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Demetrios1453 Plays the Gold Box Games
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<blockquote data-quote="Demetrios1453" data-source="post: 9280359" data-attributes="member: 6801060"><p><strong><em>POOL OF RADIANCE </em>(Part 3): Welcome to Phlan!</strong></p><p></p><p></p><p>We start with a brief shot of the pier we have landed on (so brief I didn't get a screenshot of it), and then we are approached by this fellow:</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349135[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>So we follow Rolf around the city:</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349136[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>Tyr and Tempus make sense here; we're in a city where evil is fighting to destroy what remains of the city. Sune, though? It's not a particularly obvious place for the goddess of love and beauty to have a temple, is it? Maybe Phlan, before it was overrun by monsters, was filled with art and they're here to help reclaim what can be salvaged? The city was renowned for its library, as we will see, but that's more in Oghma's wheelhouse than Sune. It's basically left unexplained why this temple is here.</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349137[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]349138[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]349139[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]349140[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]349141[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]349142[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>I've always thought that parenthetical "(You are on your own now)" to be pretty funny. Like players were just going to endlessly stare at that gate waiting for something exciting to happen.</p><p></p><p>Anyway, tour over, time to start doing things. First things first, we'll turn around and go back to the city hall to pick up our first quests.</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349143[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>Well, commissions are what we came here for!</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349144[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>Although these proclamations look to be important, they really aren't. The City Clerk will be giving out quests that cover basically all the scenarios covered in these proclamations. They do change over time, and if you really want to read up on them, they have a chapter of their own in the journal book:</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349145[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>Basically, there are problems in the Valhigen Graveyard. We'll be getting to that... eventually. In the meantime, let's go inside and talk to the City Clerk.</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349146[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>The funny thing is, the guards "watch you closely" even after you've completed a lot of quests. In fact, they do so even after you've saved the city and won the game.</p><p></p><p>The City Clerk's door is the one on the left. Let's go in.</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349147[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>1988 graphics aren't particularly flattering to her. She looks much less blocky and exhausted when we meet her in later games, where we find out her name is Sasha. Also, obviously, we aren't due a reward since we haven't done anything yet. So she has a choice of several commissions for us:</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349148[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]349150[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]349151[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]349152[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>The Clerk always offers three commissions (except at the end of the game when she starts running out of them), and the secret here is always to do the first one she offers - that's the one that's most likely best tuned to your level. Once you've done it and claimed your reward, it disappears from her list, the other two move up, and new one will be added as the third option. So, looks like it's time to clear the Slums!</p><p></p><p>All this done, it's time to go shopping! We can't go wandering in the Slums in naught but our skins, Mr Frodo!</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349153[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>Down the street to the east of the Town Hall we go, into the shop district! Where all the shops are one of three types that all carry the same three inventories! The one in the picture (on the left) is the one I always go to since it's right next to the inn and the town hall.</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349154[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>Why yes sir! Show us what limited inventory you have in what appears, from the map, to be a tiny shop!</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349155[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>Sigh. Gary and his polearm fetish. (As a side note, Battleaxe is at the top of the page, but doesn't show until you start scrolling for some reason)</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349156[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>Well, at least there are long swords here. But wait, there's still more!