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Follow-up to my post about playing the SSI AD&D Goldbox CRPGs from April 2021, three years ago:
So two characters were dual-classed three years ago, to turn a fighter into a fighter/magic-user, and turn a magic-user into a magic-user/fighter. That was a bit more time-consuming than I had expected. Reading some online discussions about Pools of Darkness recently I learned that most prefer to do their dual-classing around levels 10-15, not 20-21 as I did. By AD&D rules, for a character to be able to use the abilities from their original class they have to first reach a higher level in their new class. So I had to get my two characters up to level 20-21, or some 4,000,000 XP (give or take). After many quite boring sessions of hunting random encounters to grind XP I started to carefully explore the world a bit more earlier this year (in real-world time). I found some locations with scripted encounters to clear, and after many attempts managed to clear one of the bigger dungeons, one major other location that I am not going to spoil, and then the two next entire areas that are part of the main quest. Turns out progressing a bit in the story was much more fun AND rewarded more XP than trying to grind random encounters, so I probably should have done that much sooner.
So my old magic-user finally reached level 21 as a fighter and can now cast spells again. In practice that means I have two characters that can cast Delayed Blast Fireball. The benefit of that spell in the Goldbox games is, ironically, that it can be cast without delay. When casting a regular Fireball there is a delay that can give enemies the opportunity to move first, and if they hit the spell-caster the spell is lost. The Delayed Blast Fireball has no delay. I guess implementing the spell the way it works in the real AD&D rules was too much work, so they had to come up with some other benefit for a higher-level Fireball variant.
Anyway my party is in the next major quest area. Possibly the last before going on to the end-game area? This is a place full of far too many "if the enemies go before my DBF barrage my party is dead" encounters and I lose probably 50-75% of all random encounters, but that is just how Pools of Darkness plays unless you have heavily min-maxed characters in your party (and most players seem to cheat quite a bit and edit character attributes to get good enough starting characters as well; I just allowed myself a few re-rolls).
I wish I logged how many hours I spent playing this game. I skimmed some of CRPG Addict's posts about it (but trying to avoid too many end-game spoilers) and saw that he completed the game in 68 hours (enough to make it to his top list of longest games so far). I must have spent far more than that.
CRPG Addict's Pools of Darkness posts
tags: #games #dos #dnd #rpgs