. At that point, you have all your abilities and spells and there's nowhere else to develop except to add a few more hit points and spell points to your pool. Like most CRPGs of the era, the encounters don't differ based on race or class, although apparently you do need a thief at some point in the game to sneak up and backstab a guy who's immune to spells and stays out of melee range.

This is a sign of a broken character-development system.

I'm going to give an extra point for something that I didn't actually experience in the game: the option to change fighters to the "geomancer" class, which doesn't come up until the fourth dimension. Doing so allows you to keep using the same weapons and armor, but you lose all your special attacks and, for bards, bard songs. The spells in this class seem almost worth the effort, including the ability to "trap zap" an entire dungeon level, an alert for anti-magic zones, and lots of mass-damage spells. I suspect I would have transferred my paladin or bard. Score: 5.

3. NPC Interaction. This hasn't changed since the previous two games. There are no true "NPCs," just occasional encounters with people in their respective squares, to whom you can say, at best, yes or no. There are a few wandering NPCs, like Hawkslayer, who join your party, but with no lore or dialogue attached to them. Score: 2.

Someone clue me in as to what he was all about.

4. Encounters and Foes. This game's downfall is its banal, featureless encounters with a slew of unmemorable monster portraits. Thank the gods for mass damage spells. In the unpatched version, at least, there are far, far too many encounters, although you can run away from a lot of them. There are inventory puzzles in the various dimensions that add a little depth to the game, but for most of it, I was cringing with every turn or step, hoping I could just finish mapping this #*&$(ing corridor already! I usually regard random encounters, opportunities for grinding, and re-spawning as good things, but this game taught me the value of moderation.

Two hobgoblins. You have to admire their spunk.

I wish the developers had learned a lesson from the Might & Magic series, in which every third or fourth square featured some kind of message or context-sensitive encounter, or Pool of Radiance, where at least four or five times per map, you got some kind of role-playing option. I mean, what kind of a world is this in which packs of 98 monsters are just roaming the countryside together? Where do they even live? How do they feed themselves? Score: 3.

5. Magic and Combat. A character who has progressed through all mage classes, including archmage, has access to 80 spells. Between these, the various combat options--including rogue sneaking/backstabbing--and the various items you can find and use, combat ought to be very tactical, and there were times at the beginning when it was. Spell points were so precious and death so imminent that I carefully studied the spell book and tried to identify the best spell for each foe. It was a joy and relief when I defeated Brilhasti. After that, when I got 20 levels all at once, the game suddenly became far too easy, and every combat was a bore, except for the boss-level fights. These left my spellcasters so drained that I had to stand around in the sunshine for hours (real hours, not game hours) to get them back again. Score: 4.

 

6. Equipment. I have to give it points for variety, but this is one of those games that doesn't tell you jack about the stuff you find. You can guess that adamantium plate is better than mithril plate based on your armor class, but there's nothing to tell you whether Kael's Axe does more damage than the Dayblade (except, I guess, to meticulously record and average your damage scores). Part of this is supposed to be fun, I guess; most of the items you find have some sort of magic property attached to them, and through trial and error you can figure out what they do. With the right items, any character can cast mage spells. In practice, I find that there's far too much stuff to keep straight and much of it was under-powered. After a certain level, damage was so overwhelmingly based on character attributes, I don't think it would have mattered if they'd all had daggers. Again, I wish the creators had looked to Might & Magic, which had the same variety of equipment but allowed you to pay people to tell you stuff about it. This game doesn't even offer a shop. Score: 5.

My chronomancer and the only two harmonic gems that I found in the entire game.

7. Economy. You collect millions of gold pieces and have nothing to spend it on beyond spells (which you buy up quite quickly) and healing. The lack of Roscoe's Energy Emporium and Garth's equipment shop did not improve this game. Would it have killed the developers to let me buy harmonic gems? In the beginning stages, coin is precious because of healing, but pretty soon you have spells that will resurrect all your characters and cure them of all conditions in one casting. Score: 3.

8. Quests. The main quest is the standard slay-the-evil-wizard type, but the sub-quests associated with each world are, if not quite "fun," at least interesting. The game would be a lot better if you were allowed to visit the seven worlds in any order, instead of marching through them in lockstep. There are no side-quests and, as far as I can tell, no opportunities for role-playing in the main quest. Score: 3.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. Most of the problems I experienced here are probably platform problems, but that's what I have to judge. The graphics are adequate enough, but the sound is horrible and I kept it turned off. The automap seems like a nice feature, but it was broken, frequently not mapping squares I'd stepped on, and it resets every level.

