The Stack

The Might and Magic series is of course the source of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. So as I play the former, I’m keeping an eye peeled for connections to the latter. And, frankly, I’m not finding much. There are some spell names that the two have in common — in particular, the Town Portal spell, which I anticipated so greatly in Heroes Chronicles: Conquest of the Underworld, looks like it’ll just as useful here — but that’s pretty much it.

To be fair, this is the first episode, and it’s likely that it just hasn’t developed its identity yet. Most of what I’ve seen so far is just undistinguished D&D-style fantasy. But Final Fantasy started off the same way, and look where that ended up. Ultima was half sci-fi to start with, but toned that down considerably from episode 4 onward, when the Virtues of the Avatar became its defining characteristic. Might and Magic seems to have gone in the other direction, becoming more of a science-fantasy over the course of the first five episodes at least, with horizon-dominating planetary bodies becoming prominent on the cover art. But that’s an aspect that’s completely absent in HoMM as I know it. Considering that the first HoMM came out when the most recent Might and Magic game was set on the planet Xeen, I have to wonder what was going on there.

The one major thing I can see as an influence on HoMM so far is the outdoors sections. For one thing, the mere fact that they’re there. Might and Magic had an explorable wilderness before other Wizardry-style RPGs did — it predates the far simpler and less-varied outdoors in The Bard’s Tale II by a year or two. As a result, it establishes from the very beginning an environment for outdoor monsters. Venture into the mountains, for example, and you can wind up fighting herds of centaurs or pegasi — the same cantaurs and pegasi that would become core troop types for “rampart”-type cities in HoMM3. Obviously these aren’t unique to M&M — they’re part of the Narnia-esque mishmash of myth that forms part of D&D‘s core, and therefore the core of early RPGs in general. But that’s the part that’s generally neglected by other early RPGs in favor of the abominations-of-the-dungeon side, the troglodytes and oozes and spiders and so forth. It would be incongruous to find a pegasus wandering the corridors of an underground maze. (Not that Wizardry shied away from the incongruous.)

I haven’t said anything about the plot yet. That’s because, after nearly a week of play, I’m only just starting it. It took me some time to battle through the one-level dungeon under Sorpigal to the point where I got my first quest, a simple courier mission to the town of Erliquin, and it took me a while after that to be able to reach Erliquin. The closest I’ve come to a Wizardry-like lost-in-the-dungeon experience was when I tried to take an overland route to there, but realized that the monsters in the next map sector were getting too tough for me, then tried to return to Sorpigal, only to find that some of the passages between sectors are only passable in one direction.

I did ultimately reach Erliquin, where I was assigned another delivery to another town — I’m guessing that this whole quest chain is meant as a way to get the player to visit and map every town in the land of Varn. But I did not get there by venturing outdoors. I’m a little displeased about how this happened. Remember that I had had problems with text flashing by too fast to read. I had missed some tavern rumors in this way, and wasn’t having any success getting them to show up again — in fact, I don’t think the rumor texts ever do repeat. So I went online to see if I could find some record of the rumors there, and inadvertently got spoilers about a hidden way to teleport from town to town. I might have found it eventually by myself — I knew from experience that there are secret doors, and that therefore I should be banging my head against the boundaries of any unused bit of gridspace. But spoilage is never all that pleasant.

So now I’m mapping Erliquin. I assume I’ll find a similar teleport opportunity taking me to the next node in the chain. I’ve been in one dungeon not affiliated with a town so far, and that too had a way to teleport to it from Sorpigal. I’m kind of wondering now if it ever really becomes necessary to go outdoors at all. Perhaps the wilderness was a late addition to a game designed without it. That would make this like an inverse of some of the Ultima games.

I mentioned before that in Wizardry, as the title suggests, the spellcasters are the real powerhouses of the party, while the fighters mainly function as their bodyguards. From the title, you’d expect Might and Magic to treat the two disciplines more equitably. Is this the case?

