Swords and Sorcery: Finished

I'm done with Swords and Sorcery, which I ended up playing for much longer than I thought I would. There's a simple reason for that: I was enjoying it. But while some games remain enjoyable for a long time, there are others where you eventually hit a wall, and they stop being fun. In that regard, Swords and Sorcery has one of the sharpest declines that I've ever experienced.

As of my last post, I had around 130,000 experience points, and the missions I was getting from the king involved killing Demons. These were not too hard; in a head-to-head battle, I would generally earn just enough XP from killing a demon to offset the damage taken. Using maneuverability, ranged attacks, and the protection of the magic circles, I was able to beat them without taking much damage at all, gradually increasing my XP (which double as hit points).

Soon I was getting missions to kill Invisible Demons, which were about twice as tough as regular Demons. Their invisibility could definitely be a problem; it was easy to get into a rhythm while clearing out weaker foes and not realise that an Invisible Demon was attacking me repeatedly, draining 1,500 XP with every attack. The best way to beat them is by using the Magic Lantern, which reveals their location. The duration of the lantern is limited, but generally long enough to last a whole mission.

After that came Goblin Kings, which looked like regular Goblins but were a whole lot tougher. Each one had around 20,000 hit points, and it was taking me around a dozen hits to kill just one. Luckily they're weak to arrows. Especially effective were the magic arrows that fire three shots at once. With those, as well as the ever-useful magic circles, I was soon beating them and earning even higher rewards. I'm pretty sure that your XP reward for killing a monster is equal to its hit points, so the Goblin Kings were granting me some hefty rewards.

Finally, the king started giving me missions to kill Men. This is where the game really took a turn. Each man had over 200,000 hit points, and on a successful strike would deal a like amount of damage. I had around 1 million XP by this point, but even so just a few hits from a Man would be enough to wipe out hours of progress. My return strikes were only doing about 2,000 damage, and my arrows were even less effective. I was able to kill them from the safety of a magic circle, which was a lengthy process that usually involved breaking a number of swords. This would have been fine, because my regular readers will be aware that I have a lot of patience and persistence, but not every section of the forest has a magic circle. Eventually it's necessary to kill a Man without that protection. I was able to do it, by staying out of range and peppering him with arrows, but that took me over an hour. It was lucky for me that I'd acquired a quiver with an infinite amount of arrows; without that I surely would have run out first. Regardless, at that point I realised that I had four more Men to kill to complete the mission, all without the aid of a magic circle, and that's when I gave up. The time-to-fun ratio had definitely dried up.

That said, it now occurs to me that I could have switched to playing in 1x1 forest maps, which would guarantee the use of a magic circle against all foes. I'm tempted to keep playing now to see if there are any enemies beyond Men. There was a weird jellyfish icon on the opening screen that I haven't encountered yet.

Fighting a Man from a magic circle. His icon is the same as mine.
You can see in the bracketed text below how many hit points he has left.

Still, I'm done with Sword and Sorcery at least as far as the blog is concerned. Time for a Final Rating.

FINAL RATING

Story & Setting: The story is simply that a king keeps sending you into a forest to kill increasingly stronger monsters, with no end-point in sight. That's fine for a game set-up but it's not going to score a lot of points. The forest is a novel setting in what has been a dungeon-heavy genre thus far, but it's not a particularly interesting one. Rating: 1 out of 7.

NPCs & Monsters: This game has a solid number and variety of monsters, but as is usual at this time they're differentiated only by icon and number of hit points. The Goblin King had a noticeable weakness to arrows, so it's possible that there were other weaknesses and immunities that I didn't catch onto. The Invisible Demons also added an extra challenge. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: The graphics were clean and functional, and I've always marked the PLATO games up a little for that warm, cozy orange glow. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: This is a tight, well-designed game, at least up to a point. The combat is tactical in a way that I haven't seen in any other games on the blog, relying more on maneuverability and ranged attacks than items and spells. The advancement system is rudimentary, but I appreciate the way that it cuts out the middleman by using XP directly as health. I have to mark it down a little for the very steep rise in difficulty, though. I'm also not super keen on the way the movement controls work, but they were fine once I got used to them.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: Right up until I started getting missions against Men, I was prepared to rate this game pretty highly in this category. Before then, it maintains a really good balance, with the monsters ramping up in difficulty just as things start getting a little easy. It's possible that I missed a weakness that might have made killing Men easier, but they really did make the game stop being fun very quickly. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: The influence of this game seems to me to be negligible, but as far as RPGs go it represents a play-style that I haven't seen in the blog so far: the tactical RPG. That's probably to do with its roots as a Star Trek variant. The only other game I've played so far that felt at all similar was Richard Garriot's DND1, and there was definitely no mutual influence there. So it gets some points for originality. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Fun: As I mentioned in the last post, this game was dominating my thoughts but I did get sucked into it whenever I found the time to play. When the challenge was still there, it remained enjoyable, and I'm a little disappointed that it stopped being fun with such abruptness. Rating: 3 out of 7.