Most egregious is the repetitive melodies in the bard songs, which loop every 20 seconds and drive you crazy, but leaving the sound on is the only way to tell that they're still playing. The navigation and combat controls were fine, but the method of selecting spells is so awful that I can't believe no one stopped the game from being released like this. Imagine having to scroll through 80 spells, not listed in alphabetical order, every time you want to cast something. Although the patch fixed this problem, I have to grade it on the original, and I'm taking away all its interface points for that horrible design choice. Score: 3.

10. Gameplay. Linear, repetitive, non-replayable, too difficult at the beginning and too easy after that, and far, far too long. There is really nothing that I liked in this category. I can't give it a 0--the only 0 I've given was for Braminar, which featured literally no gameplay--but I really can't see offering anything more than a score of 1 here.

Final Rating: 33. This puts it 3 points lower than II and 4 points lower than I, keeping with my belief that the series got worse as it progressed. The developments the story and dimensions was offset by repetitiveness and boredom.

If it's killing you not knowing how it ended, here's the last of a nine-part YouTube series by user girldrinkdrunk1:
 

Like me, she played the DOS version. The video is an hour, with no sound (it's not a "let's play"), and it's mostly repetitive combat. Her characters, oddly, seem to be lower levels than mine; she must have used a walkthrough and avoided most of the mapping and level-grinding. But she has two archmages, which probably helped a bit with the spell point issue. The final battle with Tarjan starts at 45:45, and it clearly shows way overpowered characters fighting way overpowered monsters; her strategy (which is no doubt the correct strategy) is to use alternate mass damage and mass heal spells and slowly wear down the monsters before her spell points and harmonic gems run out. Meanwhile, she's having her thief hide in shadows and slowly sneak up on Tarjan; the titular thief does his one job at 51:44 and kills the mad god, but she's still got to contend with 25 rock demons one-by-one (they're immune to the mass-damage spells) before she wins the battle at 54:23. Her party ascends into heaven, is congratulated by some benevolent god, and is rewarded with godhood for themselves.

White text on an aqua background. Nice design choice.

 

The color choices make this section miserable to read, but it's a fairly good ending. If I'd played all the way through, I would have felt suitably rewarded. I'll reprint it here (punctuation errors and all) so you don't have to strain your eyes:

"Welcome, brave heroes. You have succeeded in destroying the threat to all reality. As you know, to do this, you slipped the bonds of time, and traveled forbidden routes through that which has forever been. You pressed your struggle forward despite danger and death, and you accomplished that which the gods themselves were unable to do."

His praise washes over you like a warm ocean wave, and you feel your strength infuse your body.

"In doing what you have done, you have proved yourself worthy of nothing less than the ultimate reward." He closes his eyes and raises his hands. "The death of the gods tore reality asunder, but you bound it up again. The gods of old are dead, therefore I accept you as my new children. You shall be gods yourselves."

His eyes open again and you look upon infinity. At once you see Skara Brae restored to its former beauty. You see beyond it and the Six Cities of the Plains. You see the whole world and each of its cultures, and you realize all of it is now your domain.

"And so it came to pass that the new stars burned in the night sky. The least of these, the Companion star, was named Hawkslayer after a hero of legend. The other seven, together known as the Company of Heroes, are each named for one of the New Gods. Each night they can be seen is betokened a good night, and adventurers know these gods smile especially upon them..." --excerpt from The Gospel of the New Gods (Chap. I, Verses 5-9).

Oddly, though, the game then sends these new "gods" back to the refugee camp in the unrestored Skara Brae.
 
Turning to Scorpia's June 1988 Computer Gaming World review, I'm surprised to see that some platforms allowed you to import characters from Ultima III, Ultima IV, or Wizardry. It's a cute feature, but how do we explain these worlds existing in the same universe? Moreover, what does importing your Ultima IV character actually do, since the classes, levels, magic systems, and hit point scales are all different?

