gemini://gem.hexandcounter.org/gemlog/posts/goldbox0.gmi

Pool of Radiance, the first AD&D Goldbox CRPG, was the first CRPG me and my friends discovered, around 1990. At first we thought we were supposed to play as if it was a tabletop RPG. We sat 4-5 together in front of the computer, created one character per player (the game engine supports parties of up to 6 player characters) and played together. That quickly became too frustrating, so we moved on to play with only 3, then 2 players, and finally I was playing on my own.

In around 1995 I bought WizardWorks' AD&D Goldbox CDROM collection ("Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Collectors Edition"). It contains Pool of Radiance plus the other 8 Goldbox AD&D games. Around that time I created a party of 6 characters and made my first serious attempt to complete Pool of Radiance. Two or three years later I had done so, and also transferred the party to the sequel Curse of the Azure Bonds, completed that game, transferred to Secret of The Silver Blades, and finally completed that as well! That left only one game in that campaign, Pools of Darkness. I made several attempts to start playing that game, but all failed. Pools is infamous for not telling the player enough what has to be done and in what order.

Every now and then I re-installed Pools of Darkness (usually playing in Dosbox in Linux). A few times I tried to start up the other two Goldbox campaigns (the two-game Savage Frontiers campaign, and three-game Dragonlance campaign) but I did not feel good about abandoning the first campaign. Until around 2015 when all the Goldbox games, and many other old AD&D games, were finally published on GOG! Not only did they include good scans of all the Adventure Journals (the copies that came with the old Goldbox CDROM were barely readable), but they also included the hint books for all games. I decided that I was not above cheating a bit to finally figure out what I was supposed to do in Pools of Darkness. Even using the dungeon maps in the hint books did not feel too extreme, considering the games did not come with automappers. The GOG versions also have all the annoying copy protections removed.

I installed all the GOG versions in a Git repository together with all documentation and my save games, and a large Emacs Org-mode file for taking notes, and of course all the necessary Dosbox configuration and start-scripts. Finally a sensible way to play those old games! But even with the hint books my progress through Pools of Darkness has been slow. I play on and off, slowly grinding and save-scumming my way forward.

One problem is that the party I created over 25 years ago is not very good. Even if I replaced a few of the weakest (non-human) characters a long time ago, I think I am way behind at this point in Pools of Darkness. Battles are extremely difficult and I have to savescum to get past almost every little encounter. I finally decided a few weeks ago to dual-class two of my humans. My fighter became a magic-user and my magic-user became a fighter, both starting over from level 1. The way dual-classing worked in the Goldbox games (same as in old tabletop AD&D?) is that until the character has reached their old level in the new class, they can not use any abilities from the old class. So my level 20 magic-user can not cast any spells until he has become a level 20 fighter. And my level 20 fighter now has to reach level 20 as a magic-user before he can use any of his special fighter abilities (or use armor and weapons like a fighter) again. Needless to say, this means hours of xp grind. So the last few evenings of playing Pools of Darkness have been mostly walking around picking fights for xp. This is probably what I will do for the next several months at this pace.

SSI AD&D Goldbox