I can’t really speak to what happens at high experience levels yet, but there are a few things suggesting that it is. For one thing, there are a great many more highly-effective combat buffs. For example, there’s a level 2 cleric spell that increases one person’s effective experience level by 2 for the duration of the encounter. This is essentially an effect that scales with the level of the castee: no matter how powerful you are, two levels will make you substantially more powerful. Still, it won’t turn a sorcerer into an effective melee fighter. Buffs are essentially a means of collaboration between the casters and the fighters.

Mind you, there’s no shortage of damage-all-monsters spells, but they seem to come rather late in the game. At the moment, the only spells I have that affect multiple creatures are the sorcerer’s Sleep spell and the cleric’s Turn Undead. (These are sort of complementary: undead, by definition, resist resting.) Sleep is useful enough that I use it at nearly every encounter, but even when monsters are asleep, someone still has to step in and kill the things.

Also, I think the combat mechanics makes fighters somewhat more useful. Like in Wizardry, there’s a concept of front and back rows, with only the front row being in range of melee attacks. But fighter-types can remain effective in the back by using bows and other missile weapons. (Indeed, one class specializes in it.) Also, characters can exchange positions in mid-combat, making it possible to cycle characters out of the front row as they get hurt. Finally, there’s variation in how wide the front row is. In a narrow dungeon corridor, only two can walk abreast, but in the open wilderness, the first five characters — and the first five monsters — are in melee range. It all makes me think that a fighter-heavy party would be very viable.

Not that I’m much tempted to try such a thing. Might and Magic provides an obvious natural party composition: there are six slots in your party, and six character classes. Only two of which specialize in spells.

One thing about playing old games: they often don’t work well with hardware that runs thousands of times faster than what they were written for. I mentioned how there were occasional text messages in Wizardry that didn’t wait for the player to dismiss them and went by too fast to read. The same thing happens in Might and Magic, but far more frequently. Most status update notifications flit by without a prompt, including the hit/miss messages in combat. Combat messages are a special case, because the game lets you change their speed, and even considers it important enough that this is one of the core elements of the combat menu (presumably to let you temporarily speed things up when you’re fighting a dozen weak monsters who all have to take a a turn at missing you). But even there, the delay is relative to the CPU speed, and unreadable at even the maximum delay if I run the game at full speed.

Fortunately, I don’t have to run the game at full speed. As with Wizardry, I’m running it under DOSBox. I can’t say enough good things about DOSBox; it’s easily the best emulator I’ve ever used, and the whole project represented by this blog would probably be impossible without it, or at least very inconvenient.

Anyway, any decent emulator provides some way to adjust the emulated CPU speed, so making all those messages readable is not a problem. But it introduces a new problem: playing at the game’s original speed is a great deal less pleasant. The game takes noticeable time between keypresses to figure things out and then render them. I’m talking about fractions of seconds here (unless you’re moving between map sectors, which is slower), but it’s enough to make the interaction seem muddy and unresponsive, as opposed to the crisp immediacy of reaction before I slowed it down. I suppose I’m spoiled, but this is one aspect of the original experience I can do without.

DOSBox provides a couple of hotkeys for turning the speed up and down, and I’ve spent some time fiddling with it to find a good compromise. Setting it somewhere around 160 KHz seems to work pretty well. Messages flash by pretty quickly, but not too quickly to read, for the most part. Some of the messages from triggering traps are longish, but as long as I understand that I triggered a trap, I can see the effects by looking at the party status screen.

The traps. That’s another thing M&M does differently from Wizardry. They’re less deadly, but more numerous and harder to avoid: in addition to traps on treasure chests, there are traps on doors, which means sometimes you need to get through one to move forward. I’ll probably have more to say about that later.

I haven’t made a lot of progress in Might and Magic yet. Mainly I’ve been exploring, trying things out, picking fights to see how tough various creatures are — learning through failure is more attractive when death has no lasting consequences. I was uneasy at first about venturing out of the starting town, but it turns out that outdoors is where the real loot is (that’s accessible to level-1 characters, anyway). So I’m contemplating the task of mapping the outdoors.