Scorpia's assessment is fairly similar to mine, though she ranks it "better" than the previous two games, if still "too heavily oriented towards mega-combat" (p. 52). She notes how boring the dungeons are, and how pointless the spinners and dark zones are, especially given the automap function (p. 21). She says that Tarjan himself is quite easy. I was gratified to read her final assessment on the magic:

These spells make your party incredibly powerful. Except when facing opponents that are highly spell-resistant or have huge amounts of hit points, your characters can often blow away herds of monsters in a single round, with just a couple of spells. The power balance is thus very much weighted in the party's favor, making the majority of encounters fairly routine and not very exciting (p. 52).

So there you have it: a game that's eminently winnable, but would take poor time management skills to actually win. Like The Dukes of Hazzard, Lloyd Alexander novels, and the musical stylings of Duran Duran, this game is better experienced in memory than in actuality.

The Bard's Tale III: The Age of Aggression is Just About Done

The guy was dead literally four seconds later.

I can't believe how many comments I got on my last Bard's Tale III posting. I really starved you for those five weeks, didn't I? The last week has been rough, work-wise, so while I struggled to find time to play the game, I read your comments and tried to figure out what to do. Most of you wanted me to get on with it, but some of you offered cogent arguments for staying. I was particularly intrigued by bobturkey's comment that there's a World War II-themed world, and I appreciated Stephen Tanner's reminder that Sir Robin's Song eliminates a lot of the random combats. Then Killahead came along with a link to a thread on The Adventurer's Guild that not only explains the programming behind the random combats, but also offers a patch to reduce them and fix some other errors, like enemies not using their special attacks (or, in some cases, attacking at all).

I'm pretty sure he's referring to stuff that happens in a different world. These bartenders get around.

I downloaded the patch (created by a user named "drifting") and I can't say I noticed a huge difference, although I wasn't keeping track of the various monsters' special attacks in the first place. It sounds like most of the high-random-combat squares were in the starter dungeon.

Uh-huh.

I resolved to finish at least Arboria. I opened up my mapping file and was surprised that I'd already mapped much of it. I don't remember getting as far as I did, but then again, it was over a year ago. I do vaguely remember hitting a lot of places that I could not get past because I lacked some crucial item, and a foe (Tslotha, it turns out) who kept coming back to life. The key was doing everything in the right order. I had to collect an acorn from the outside area and the "water of life" from the palace beneath the lake.

It took me forever to figure out I needed to use a wineskin to "collect" the water.

Planting and watering the acorn allowed me to get through a portal in Valarian's Tower, where I found a weapon called the Nightspear. The Nightspear was needed to trap Tslotha's soul so he wouldn't come back to life.

See if you can figure out which part of this message nearly made me rage-quit.

Returning Tslotha's head to the king allowed me access to the Sacred Grove...

 

 
...where Tslotha's heart and the water of life, placed in the cavity of the dead Valarian's chest, allowed...I don't know...somehow allowed me access to a part of the dungeon where I--at last--collected Valarian's Bow.

 

Returning it to the guild master in Skara Brae, I was awarded 600,000 experience points and given a new quest to retrieve Lanatir--or at least his gear--from the realm of Gelidia.

"Actually, it would probably be easier if you just killed him and took his stuff."

After finishing the level, I reloaded a backup and played parts of it again so I could make the following video, which illustrates some key aspects of gameplay. The pauses are me consulting my maps, but for the most part, it's quick because I'm able to teleport to most of the places I need to go.

Some highlights from the video:

• 00:00: Start off in a tavern. Note how the animation makes it look like the bartender is repeatedly spitting into the patron's glass. It takes Essyltt a while to order a drink because I forgot to give her any money. Earlier in the game, the bard needed to keep drinking to replenish her songs, but somewhere along the way, she found something called the Bardsword which makes that unnecessary. So I basically just wasted a minute for nothing.
• 01:16: My characters are nearly at max health, but I figure I'll heal them anyway. A few seconds later, I lose patience with pointing and clicking, and throughout the rest of the video I'm using the keyboard.
• 01:58: Note the unfortunate gesture the king is making with his staff.
• 02:31: An easy combat begins. I could run, but I want to illustrate some combat things.
• 02:43: Notice the difference in attack damage between my monk and my bard! The bard is fairly worthless except for "Sir Robin's Song."
• 03:35: Boy, that tower sure looks high.
• 04:27: Another combat. Mabon the Mad pulls out all the stops and casts Mangar's Mallet (while shouting, "Run home and cry to MAMA!"), which does 200-800 points of damage on every foe but costs 80 spell points. It's one of a few fairly overpowered spells. I've been complaining that spell points take so long to recharge, but perhaps that's deliberate. Perhaps the creators wanted your pool of spells to last through basically one world, with a little recharging or harmonic gems in emergencies. My guess is it would definitely be worth having a third spellcaster, especially since Escorducarla, as a chronomancer, doesn't have nearly as good mass effect spells.
• 05:32: The game forces me to pick up some armor that I don't want, so I have to immediately go and drop it.
• 05:54: In preparation for entering the tower, Mabon the Mad casts the "Batch Spell," which simultaneously casts light, compass, protection, wizard eye, and levitation. One of the better inventions of the game.
• 06:35: I teleport to the place on my map that I want to go.
• 07:00: For some reason, planting an acorn in a dungeon floor accomplishes something.
• 07:40: I "trap zap" a trap ahead of me, but frankly I get the message so often that it's a waste of time to keep doing it.
• 08:01: Watch the compass. I run into a spinner. It takes me a few seconds to figure out where I'm going.
• 08:18: Every first-person tile-based game of the era features "zones of darkness." These serve no purpose but to making mapping a pain in the neck and waste spell points.
• 08:31: Forgot to have Sir Robin's Tune going. This allows me to "(R)un" from unwanted encounters with near-100% success. I haven't been having much trouble so far, but just in case...
• 09:13: I find my objective.
• 09:40: Yes, I'm looking at my map and counting squares. Moments later, I exit. Time to hang out in the sun and recharge my spell points!

At some point, leveling became meaningless. I stopped by the Wizard's Guild every once in a while and got a level or two, but all I'm getting at this point are more hit points and spell points on top of an already-staggering total. When games get to this point, it's time for them to be over. Usually it happens late in the game. When I was playing Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal and started thinking, "Ho hum. I guess I'll take another improved whirlwind attack," it was fortunately close to the last battle. In this case, it's relatively close to the beginning of the game. I know it seems like I've been playing for a long time, but all I've really done is complete the optional starter dungeon and the first of seven worlds.

When you have to start mentally putting commas in the experience point figure, your characters are perhaps a bit over-leveled.

Although each of the four dungeons featured only one or two key locations (the rest was just mindless mapping), the levels at least had the virtue of being small, and thankfully the developers didn't restrict the use of APAR (teleport) at key locations like most games do.

I confess that when I started this posting, I had intended to include a GIMLET in it, but it ended up being longer than I anticipated. I hated the game a little less during this play session--mostly because I took the time to re-read and note the spells, which make combat a lot faster--but probably not enough to keep this up through six more worlds. I'll explore Gelidia a bit as I gather the screenshots for my GIMLET, but I really think the next posting will be the last.

The Bard's Tale III: Don't Make Me Do This. Please.

"We drink to our youth, to days come and gone..."

Holy... I last played Bard's Tale III more than a year ago?! I've been working on 1988 games since last January?! If I had realized this a week ago, I probably wouldn't have restarted my blog. I'd have given up in despair. I realize that the odds of me ever catching up in time with current CRPGs is extremely small, but it's absolutely impossible if I take more than a year to cover a year's worth of games.

I already didn't want to play The Bard's Tale III again, but now I don't want to play even more. You can go read my postings on the game from--Jesus Christ--last February if you want (the last one is comically titled "brief break"), but to summarize my dislikes:

• Characters come into the game far too high, possessing all of the available spells. There is really no room to develop throughout 90% of the game.

• The game involves endless combat, with random encounters appearing even as you stand in a square and turn. With the number of monsters, the distances, and no "quick combat" option, combat takes forever. By the time it's over, you've forgotten what you were doing before you went in, so you take a couple of turns to orient yourself, and you're back in combat again. Even with liberal use of the "Run Away" command, you find yourself in six times as many combats, each lasting four times as long, as Wizardry or Might & Magic.

This is a game where you find yourself saying, "Oh, for #*&$'s sake" quite frequently.

• You're forced to pick up useless equipment and then discard it.

• Spell points regenerate only outdoors, at a rate so slow that it literally takes an hour in real time. There is no "energy emporium" where you can pay to get spell points regenerated, as in previous games, and the "harmonic gems" that regenerate all of them are precious and rare. (At least, in this DOS version; some commenters reported they were more frequent in other versions.)