I'll give this game the coveted bonus point, because I wasn't done wanting to play it when I had to stop. The above scores total 20, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 40. That's a very respectable score, placing it 10th out of 27 games overall, and 6th out of 11 CRPGs. It's not quite up there with the games I would genuinely recommend, but it's a solid, very playable game that would have scored even higher without such a steep rise in difficulty.

ADDENDUM:

Somewhat later in this blog I made the decision to overhaul my Final Rating system, so I'm going back through and fixing all of the games I've already played as of March 2020.  I've ditched the Innovation and Influence category, and replaced it for adventure games with a category for Puzzles.  For CRPGs I'm using a Combat category.  I've also changed the purpose of the bonus points, saving them for games that are important, innovative, influential, or have features that are otherwise not covered by my other categories.

Also, the Final Rating is a boring name.  The CRPG Addict has his GIMLET.  The Adventure Gamers have their PISSED rating.  Data Driven Gamer has his harpoons.  So I'm ditching the generic name and calling my new system the RADNESS Index: the Righteous Admirability Designation, Numerically Estimating Seven Scores. It's a pretentious mouthful, but I'm going with it.

Combat: Combat on its own is pretty simple, but using your mobility gives it some extra tactics, as does using missile weapons and magic items. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0. This game is unlike any others on PLATO, but it had no influence at all on the CRPG genre.  I'm not entirely sure it qualifies as a CRPG at all, so I'm going to refrain from givign it a bonus.

Swords and Sorcery gets an impressive RADNESS Index of 36. It's a tight game, and although it may not really a CRPG I enjoyed my time with it.  It ends up equal 9th on the list, and equal 4th out of twelve CRPGs.  It's equal with Oubliette and The Dungeon (pedit5).

NEXT: If I can't get Daniel Lawrence's DND up and running (and it looks like I probably won't be able to), I'm done with 1978. I'll do a wrap-up for that year, hand out some awards, and then it's time to start with 1979. Looking at some of the highlights for that year I see Adventure for the Atari 2600, Akalabeth, Temple of Apshai, and The Count (which I've heard is Scott Adams' best game). I'll probably kick off the year with Akalabeth, because I'm a total stan for Ultima, but I haven't decided for sure.

Game 31: Swords and Sorcery (1978)

Monsters on the battlements from left to right: demon, werewolf, zombie,
goblin, dragon, unknown, and wizard.

Ah, that familiar orange glow. Despite all the grief that the various PLATO CRPGs have given me  - I'm looking at you Moria, and you The Game of Dungeons - going back to that system almost feels like going home. There's something warm and comforting about it.  It could be Stockholm syndrome, or it could just be that the best PLATO games are so much better than their contemporaries on home computers. It's one of those.

(While I'm on the topic of Moria, Ahab over at Data Driven Gamer has just started playing it. If you didn't get enough of that game during the eight months that I was immersed in it, that blog has you covered.)

Today's game is Swords and Sorcery, which as far as I can tell is the second-last PLATO game I'll be covering. It was developed by Donald Gillies, who was a student at Urbana High School at the time, where he had access to PLATO. Its inspiration was a game called think15, created by Jim Mayeda, which is another one we have to chalk up as having been deleted by an overzealous system administrator. Following think15 was another game called think2, which Gillies describes as running incredibly slow. Development of Swords and Sorcery started in 1976, but the full game wasn't playable until 1978. Thankfully, Gillies made the game available again on cyber1.org back in 2003, so we can still play it today.

 Apparently, this lineage of games is heavily influenced by Star Trek from 1971, which is a very important piece of early gaming that I've never actually played. In that game, you fly the Starship Enterprise around a map with 8x8 quadrants, blowing up Klingons and seeking refuge in starbases. Swords and Sorcery takes the same idea and applies it to the fantasy genre.

There's no back-story in the Help file (no Help file at all, which is unusual for PLATO games, which normally have manuals that go into excruciating detail). It's set "1200 years ago," and you play a warrior or a knight undertaking missions for the king. These missions take place in a forest, and usually involve killing a certain number of a specific monster, except for a character's first mission which requires chopping down trees or collecting treasure chests.

Before you are given a quest, the king will ask you to determine the dimensions of the forest you'll be exploring. You can go as small as a single screen (1x1). I'm not sure what the upper boundary is on size; I'd test it out, but I don't want to get locked into a mission that might take me over an hour to complete. The larger the forest, the more monsters you have to kill to complete the mission, and the higher the reward you get from the king when you finish. I generally default to a 2x2 configuration, which is 4 screens. In the note files for the game, Gillies says that playing with a single screen is the most efficient way to advance, but I find that I rely on shifting from one screen to another quite a lot to survive. There's not a lot of room to maneuver one just one screen.