The entire world of Varn (where M&M takes place) is composed of 16×16 grids. Wizardry‘s dungeon levels were 20×20, which is a more natural number for a human, but 16 is more natural for a computer: every grid reference fits neatly into a single byte. I imagine that this compactness was appealing to the programmer who had to fit the whole of the world onto a floppy disk: although the individual map levels are smaller than Wizardry‘s, it makes up for it by having a lot more of them. Wizardry III apparently has six dungeon levels; one of the major M&M quests apparently involves six castles, each presumably with multiple levels, and that’s in addition to the sundry towns, the freestanding caves, and of course the overland map, which is a 5×4 grid of 16×16 sub-grids. (The outdoors is at a larger scale, so that an entire town fits into a single outdoor map tile.) This hierarchical nature makes the output of the Location spell a bit confusing at first: casting it from inside a town or dungeon, you get three sets of grid references, indicating your main map sector, the coordinates of the town or dungeon in that sector, and your coordinates within the town. (And the coordinates aren’t even given in terms of compass directions, but rather, as X and Y.)

You can walk between adjacent outdoor map sectors, provided there isn’t a mountain range or something in the way, but the sectors are clearly isolated units all the same. You can’t see into adjacent sectors. There always seems to be a passable-but-obscuring forest or something in the way. This makes sense, when you think about it: the whole game engine is clearly organized around dealing with only one 16×16 chunk at a time. And that means it’s reasonable to map it as isolated sectors, just like you map a dungeon one level at a time.

But I might not do it that way. When you come down to it, the world isn’t really all that big. A 5×4 grid of 16×16 tiles coms out to 80×64 — at five squares per inch (my preferred grade of graph paper), this comes out to about 16×13 inches. Paper is certainly manufactured in sheets that large, but it would probably be more convenient to use A4, which would mean spreading it out among four sheets, probably splitting it into two 32×32 sections and two 48×32 sections, leaving ample room for notes. But we’ll see how it goes. Mapping the outdoors may not even be necessary: the game comes with a map. It’s an illustrative map, and not precise to the level of map tiles, but it may well be good enough for general navigation in an environment that doesn’t play the cruel tricks that Wizardry does.

I have to admit that what little I know about the Might and Magic series comes from its spin-off series, the Heroes of Might and Magic turn-based strategy games. I was curious enough about where it all came from to pick up the Ultimate Might and Magic Archives when it was released in 1998 as publicity for Might and Magic VI, but not curious enough to actually get around to playing it until now. Presumably the package was named by the same committee as the Ultimate Wizardry Archives; it isn’t exactly “ultimate” today, containing the first five of what is now a nine-game series. It’s a pretty nicely-put-together package, though, containing several handsome and colorful world maps on stiff paper, which fit neatly in a 6×9 envelope along with a compact booklet containing summarized instructions and spell descriptions. The full manuals are in PDF format on the disc, rather than in a thick book the way Ultimate Wizardry Archives did it.

Am I mentioning Wizardry a lot? I shall continue to do so. Might and Magic, it turns out, is a Wizardry clone. At the navigation level, it plays so much like Wizardry, with even the same visible distance and everything, that I’m finding the minor differences in the controls quite disconcerting. (Where in Wizardry the down-arrow key did an about-face, in M&M it moves you backward without turning.) I’ll note just three major differences that I’ve noticed so far in what little time I’ve spent playing:

First and most visibly, there’s the graphics. Instead of line drawings, we get textures, like in The Bard’s Tale. Remember when I said that Wizardry‘s minimalism holds up better than more ambitious graphics from the same era? This game is a good example of what I was thinking of. The wall textures just scream “The programmer who drew me was really pushing the limits of Apple II hi-res mode!” The PC version is actually capable of running in 640×400 EGA mode ¹[23 January] It turns out that EGA doesn’t have a 640×400 mode. I think the emulator I’m using is automatically upscaling. Still, it’s definitely using multiple pixels to represent each Apple II pixel. Apple II hi-res mode pixels are just freakishly elongated., but faithfully imitates the pixel size (and, where relevant, the dithering) of the Apple II version throughout, eight EGA pixels to every Apple one. Because this isn’t a perfect fit to the Apple pixel aspect ratio, the scenes are stretched out horizontally somewhat relative to the original. And yes, the game does credit the programmer as an artist. It also credits a couple of artists who aren’t credited as programmers, but I think they must have worked mostly on the monster illustrations.

