Quick tour of the Gold Box games (Part 1)
So, given how much time I spent on the Gold Box games lately, I wanted to share some notes on the games, maybe also some relevant bits.
Overall style: Mega Dungeon and Sandbox.
Overland Map: Traverse on grid, random and hidden locations
Quirk: Extensive level scaling which ups the challenge, especially in the beginning.
How does it fit in the line: This is probably the hardest title until the very end of the series. You find your bearings with the engine, its quirks, how the spells work, you have to sort out effective combat tactics. And then you're set. It's a great intro to both the Gold Box line and AD&D, but it surely does not tutorialize you. At. All.
Variety: You get the feeling of visiting many varied locations, some quests/sites have a different feel, some missions bypass the focus on combat. They crammed a lot into this one. Due to the limitations of the early engine you still feel like you battled a lot of the same enemies, over and over, and in waves. Still, many challenging set piece encounters that break the mold.
Notable NPC: Cadorna the Traitor.
What I think: See this article.
What can we learn from it: Healthy mix of environments. All missions lead to the end goal, but not all derive from the same big bad. Good, explorable individual locations. How to vary the same enemies into evolving encounters that keep challenging you. And it really did a good one on backtracking - more of that would have done the series good.
What it could have done better: Give a tutorial or intro to the game, or guide you at the start. Maybe. Sometimes figuring stuff out the hard way is also very rewarding.
Overall style: Separate locations, spanning multiple maps each (episodic).
Overland Map: Point crawl. Mid-game, additional optional locations become available to explore.
Quirk: Cameo by Elminster... if you happen to know him.
How does it fit in the line: Curse of the Azure Bonds feels like a sequel. It is not as tight as POR, nor as focused. It evolves the engine somewhat. You get a bit of a feel for the politics / conflicts south of the Moon Sea.
Variety: Yes, there are many varied locations, but to me most of them don't have much flair. Dracandros' tower and the thieves' guild / sewers at the beginning seem most memorable in terms of dungeon design. Definitely a lot more variety in enemies. It has a damn beholder - probably one of the most complex monsters in the whole line.
Notable NPC: Dragonbait, the saurial paladin whose emotions you can smell. (Nacacia, my ass!) He's on the cover, too.
What I think: COTAB feels a bit weak compared to POR. It starts a trend in Gold Box games' dungeon design - you can enter a lot of rooms in a non-linear way, but most of them feature just unrewarding combat you may skip. And you want to skip lots of it, really. Most of the game I don't remember, having played it one week ago. In POR, set piece encounter rooms often featured some reward - a clue, a story, a piece of gear, needed money and XP. You often had to do many of them, anyway, might as well tie them up in a good way. Not in COTAB - they just feel so skippable!
And while you may spend your sweet time exploring optional stuff and could do the middle part in any order, the game rubs a recommended order in your face, so it narrowly escapes feeling linear after all. (The illusion wears thin but holds, I guess.)
What can we learn from it: COTAB tries its best to keep the point crawl lively by tying stories to each leg of the journey, and tries to avoid being too repetitive by making routes previously traversed safe.
What it could have done better: While it works for COTAB, the idea of "the GM can do things to me" bonds is... highly questionable. The party suffers "consequences" for things they never intended to do and had no chance to avoid - and for example gets banished from a whole country. In the context of a CRPG that's no big deal. But in your campaign, this could suck big time.
Gateway to the Savage Frontier
Overall style: Separate locations, spanning typically a single map each (episodic).
Overland Map: Huge map. And yet almost completely unused except for conveying amount of travel needed - there's only one location you visit which isn't a city and it is in the most obvious place imaginable.
Quirk: We're the heroes, and we're gonna walk into every house in town. Oh look! We surprised some spies!
How does it fit in the line: As a game Gateway seems considerably less complex, it feels almost like a tutorial to the other games. You spend considerably less time on each location, making each feel even less memorable than COTAB locations. Given the restrictions of character import/export you should play Gateway right after COTAB. Could of course be considered its own line.
Variety: Quite a bit, it reuses a lot of stuff all over. You don't spend enough time anywhere to let it bore you, anyway.