Moving around the screens takes a bit of getting used to. You need to type M (for move), followed by a direction, followed by the desired speed. You can move in all eight directions, using a number pad (or the arrow keys if you only want to go north, south, east or west). If you don't have a number pad the directions are mapped to different keys, but I can't remember what those are. The speed you set determines how many steps you move in one turn. Normally you can move from 1 to 3 steps, but by using adrenaline (which you can buy or find in phials) you can move 4 or 5. The trickiest thing to master is the inertia mechanic, where once you start moving in a direction you keep moving that way until you stop or change direction. I spent a lot of time early on killing myself by bumping into trees, because I couldn't figure this out. Once you get the hang of it it's not too bad, as you can stop your movement by pressing 0.

Loads of monsters, three chests, a Magic Circle on the far right,
and me at the bottom, surrounded.

Each screen will be filled with monsters, which will move towards you and try to kill you. Melee combat is a simple matter of hitting S (for sword) and choosing the direction you want to swing. Either you do enough damage to kill the monster, or you don't and it gets to retaliate. The weakest monsters are goblins, with about 10 hit points. Moving up from there are thugs, zombies, werewolves, dragons, wizards, and demons. Worst of all are the invisible demons, which have about 10,000 hit points, deal almost 2,000 damage per hit, and can't be seen. I've lost a number of characters to them without even realising I was being hit.

You can attack monsters from a distance with arrows, which do more damage than your sword early on. Arrows can be fired the length of the screen in eight directions, but they're in short supply; you need to buy them or find them. There are magic arrows that do extra damage, and can fire through multiple foes.

Some screens have treasure chests, which are opened by pressing T when you're next to one. Most of them contain bags of gold, but occasionally you'll find gems, jewels, or a magic item. Gems and jewels can be sold, and are extremely valuable. Much like original Dungeons & Dragons, finding valuable jewels is the quickest way to advance in experience. Magic items include swords, shields, boots of flying and the magic lamp (which allows you to see invisible enemies). I've found a few cursed weapons as well. Your character will normally default to the best weapon and shield, but a cursed item will force you to use it instead.

The forest will have a number of Magic Circles, which are vital to your success. Once you step on a Magic Circle, you can't be damaged by attacking monsters. You can retaliate, though, so it's a good place to fight back against those monsters that are more powerful than you. You can also sell gems and jewels here, trading them in for bags of gold. The Magic Circles are also where you can buy experience points (1 gold piece buys 25), arrows, and adrenaline. You can also pay for the ability to fly, but this isn't something I've tested out much yet; the one time I did it I accidentally left the forest and was executed by the king for failing my mission.  If your sword breaks (which occasionally happens during combat, even to magic swords), and you don't have a spare, you can buy one here or beg to have the king send you a replacement if you don't have enough gold. A sword costs 50gp, but you're better off spending that money on experience points, then begging for a free sword. Speaking of swords, don't swing one at a magic circle; the circle will become hostile, and you can't use it any longer.

Enjoying the protection of a Magic Circle.

Experience points are the most important thing in this game. Not only do they measure your progress, but they double as your hit points. You can buy them, and earn them by killing monsters, but every hit you take reduces them, and if you go below 0 you're dead. It's a fairly elegant distillation of the Dungeons & Dragons system, in which earning treasure grants you experience points that allow you to gain levels and more hit points. Swords and Sorcery does away with levels, lets you spend your treasure on experience directly, and uses that experience total as your hit points. A simplified system like this works for a simpler game.

I found this game to be very Deadly at the start, to the point where I started to despair of ever making any progress.  The first mission can be tough, because you begin the game with 0 experience points. Any damage will kill you, even bumping into trees as I mentioned before. Combat is right out, because you start out not being able to do enough damage to kill even a lowly goblin in one hit, and the return strike will absolutely be fatal. One method of survival is to outmaneuver the enemy, and either collect the required treasure (or chop the required amount of trees) without entering combat. Another is to try to nab a treasure chest and then find a Magic Circle, where you can buy some experience and arrows. The third method, the one I eventually came to favor, is to find a Magic Circle and use its protective power to kill your enemies without taking any damage.  Also useful is switching from one screen to another; you'll never be attacked on your first move into a screen, and the layout will rearrange every time you enter. So if there's a Magic Circle that's too hard to get to, just leave the screen and return and it might be in a more convenient spot.

My current character.

Using these tactics I'm making slow and steady progress. My current character has about 130,000 experience, and is mostly being given missions to kill Demons. I'm enjoying it quite a bit; it's not the sort of game that dominates my thoughts when I'm doing something else, but when I do play it it's very easy to get into a rhythm and lose a few hours. It has that thing where a mission is just short enough that it's always tempting to play just one more. I could probably finish this up in one post, but I want to keep playing, and I suspect that there are more powerful enemies that I haven't encountered yet. I'll give it one more week and see how it goes.