Secondly, the first-person view extends to more of the world than in Wizardry. The earlier Wizardry games, at least, are played entirely in the dungeon (even if they sometimes try to pretend that it’s something other than a dungeon); the town is nothing more than a series of text-based menus. In M&M, as in The Bard’s Tale before it, the towns (plural) are something you can explore, and where you can be attacked by monsters while walking around. Unlike The Bard’s Tale, though, the starting town looks like a dungeon. Enough so that it’s actually worked into the fiction: mention is made of how the towns moved underground as a defense against dragons. The wilderness outside is also explorable, and rendered in the same engine, which looks fairly ludicrous: the world is plainly made of square partitions with pictures of forests and mountains wallpapered onto them.

Thirdly, the game is a great deal gentler than Wizardry. Characters reduced to zero hit points are not dead, but merely unconscious, and can be revived by means of a simple healing spell (even in the middle of combat). Even if you suffer a total party kill, the only consequence is that you start over from the last time you stopped at an inn. In this respect, it’s a lot more like a modern CRPG: nothing permanently bad happens. It’s making me a little worried, though: I created my current party thinking of it as a test run, but if they can’t get killed off for good, maybe I should have spent more time rerolling for better stats.

A TPK of my second party has left me in a poor position. Oh, it’s a better position than starting over from scratch — I meant everything I said last time about saving up the snazzy gear, and I still have a few back-up characters waiting in the wings. The highest-level one remaining is a priest, which is probably the best class to jump-start a new party, what with all those healing and protection spells. Nonetheless, the plan was to pull out a new game every two weeks, and since it’s pretty much time for that, I’ll take this as an opportunity to bow out for a while.

It’s funny. After mastering dungeon levels 2 and 3 so handily, I really thought I was going to finish the game before my self-imposed deadline. But that sort of attitude just encourages recklessness, and this is a game that rewards patience — the reward being those “I can’t believe I actually pulled that off” moments, rendered meaningful by the very real possibility of failure with major consequences. With that and the major role of randomization, the game plays more like gambling than most CRPGs do, albeit gambling where the odds are really tilted in your favor, however it seems sometimes.

I do want to get back to it, and will probably take it up as this year’s game-to-play-between-other-games. As I mentioned before, I’m finding it’s a good thing to play on the bus with a laptop: it occupies the attention, but doesn’t absorb it so much that you miss your stop. Dealing with maps on the bus is awkward, but that just means mapping is best done at home and the bus is better for grinding. After you’ve spent some time grinding on a level, you don’t even really need to consult a map very often; you just develop an orbit that takes in a few guaranteed monster encounters and returns to the exit.

Maps are still necessary if you trigger a teleport trap, mind you. Traps are the single deadliest things in the game — my latest TPK was the result of triggering a teleport trap and winding up in a place that I was in no position to get through, and in the near-TPK I described last post, the reason my party was mostly poisoned was a gas cloud trap. Traps are also completely avoidable: they’re only found on treasure chests, and opening treasure chests is optional. But pass them up and you’ll never get the buff gear that makes it so easy to train up your replacements. I’ll admit that it’s kind of a circular argument, but there it is.

Next up: Another old RPG from an anthology package! I have a lot of those. If I stick to schedule, it’ll be mid-March before I play anything else.

I’m recovering from another TPK. It was a pretty anticlimactic one, too. I had just gone through a heroic effort to bring my party back unharmed from a one-way trip into a lengthy sequence of unexplored tunnels — basically, the previously-unexplorable reaches of dungeon level 2. The monsters back there don’t pose a serious threat to me any more, except perhaps through slow attrition after I run out of spells, but there was one complication: most of my party was poisoned, and losing health just from walking around. Not only that, but there was a point where the only way forward required a password. After guessing wrong twice, I really thought I that was it, but, in classic storytelling form, I solved the riddle on my third try. And I made it out without loss of life. It was the sort of adventure that leaves you elated for having beaten the odds. And then, on my next try, I blundered into a previously-unseen boss lair, was surprised, and bam. I couldn’t even run away.