• To cast a spell, you have to select it from a very long list of four-letter codes, which are not alphabetized, instead of being able to just type it in yourself.

I know I saw it in here somewhere...

 

• Enemy magic users have a habit of summoning creatures every round, needlessly prolonging combat until you can get close enough to kill them.

Oh, yes, please let's keep this going indefinitely.

• Multiple monsters use the same portraits and it's very hard to keep straight those that do no damage from those that do horrific damage.

• The dungeons are full of annoying things like spinners, squares of darkness, and magic-draining zones that add nothing to the gameplay and just make things hard for no reason. There is otherwise hardly anything in the dungeons, so you end up spending a lot of time plodding along and mapping for nothing.

• You can't tell if a bard song is playing unless you have the volume on, in which case the same 10-second melody loops over and over and over.

• The game just sucks.

But last year, when I was saying this, you were all like, "Noooo, CRPG Addict! It gets so much better after you start traveling to other worlds! We promise! Bard's Tale III is a classic!" so I declined to just do a GIMLET and delete the stupid thing from my hard drive. Why did I let that happen? You don't tell me what a good game is; I tell you. Did you invent the GIMLET? No, I didn't think so.

Fine. I'll give the game one world to prove that it's not just one big suck-fest, and then it's on to BattleTech.

I remember that after the "brief break" posting on February 6, 2011, I spent a lot of time level-grinding by just randomly spinning in place in some dungeon, fighting random encounters, while I...well, it would take too long to explain, but suffice to say I had a week's worth of work where I had to wait for my computer to process batches of hundreds of thousands of data records, and I couldn't do anything intensive on it while it was processing. DOSBox, fortunately, doesn't take up a lot of the CPU's attention. Most of my characters rose about 10 levels during that week. Either because of that or the 20 levels that the character's rose after the first dungeon (see my rant about that here), I'm not finding most of the combats terribly difficult, just long and annoying.

For reasons I don't quite remember, my characters are in a realm called Arboria, trying to collect a magic bow and arrows from someone named Valarian. I ran into a character name Hawkslayer, who is now at the head of my party, and some total spaz of a king wants me to kill someone named Tslotha.

Or maybe "Tslotha's Head" is some kind of artifact. Whatever. The developers aren't so good with the punctuation, either.

From some hermit, I bought a spell that will make me grow gills and explore the bottom of a nearby lake where there's some kind of palace.

Hey! You look just like every other old man in the game!

And there was a tree with acorns on it nearby:

And...yeah. I've got nothing else to tell you. I'm not sure how all of these things fit together. Right now, I'm in the midst of mapping a place called Valarian's Tower. There are at least two other dungeons in the area of I don't know how many levels, and the thought of mapping them all fills me with such revulsion that I honestly think I may get drunk before playing any more of this game. You have to map, though, because the game depends so much on special encounters in non-obvious squares that to miss a single square might screw up the entire game. (To be fair, this is true of every first-person, tile-based game of the era; it just somehow annoys me more here.)

This is a perfect description of the CRPG Addict's living room.

The basic problem with The Bard's Tale series is this: by the end of the first game, your characters were already developed as much as they were going to develop. Oh, sure, there's a "chronomancer" class in this game that has a different set of spells, but they don't add much of anything to the game and you can max out your spell levels in about half an hour of gameplay. So after spending a relatively short and non-torturous game getting from level 1 to 15 or 20, you get to spend two more games of twice the duration getting from level 20 to...I don't know...probably 100 or so, but you don't really gain anything from these level increases except more hit points and spell points. This is why most other series (Ultima, Might & Magic, Wizardry) have you start over at Level 1 or, at most, allow you to continue your level progression through two games. If The Bard's Tale III had me start over at level 1, with level 1 foes, I wouldn't have complained for a second. As it is, with characters so over-powered, the game has no choice but to throw hordes of over-powered monsters at me.

I know I'm going to get a lot of comments urging me to just drop it if I hate it that much, so I'm more interested in hearing from people who see some value in this game. For god's sake, what do you like about it?

Game 69: The Game of Dungeons/dnd (1975)

[Ed: Nearly 7 years after originally writing this, I took another look at the game and won it. I recommend reading the updated entry, as it has more information than this entry offers.]