</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349157[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>So, yeah, three pages with a lot of useless items no one will ever buy. We'll just have to trawl through all the unusable stuff when buying what we need. First, we'll go back a couple of screens and pool our money. This makes things a lot simpler when purchasing things, and also has the added benefit of rounding your funds off to just gold and platinum (not a problem now, but when we're dragging in hundreds of copper and silver, it's a relief to our encumbrance. I've never looked to see if I'm getting ripped off with the rounding, but at that point I don't care!)</p><p></p><p>We have 850 gold all pooled together. So what to buy?</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349159[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>So here's what we have purchased for Baroness Bella. We can't afford plate, but... in these games non-magical plate is a trap anyway, as it reduces your movement to just 6 (12 is normal movement, 9 is movement with most armor, and 6 with plate and splint), which is terrible during battle. Only wear plate if it's magical, since it's has a much better movement rate of 9.</p><p></p><p>Why not go two-handed instead of weapon and shield? Again, it's a bit of a trap, although not as much in this game as later games, when higher-level magical shields become available. AC is very important in these games, much more so than in 5e, and losing the AC benefits of a magical shield hurts a lot in later games. I've tried running a character with a two-handed weapon in the Pools series, and in later games they just get mauled and lose lots of HP each combat. (This isn't so bad in the Krynn games, where a Knight of Solamnia can gain access to Solamnic Plate, which not only has a significantly better AC than regular plate, it is non-magical to boot, so it works with <em>rings of protection</em> and the like, and thus it's viable to run a two-handed weapon character - which with <em>dragonlances</em> involved is a good thing!)</p><p></p><p>To equip our items, we just select "Ready" for each of them, the "No" turns into "Yes", and they're equipped!</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349160[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>That looks much better!</p><p></p><p>We do the same for Bant, but give him a battleaxe instead of a longsword, which is a slight nerf, since battleaxes don't do as much damage against large creatures as longswords. Oh, did I mention that 1e weapons did differing damage for large creatures? Well, they did, although since most creatures you'll fight are medium, it's not too huge a deal. Anyway, Brother Baltor gets the same as well, but with a flail instead of a sword because he's a cleric, as clerics were restricted to blunt weapons in 1e (although in these games, because he's multiclassed he could actually use a sword, but I'll keep it as a flail for flavor as well as to not let all the magical cleric weapons in these games go to waste)</p><p></p><p>Buffy, as a thief, does get a longsword as well, but since her thief abilities, especially backstabbing (the old version of sneak attacks), are reduced or outright impossible with heavier armors and shields, she only gets leather armor. But, since she and the two fighter/magic-users are in my back row, I'll equip them with longbows (I'd buy them my front-liners as well, but I don't have the money to do so now, which is the same reason I'm not buying characters composite longbows with the better range). But arrows only come in stacks of 10, and we have a relatively limited amount of inventory slots:</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349161[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>But see that "Join" option? We click on that and all our arrows are now grouped together!</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349162[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>("Halve" will split the highlighted item, which is useful if one of your other characters is running out of ammo and there's no store nearby).</p><p></p><p>Bows are somewhat broken in low levels in 1e, since characters get 2 bow attacks per round, unlike most other weapons that get just 1 attack at this point. Warrior classes will eventually get more attacks per round, but don't reach 2 until they're in the teen levels. So my backliners equipped with bows are going to do some pretty impressive damage. And, as we'll soon see, they have the potential to really do some damage with certain bows in the future. The only real issue is if a foe gets within melee range of them, which will disallow bow use and force them to use melee weapons.</p><p></p><p>My two fighter/magic-users will also get bows. But... now's the time for a bit of a surprise. I'm also equipping them with banded mail as well! But... magic-users... armor? Well, see, they're <em>elf</em> fighter/magic-users, and in 1e, elves could cast spells while wearing some types of armor (notably elven chain). I assume the makers of the game just didn't care about or didn't want to put the extra work in concerning which types of armor were allowed, so they just threw them all in. So I'm going to have some the best protected spellcasters ever as a result. (I'm not equipping them with shields since they'll usually be equipped with bows, and since you have to go into the inventory and manually swap out equipment, it's less tedious the less you have to swap out. For the same reason I'm giving them two-handed weapons, since, as they're in the back row, AC isn't quite as important)</p><p></p><p>So everyone is now pretty well equipped:</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]349163[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>So, next, we'll go and memorize spells, rest up, explore the rest of Civilized Phlan, before heading out to the Slums for adventure!