Fortunately, I had another party waiting in the wings: the reclaimed remains of my last TPK. They’re not quite as advanced as the ones newly-lost, but they’re pretty close. The only real drag on my progress right now is the need to train up a new mage, as I seem to be fresh out of mages. In fact, I should probably train two. Two in the hand is worth one lying inert on the dungeon floor, right? After all, I’d be in really bad shape if the party I’m currently using got wiped out too.

But not as bad as you’d think. Spending a long time in a particular area of the dungeon means picking up a lot of redundant magic items. Even if I had to start over with level 1 characters, I think I could get through the opening stages of the game again pretty quickly if the entire front row started with +1 plate mail. Which means I have to make sure to actually give the spare gear to someone not currently adventuring. This is certainly doable, but it goes somewhat against instinct, and involves fiddling around with menus instead of just selling your loot and going straight back into the dungeon.

Still, one thing is clear: I’m going to need a much more powerful party to do the rescue this time. My best characters are going to rot in a heap until they aren’t nearly my best characters any more.

I’ve survived another trip to dungeon level 4. It was a close thing, though: fully half my party was dead by the time I made it out. (Fortunately, they all survived resurrection.) This time, though, it wasn’t due to any individual encounter. It’s because I spent too long wandering the dungeon and getting into fights. Not deliberately, either: I hit a teleporter I didn’t know about, and had to find a way back to the exit through uncharted ground. The upside is that it’s not uncharted any more.

Since the primary distinguishing feature of my last session was more fights than I wanted, let’s talk a bit about what fights are like. The Wizardry combat system is the basis of turn-based combat in so many RPGs, notably including Final Fantasy. It’s all turn-based, or, more precisely, it’s what’s been called a “phased” system: you give every character their instructions for the round — whether to attack or cast a spell or whatever — and then there’s a certain amount of randomness in the ordering of the results, weighted by experience level and Agility. This includes the actions of the monsters.

Monsters come in homogeneous stacks, with up to four stacks per encounter, but act individually. The stacks (or “groups”, as the docs call them) are significant to the mechanics: when you specify a target for a spell or an attack, you specify the group, not the individual. Many of the combat spells affect an entire group at a time, which makes a sufficiently-advanced mage vastly more powerful than an equally-advanced fighter, who can kill at most one creature per round. Past a certain point, the fighter has only two purposes in the party: meat-shield, and conserving the mage’s spells by killing the less-threatening monsters the slow way.

Not that this makes them less crucial as parts of the party! Mages really, really need their meat-shields, because it’s the only kind of shield they can use. Although the interface doesn’t indicate this clearly, the party is divided into two rows. Only the first three slots are in melee range of the monsters. I don’t mean that there’s a reduced chance of hitting the back row, I mean the back row can’t be targeted by physical attacks at all. This is why samurai and lords are so valuable: they’re spellcasters that you can put in the front row without getting them killed. They are, in effect, their own meat-shields. Priests are almost as good in this role, in that they can wear armor that’s almost as good as a fighter’s, and in addition can carry enough healing power to compensate for the difference. But I’m still somehow not comfortable putting more than one priest in front.

Mind you, even in the back row, you’re vulnerable to spells. This is something I remember coming as a bit of a shock when I first encountered spellcasting monsters on dungeon level 2 of Wizardry I. I had gotten used to wiping out the monsters with group damage spells, and suddenly they were easily wiping me out using exactly the same techniques. It seemed somehow unfair, despite being symmetrical. Or, well, not entirely symmetrical: spellcasting monsters tend to come in groups, which increases their chance of getting in the first cast, which can determine the outcome of the entire battle. It’s a good thing that your initiative goes up with your experience level.