The interesting thing about role playing games--computer and otherwise--is how they marry the left and right brain, the quantitative and the qualitative. For people who like calculations, tactics, and probabilities, you have the statistics-based combat and magic systems, adapted from wargames like Chainmail. For people that like open-ended narratives, histories, quest, and dialogue, you have--well, all the rest. Just as I suppose there are some (demented) people who prefer their chocolate and peanut butter separate, there are those who prefer these game elements separate. If you just like the left-brained stuff, you play strategy games; if you just like the right-brained stuff, you play adventure games.

It's inescapable, though, that the earliest CRPGs were more about the left brain than the right. (Yes, I know that the idea of "left-brain" and "right-brain" has been discredited; I'm using them as metaphors.) The world-building and story-telling of the PLATO games, Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and other early CRPGs are not nearly as well-developed as their combat systems. One is tempted to cite programming limitations for this, but we have the problem of Zork rearing its head in 1977. Zork offered an interesting game world, detailed descriptions of rooms, persistent inventories, and some quasi-NPCs--essentially, the right-brained half of an RPG. It is no less an "RPG" than computer games that adopted that designation, and yet, somehow, it wasn't considered as such. The left-brainers won out.

The union of tactical combat with interesting game worlds happened so slowly that it's hard to pinpoint when the first full, synthesized "CRPG," as we currently think about that term, first appeared. I suppose we have to give the honor to Ultima, but the game loses points with me by offering a game world that's so stupid. (Ultima II was more offensively dumb than Ultima I, but Ultima I was still dumb.) Regardless, Origin deserves credit for a string of games from 1983-1986 (Ultima III, Ultima IV, Autoduel, Moebius, 2400 A.D.) that included plenty of elements from both sides of the brain. SSI leaped on the scene during the same period with Wizard's Crown, Rings of Zilfin, and Shard of Spring. These were not all great games, but my point is that this era marked the end of the period in which a "CRPG" was about combat and virtually nothing else.

To play these early PLATO games is to look through a window on a time in which not only were CRPGs new, but the earliest developers had decided that the most important aspect of a "computer role-playing game" was not the story but the monsters and weapons. I wonder if this caused any backlash from pen-and-paper RPG players. Certainly, some of them must have complained that the programmers had stripped the soul from RPGs. That doesn't mean they're not fun; they just lack a major element of the game--Dungeons & Dragons--from which many of them take their names.

The "finders of the orb" seem to have a common theme going.

The title screen calls the game The Game of Dungeons, but the file name was just dnd, and this is what has stuck in history and legend. Developed in 1975 by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood (who named the dungeon "Whisenwood"), this may be the first CRPG developed openly as a game, without having to hide under fake file names on the PLATO mainframe (cf. PEDIT5). It has existed continually since its first edition.

For the history of the game, I am indebted to Dirk Pellett and Flint Pellett. Dirk wrote a history of the game on Cyber1's preserved PLATO system, which I quoted in December. Dirk and Flint both exchanged e-mails with me following this posting and fleshed out the history a bit more. Whisenhunt and Wood were inspired by both the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, first released the previous year, and the PEDIT5 dungeon, which I reviewed in December. They improved upon PEDIT5 with a multi-level dungeon, more monsters, and more spells. Dirk Pellett arrived at the University in late 1975, started playing dnd, and had so many suggestions that Whisenhunt and Wood gave him editing privileges to implement them. He improved a number of aspects of the game mechanics and added a host of items, potions, and encounters. Dirk's brother, Flint, attended the university starting in 1977 and helped program subsequent editions. They were kind enough to send me a bit of the original source code, of which Flint says he has a "pile of printouts."

To me, this appears as Είμαι ένα άγριο ζώο. Ακούστε με βρυχηθμό!.

The earliest version still around (5.4) is from 1977. The manual describes the game in language that inescapably marks it as the progenitor of almost all CRPGs that followed:

[Adventurers] wander around in a maze and pick up any gold they happen to find lying around. They can also find magic items and treasure chests! Unfortunately, recent years have seen the dungeon become inhabited with strange and deadly monsters...

Characters have four attributes--strength, dexterity, intelligence, and wisdom--which, like D&D, are on a scale from 3 to 18. PEDIT5 didn't allow you to re-roll, but dnd does. It's also fairly generous with the stats. I got these after only a few rolls:

After you accept the statistics and assign a name to your character, the game dumps you in the entrance to the dungeon, and the adventure begins. Your character is simultaneously a fighter, magic user, and cleric, with power depending on level and attributes.