Notable NPC: Krevish, the harmless-looking fighter. He actually has quite some useful stuff to say over the course of the game.
What I think: This is the tutorial for gold box games you never got. The game is easier, features difficulty controls. It is actually fun in its own way but also rather simple - it's essentially a MacGuffin hunt with some clues, and if you fail to decipher the clues, you can traverse the map and ask a friend. A super quirky sage friend.
What can we learn from it: Gateway, by virtue of having a big map, helps us envision the sheer size of the frontier. Different regions of the map have matching encounter tables - something you quickly learn if you travel through the Troll Moors...
What it could have done better: Gateway should have utilized that map better, placing locations in the wilderness you need to look for. Instead it opted to place practically all its crawling in cities - and adding some "cities" / "dungeons" off the world map on islands. In comparison, POR's overland map was smaller and more condensed, and yet there was plenty of original content to discover, including randomly placed monster lairs.
What seems bizarre are all these city maps that double as explorable dungeons, so you get attacked by barbarians or stirges on your way to the inn.
Secret of the Silver Blades
Overall style: Mega Dungeon all the way.
Overland Map: None. Instead you have a central teleport hub you can use to avoid traversing the huge ass dungeon over and over. Only Gold Box title without an overland map, and it shows.
Quirk: Enormous plot convenience with a wishing well oracle that can generate riddle answers for money and has teleporters wherever you need them to break the game into manageable chunks.
How does it fit in the line: Even at the time, I read a review of the game that was rather dismissive and biased me against it. It is, in a sense, the most linear of the games. On the other hand, it broke the mold in making all these maps that were not simple 16 x 16 grids but huge-ass sprawling and branching dungeons to explore and map out by hand.
Variety: The game sends you through a sequence of locations - ruins, mine, dungeon, glacier/frost giant village, boss castle. Each area is themed. It sticks to its themes well, and yet that makes it feel less varied, somehow.
Notable NPC: Vala, the original plate mail bikini girl. To complement her picture (eyes up here, buddy!) you get a combat icon that shows a lot of mid riff. No wonder she takes way more damage than my (overleveled) party!
What I think: This game shows the importance of imagination in early computer RPGs. It might have fared better and distracted better from its linearity if these locations featured in a modern remake in third person or 3D style. But by lacking any overland map and you returning to this village for resupplying the game feels smaller than it is. It actually took me the most time to beat due to its sheer size. And it still feels like you're nowhere, getting nowhere. They tried to break the mold on this one, but psychologically they failed. You need to manage your players' perceptions, too.
What can we learn from it: Most people probably would get bored of the same Mega Dungeon sooner or later, no matter how much variety you contrive for it. (Leaving "Diablo" aside, an entirely different gameplay experience.) It's not that they failed to try for variety, they really tried, it's just the psychology of the whole thing. Which tells us that in RPGs, the setting matters a lot. If you feel cramped into this tiny nowhere psychologically, the actual total size of the combat maps doesn't matter much. The story feels terribly local and limited through the way it is told. The game itself is massive.
What it could have done better: Lots, actually!
- Combining size with lots of random encounters is rather tiresome! I kept lowering the difficulty to finish combats faster and since the manual said it lowered the likelihood of encounters.
- The game treats giants as regular encounters, making you wade through hill, fire, frost, and cloud giants like they are a nuisance. By the end, even three Ancient Red Dragons at once become a mere blip on the difficulty curve. This shows us rather neatly why even AD&D 2e did a rebalancing there. If ancient dragons feel like somewhat challenging enemies, then it reduces the sense of adventure.
- The game massively relies on a particular sort of enemies in mid- and end-game: Monsters with flesh-to-stone gazes. If you don't have mirrors, this is basically a save-or-die encounter and winning initiative is extremely important. If you have mirrors and equip them in time, it trivializes a lot of encounters instead. It's rather satisfying to turn a medusa to stone, though. (The Gold Box games do not consider the penalties, I think, for fighting while averting your gaze.) Most sought item in the game: Reflective magic silver shield - total: 1. Save-or-die needed to go away and won't be missed. 5e does this much better.
- Iron golems suck big time.