Frequently, combat begins with a surprise round, in which only one side gets to attack. The interesting thing about this is that you can’t cast spells in a surprise round, which completely changes the dynamic. The priestly ability to dispel undead isn’t considered a spell, so that’s pretty much your only option for disposing of monsters en masse. Until, that is, you realize that this is what scrolls are for. I had written them off as worthless at first, just an expensive way of getting the equivalent of an extra spell slot, but a Katino (sleep) scroll used in a surprise round against against a group of spellcasters has on more than one occasion prevented them from getting off a single spell.

Well, it happened, just like I said it would: I got cocky. My rapid mastery of dungeon levels 2 and 3 led to a total party kill on level 4. The really galling thing here is that my first foray to that depth was relatively placid: I explored a small area, enough to find a quick one-way route back to town, which seems pretty important, given how long it takes to get to and from that level by the front entrance (and how many encounters you’d have along the way, and what shape your party will be in on the way out). On the second trip, I tried to just do a sweep to that exit, but got slaughtered en route. I’ll want to pick up their corpses at some point, but for the moment, they’re out of reach. The one time I attempted that level with another party, I was beaten back; by the time I completed the return journey the long way, only one member of the party remained alive. Most of the rest resurrected successfully, but it’s clear that I’m not going to be able to make more progress until I’ve improved my defenses to the maximum possible extent.

And that’s been a bit of a problem. The dead party had better armor than you can buy in the store, and better also than what I’ve been able to find since. Even worse, my new priest has been strangely unable to master Maporfic. This is a priest spell — all of the spell in the game have nonsense names — a spell that improves the entire party’s armor class, and lasts for the entire expedition, until you go back to town. (Or until you hit an anti-magic field, I suppose, but I haven’t run into any of those yet.) Since it offers potentially unlimited protection for a single casting cost, Maporfic quickly becomes a part of your regular routine on entering the dungeon. I certainly don’t dare consider braving level 4 again without it. But at this point, it’s starting to look like the quickest way to get it will be to create a new priest.

To fully understand my problem, you have to understand how leveling works, and just how random it is. And since leveling up is the focus of my attention at this point, it seems a good time to describe it in detail. As usual, killing monsters (or even just passively standing and watching the rest of the party kill monsters) yields experience points, which yield character levels at exponentially-increasing intervals. Unusually for a CRPG, you don’t gain experience levels in the dungeon; you have to explicitly stay at the Adventurer’s Inn back in town. Sending each party member to the inn becomes part of the post-adventure routine, just like selling your loot. If you failed to level, you get a report of how many more experience points you need; if you succeed, you get a report of exactly how it changed you. You always gain at least one hit point on leveling, but frequently only one — although sometimes you’ll wind up gaining twenty. (As a point of comparison, all level-1 characters have 8 hit points.) Some of your stats will increase by one, but others will decrease by one, with no discernable pattern, except that higher experience levels seem to make increases more likely. At low levels, net stat loss on leveling is not unusual. (I have one fighter in my party whose IQ stat is down to 0; I think it’s possible for it to even go negative.) I know I keep saying this, but: No one would design a game like this today. The whole idea of rewarding experience with random decreases in power seems downright perverse by modern standards. But really, it isn’t as bad as it seems, because the increase in overall power from just being a higher experience level more than compensates for such losses.

Leveling is also how you learn spells. It’s the only way to learn spells, and it’s just as random. Spells come in seven levels, and there are limits on how soon you can learn them (with pure mages and priests getting access to higher spell levels at lower experience levels than bishops, samurai, or lords), but once you have access to a spell level, you’ll just pick up the spells in it at random as you gain experience levels. But it’s quite possible to start picking up level 5 spells before you’ve got all the level 4’s. Quite possible, and quite frustrating.

The one upside of spending three or four experience levels trying to get a particular spell is that, when you’re done, you have a character who’s three or four experience levels higher than before. Even if I decide to give up and power-level up a new priest, having a high-level healer around will expedite it. The amount of time you can spend in the more experience-rich parts of the dungeon is limited mainly by the amount of healing magic you have available.