When I reviewed PEDIT5, I noted:

I would have forgiven the first CRPG for being really basic and dumb: perhaps a text-only game in which you managed some basic attributes against some random encounters... Instead, we get a fairly large dungeon, a solid set of attributes, challenging random encounters, 8 spells, monsters with resistances based on type, and graphics that the DOS platform won't surpass until Ultima III.

dnd fits this description, only more so. The programming complexity here is not only impressive, but the various options and quirks are so numerous that I'm honestly having trouble keeping them all straight. Some examples:

• When you encounter a monster, you can fight, evade, or cast a spell. If you try to "evade," your chances are based on the configuration of the surrounding walls, your dexterity, and your encumbrance.

A demon reacts to my attempt to evade.

• Encumbrance also affects your ability to fight. There are various options for stashing and hiding gold to temporarily reduce encumbrance.

• There are bottomless pits in the dungeon. Falling into one gives you a chance to "grab" onto each level as you plummet into the depths.

• Treasure chests and magic items are often trapped.

• The game says that the amount of gold you "bring out of the dungeon" affects your experience and spell levels, but I can't seem to re-find the entrance to the dungeon after I start.

• There is a selection of magical weapons, armor, and accessories with different powers and + levels.

• You occasionally encounter random books that either raise or lower your attributes.

• When finding potions, you can study, examine, or just drink ("quaff") them, with 11 possible effects, including "astral form," which allows you to pass through walls and floors.

And there are occasional special encounters, like this:

Any CRPG Addict who says "yes" here doesn't deserve to have readers.

The ultimate goal of the game is to find the "ORB," guarded by a dragon, on Levels 17-20. The game warns that the dragon can do up to 100,000 hit points of damage. I'd be happy if I could just survive more than three combats. So far, the game is proving extremely hard. When you die, the game tells you how many other kills that particular creature has made before you, although I don't know when this counter was last reset. Either I'm the only one playing the game tonight, or everyone's having a lot more luck than me (these screenshots were about an hour apart):

I just hope I don't encounter a creature named "Barney Stinson."

The influence on Daniel Lawrence's DND and its derivatives is clear, and as I previously covered, informed by my conversations with Dirk Pellett, it's tough to see sometimes where "influence" ends and "plagiarism" begins. In his text file history of dnd (available only on the PLATO system), Dirk says bluntly that Daniel Lawrence plagiarized dnd in making his own DND, later commercialized as Telengard. In e-mails to me, Dirk says that he later had a chance to look at Lawrence's source code and gives him a little more credit for some original programming. Nonetheless, the influence of this dnd on DND/Telengard is obvious to me, including the random encounters with portals, monsters, and potions, the discovery of random treasure on the ground, and the overall feel of the gameplay. Yes, DND introduced some more complexity in the encounters, but it still very obviously a descendant of dnd, whether by plagiarism or homage. Rogue also owes a lot to this game and it's continually more challenging levels, culminating in the retrieval of a McGuffin from the bottom.

It would be cool, but I suspect impossible, to win this one. I'm going to fire up the Cyber1 terminal now and then and see how far I can get (and do a separate posting on Version 8), but otherwise don't look for a lot of postings here. I definitely recommend that every true CRPG lover sign up for a Cyber1 account and play a few rounds.

*****

Further reading: Posts on the entire DND line: The Dungeon (aka "pedit5," 1975); Dungeon of Death (1979); Telengard (1982); Caverns of Zoarre (1984); DND (1984); and the Heathkit DND (1985). For a discussion of Lawrence and plagiarism, see this account by one of The Game of Dungeons's original authors. 

Other posts on the PLATO series include The Dungeon (1975), Orthanc (1975), Moria (1975), Oubliette (1977), and Avatar (1979).

Over at "CRPG Adventures," Nathan Mahney spent three months and over 200 characters winning the game. Check out his series of posts starting here.

The Inscrutable Exhortations of My Soul

No, thanks. I'll just fall off.

Last weekend, my wife and I took a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine, to go "snowshoeing." Only there wasn't any snow, so we ended up doing an alternative, less romantic-sounding activity called "hiking in the cold." I've been to Bar Harbor more than 20 times, but one thing I've never done is wait until low tide and then hike across the bar that gives the town its name to Bar Island. Our bed-and-breakfast was relatively close to this natural land bridge, so we decided to do it.