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Demetrios1453, post: 9280359, member: 6801060"] [B][I]POOL OF RADIANCE [/I](Part 3): Welcome to Phlan![/B] We start with a brief shot of the pier we have landed on (so brief I didn't get a screenshot of it), and then we are approached by this fellow: [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 215846.png"]349135[/ATTACH] So we follow Rolf around the city: [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 215859.png"]349136[/ATTACH] Tyr and Tempus make sense here; we're in a city where evil is fighting to destroy what remains of the city. Sune, though? It's not a particularly obvious place for the goddess of love and beauty to have a temple, is it? Maybe Phlan, before it was overrun by monsters, was filled with art and they're here to help reclaim what can be salvaged? The city was renowned for its library, as we will see, but that's more in Oghma's wheelhouse than Sune. It's basically left unexplained why this temple is here. [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 215914.png"]349137[/ATTACH][ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 215928.png"]349138[/ATTACH] [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 215938.png"]349139[/ATTACH] [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 215952.png"]349140[/ATTACH] [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220001.png"]349141[/ATTACH] [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220007.png"]349142[/ATTACH] I've always thought that parenthetical "(You are on your own now)" to be pretty funny. Like players were just going to endlessly stare at that gate waiting for something exciting to happen. Anyway, tour over, time to start doing things. First things first, we'll turn around and go back to the city hall to pick up our first quests. [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220036.png"]349143[/ATTACH] Well, commissions are what we came here for! [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220043.png"]349144[/ATTACH] Although these proclamations look to be important, they really aren't. The City Clerk will be giving out quests that cover basically all the scenarios covered in these proclamations. They do change over time, and if you really want to read up on them, they have a chapter of their own in the journal book: [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220432.png"]349145[/ATTACH] Basically, there are problems in the Valhigen Graveyard. We'll be getting to that... eventually. In the meantime, let's go inside and talk to the City Clerk. [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220529.png"]349146[/ATTACH] The funny thing is, the guards "watch you closely" even after you've completed a lot of quests. In fact, they do so even after you've saved the city and won the game. The City Clerk's door is the one on the left. Let's go in. [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220542.png"]349147[/ATTACH] 1988 graphics aren't particularly flattering to her. She looks much less blocky and exhausted when we meet her in later games, where we find out her name is Sasha. Also, obviously, we aren't due a reward since we haven't done anything yet. So she has a choice of several commissions for us: [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220600.png"]349148[/ATTACH] [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220608.png"]349150[/ATTACH] [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220617.png"]349151[/ATTACH] [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220625.png"]349152[/ATTACH] The Clerk always offers three commissions (except at the end of the game when she starts running out of them), and the secret here is always to do the first one she offers - that's the one that's most likely best tuned to your level. Once you've done it and claimed your reward, it disappears from her list, the other two move up, and new one will be added as the third option. So, looks like it's time to clear the Slums! All this done, it's time to go shopping! We can't go wandering in the Slums in naught but our skins, Mr Frodo! [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220732.png"]349153[/ATTACH] Down the street to the east of the Town Hall we go, into the shop district! Where all the shops are one of three types that all carry the same three inventories! The one in the picture (on the left) is the one I always go to since it's right next to the inn and the town hall. [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220745.png"]349154[/ATTACH] Why yes sir! Show us what limited inventory you have in what appears, from the map, to be a tiny shop! [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220815.png"]349155[/ATTACH] Sigh. Gary and his polearm fetish. (As a side note, Battleaxe is at the top of the page, but doesn't show until you start scrolling for some reason) [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220823.png"]349156[/ATTACH] Well, at least there are long swords here. But wait, there's still more! [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 220832.png"]349157[/ATTACH] So, yeah, three pages with a lot of useless items no one will ever buy. We'll just have to trawl through all the unusable stuff when buying what we need. First, we'll go back a couple of screens and pool our money. This makes things a lot simpler when purchasing things, and also has the added benefit of rounding your funds off to just gold and platinum (not a problem now, but when we're dragging in hundreds of copper and silver, it's a relief to our encumbrance. I've never looked to see if I'm getting ripped off with the rounding, but at that point I don't care!) We have 850 gold all pooled together. So what to buy? [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 221450.png"]349159[/ATTACH] So here's what we have purchased for Baroness Bella. We can't afford plate, but... in these games non-magical plate is a trap anyway, as it reduces your movement to just 6 (12 is normal movement, 9 is movement with most armor, and 6 with plate and splint), which is terrible during battle. Only wear plate if it's magical, since it's has a much better movement rate of 9. Why not go two-handed instead of weapon and shield? Again, it's a bit of a trap, although not as much in this game as later games, when higher-level magical shields become available. AC is very important in these games, much more so than in 5e, and losing the AC benefits of a magical shield hurts a lot in later games. I've tried running a character with a two-handed weapon in the Pools series, and in later games they just get mauled and lose lots of HP each combat. (This isn't so bad in the Krynn games, where a Knight of Solamnia can gain access to Solamnic Plate, which not only has a significantly better AC than regular plate, it is non-magical to boot, so it works with [I]rings of protection[/I] and the like, and thus it's viable to run a two-handed weapon character - which with [I]dragonlances[/I] involved is a good thing!) To equip our items, we just select "Ready" for each of them, the "No" turns into "Yes", and they're equipped! [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 221529.png"]349160[/ATTACH] That looks much better! We do the same for Bant, but give him a battleaxe instead of a longsword, which is a slight nerf, since battleaxes don't do as much damage against large creatures as longswords. Oh, did I mention that 1e weapons did differing damage for large creatures? Well, they did, although since most creatures you'll fight are medium, it's not too huge a deal. Anyway, Brother Baltor gets the same as well, but with a flail instead of a sword because he's a cleric, as clerics were restricted to blunt weapons in 1e (although in these games, because he's multiclassed he could actually use a sword, but I'll keep it as a flail for flavor as well as to not let all the magical cleric weapons in these games go to waste) Buffy, as a thief, does get a longsword as well, but since her thief abilities, especially backstabbing (the old version of sneak attacks), are reduced or outright impossible with heavier armors and shields, she only gets leather armor. But, since she and the two fighter/magic-users are in my back row, I'll equip them with longbows (I'd buy them my front-liners as well, but I don't have the money to do so now, which is the same reason I'm not buying characters composite longbows with the better range). But arrows only come in stacks of 10, and we have a relatively limited amount of inventory slots: [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 221912.png"]349161[/ATTACH] But see that "Join" option? We click on that and all our arrows are now grouped together! [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 221933.png"]349162[/ATTACH] ("Halve" will split the highlighted item, which is useful if one of your other characters is running out of ammo and there's no store nearby). Bows are somewhat broken in low levels in 1e, since characters get 2 bow attacks per round, unlike most other weapons that get just 1 attack at this point. Warrior classes will eventually get more attacks per round, but don't reach 2 until they're in the teen levels. So my backliners equipped with bows are going to do some pretty impressive damage. And, as we'll soon see, they have the potential to really do some damage with certain bows in the future. The only real issue is if a foe gets within melee range of them, which will disallow bow use and force them to use melee weapons. My two fighter/magic-users will also get bows. But... now's the time for a bit of a surprise. I'm also equipping them with banded mail as well! But... magic-users... armor? Well, see, they're [I]elf[/I] fighter/magic-users, and in 1e, elves could cast spells while wearing some types of armor (notably elven chain). I assume the makers of the game just didn't care about or didn't want to put the extra work in concerning which types of armor were allowed, so they just threw them all in. So I'm going to have some the best protected spellcasters ever as a result. (I'm not equipping them with shields since they'll usually be equipped with bows, and since you have to go into the inventory and manually swap out equipment, it's less tedious the less you have to swap out. For the same reason I'm giving them two-handed weapons, since, as they're in the back row, AC isn't quite as important) So everyone is now pretty well equipped: [ATTACH type="full" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-25 222103.png"]349163[/ATTACH] So, next, we'll go and memorize spells, rest up, explore the rest of Civilized Phlan, before heading out to the Slums for adventure! [/QUOTE]
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