Arriving on the other side, we found that the road diverged into a hiking path and an overgrown track marked "private road." The private road had manifestly not been driven down all winter, or even longer, so we decided the odds of encountering an angry landowner while trespassing were low. In less than half a mile of walking, the road ended in a clearing. There was no house but rather the ruins of one: a couple of chimneys and a low stone foundation overlooking the rocky coast. It looked to have been abandoned for a good century or so. (I later found out there was, until recently, a modern house in the clearing next to the ruin, but it and the land had been donated to the park and the house torn down. I haven't been able to find anything on the older house whose ruins were still visible to us.) I took this picture:

As I gazed at the sad and overgrown ruin, a strong and inescapable feeling crept over me: I wanted to go back to the hotel room and play a CRPG.

I realize how pathetic that sounds, even to fellow gamers. I was looking at something fascinating--a piece of history in a place that I loved. But there was never going to be anything else to stoke the sparks of mystery about the place. I have no doubt that the "private road" sign had failed to deter hundreds, if not thousands, of other hikers every year, and there was no chance I was going to find anything in the ruins that hadn't already been picked over by thousands of hands. I wasn't going to open the ash trap of one of the old chimneys and discover a previous owner's journal, detailing a horrific murder that had taken place decades earlier, but providing just enough mitigating clues to heal the heartbreak of a sad centenarian residing in some lonesome house in town. Orcs were not going to suddenly rise from behind the wall and snipe at me with bows. I was not going to find a chest nestled against the outer walls, containing a sword and helmet. The brambles tangled over the stone were not suitable for brewing into potions, nor did they conceal runic letters that, when absorbed, would bestow upon me some fantastic skill. I was not going to stumble upon a concealed trap door, leading me to treasure-filled depths.

While real life, and the real location, should have offered real rewards to compensate for these deficiencies, they were not, at the moment, enough. And so, after spending a respectable amount of time hiking the rest of the island, I used the promise of a fireplace, hot tea, and a good book from the store in town to persuade Irene to return with me to the confines of the bed-and-breakfast, where I spent the next four hours attempting to win Wizardry V. I failed, and I still don't know exactly what I'm going to do with that game, but I do know that...well, I'm back.

Looking over the comments from my "hiatus" posting, I'm amused by how many of you didn't understand my core problem. The suggestions that I change the nature of my blog by playing only "good" games, or switching to console RPGs, or doing "let's plays" instead of writing blog entries...none of them got at the real issue, which is that playing games, even in "moderation," takes a lot of time--time that, as a self-employed person, I could be using to make money. If I didn't feel like making money, it's still time I could be using to do other things that would help me in the long term: learning a new language, exercising, practicing the piano, reading great works of literature (or even my own professional journals), taking dance lessons. I had decided to stop the blog because when I sat down with my list of goals for 2012, I needed the time that playing games was taking away from me.

But this is what I discovered in the intervening month: I'm apparently going to spend a certain percentage of my time screwing around, whether said screwing around involves playing video games or watching Babylon 5 for the seventh time. I've made fair progress on my goals in February, but I've also spent a lot of time on Reddit, reading old articles on Cracked.com, reading the Mistborn trilogy again, and playing Boggle on my iPhone. None of these things are what I stopped playing CRPGs to do, and playing games, and writing this blog, while overall about as useful as anything else I've been doing, at least lets me document my experiences and interact with interesting people.

It was either this or a Boggle blog.

With that in mind, I have to figure out my next steps. I've left five games from 1988 in various states of incompletion: The Bard's Tale III, BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, Sentinel Worlds, Star Command, and Wizardry V. The easiest thing to do would be to write them all off and start fresh with 1989, and I may do that, but I want to think about it first. Before I do, I'm going to offer a posting on the 1970s dnd, because I already have it half-written. Then we'll see about these other games.

I want to be clear, though: this is not the passion I would have chosen for myself. If I could design my own life, and identify the calling of my blood--the thing that, while hiking in some random part of the world, would suddenly fill my heart and mind with a palpable compulsion--it would not be computer role-playing games. Sure, I enjoy them--immensely--but I don't enjoy enjoying them. If that makes any sense. If you don't mind that paradox, I'm glad to have you as a reader.