Oubliette: Defeat.

It's time to call it a day for Oubliette. This is something I need to do for my own sanity, because I very nearly decided to persevere with it and try to map all ten dungeon levels. I could probably do it if I applied for a few more cyber1 log-ins and used them to create multiple characters. It would take a long time, though, and it would also be setting a dangerous precedent for multiplayer games. I may have decided differently if the game had an end goal, but as far as I'm aware there's nothing to achieve in it beyond obtaining loot and more loot. So this is me dusting my hands of Oubliette, and PLATO in general for the time being, albeit reluctantly.

I had set myself two realistic goals when I started the game: try every character class, and map the first level. I managed to do both, so here's a map of Oubliette dungeon level 1.

Oubliette dungeon level 1

As you can see (and as I've mentioned before) this game pioneered a lot of the tricks that Wizardry and Bard's Tale (among others) will put to irritating use in the years to come. There are plenty of secret doors, which can only be found by bumping into walls (or using a light spell if you have one). There are pits, which damage you with no warning and no way to avoid them even if you know they are there (although there is a levitation spell for mages that I never got to try out, and a detect traps spell for clerics that might work). The teleporters move you to another location on the same level, and with no way to display your coordinates, mapping is the only method of figuring out where you are. Thankfully each teleporter sends you to a fixed location, so once you've worked out where they send you they become less of a nuisance; some of them are even helpful for getting quickly back to the castle. The darkness squares extinguish your light source, or blind you temporarily if you have infravision. Finally, the spinners turn you in a random direction when you enter the square, and are a nightmare for accurate mapping; the game doesn't display your coordinates or provide a means of telling what direction you're facing, so I only discovered some of the spinners when it became obvious that my map was incorrect.

I found the stairs to level 2, and did quite a bit of exploration there as well. Not only are the monsters stronger, but the pits are deeper as well. On level 1 the pits dealt roughly between 3 and 12 points of damage, whereas those on level 2 were routinely doing 20 points. My character at the time only had about 50 hit points, so my mapping of level 2 involved a lot of returning to Ligne Castle for healing. Some of the pits were positioned so that the area beyond was a dead end, leaving me with no choice but to suck up the damage on the way back as well. There's a level of deviousness to the dungeon designs that hasn't been seen in any CRPGs before this one.

I died before I was able to map the entirety of level 2 (poisoned by giant centipedes), but I found a fan-site that has all of the maps, and a lot of other useful information. This is their map of level 2.

Pits! Chutes! Stairs! Improbable Architecture!

This level presents another first: walls that spell out words when the level is fully mapped. The other levels all have interesting and varied designs, some with lots of tiny rooms, and some with long winding passages. Level 4 is arranged similarly to a noughts-and-crosses board. Level 8 has a room that looks suspiciously like a hand giving the middle finger. They're easily the best level designs to this point, and I was really enjoying the process of mapping them until my character's unceremonious death.

I don't have many images in this post, so here's one of a random tunnel.

I probably ran through about 50 character, most with terribly short lifespans. There are fifteen classes in Oubliette, but playing them all was more difficult than you would think, because a good number of them have strict requirements based on ability scores, race and gender. Before I get into all of the classes, I need to mention something that I forgot in my last post: this is the first CRPG to fully implement a class system. Most of the previous PLATO games started you as a hybrid warrior/spellcaster (pedit5, dnd, Orthanc) or allowed you to join a guild (Moria). This is the first that lets you choose a class at the beginning, and it's a massive leap forward for character customisation.

I'm going to run through every class in the game below, and relay my meager experiences with them. There were a bunch that I was only able to play for about a minute, so I may not have much to say that's useful.

Peasant: This is the baseline class of the game: it has no requirements whatsoever, so it's a kind of fall-back option for when you roll terrible stats and can't be bothered re-rolling. They don't have any spells or special skills, and don't get many hit points. I think their only benefit is that they gain levels faster than any other class, but it hardly seems worth it. The only peasants I played never survived beyond their first battle.

Cleric: Clerics need a Wisdom of 12, and have to be of Lawful alignment. (I'm not sure what effect alignment has on the game, but I suspect that it might determine what other characters you can team up with.) They can cast spells, dispel the undead, and the best weapon they can use is a mace. It's all very Dungeons & Dragons. The clerics I played did quite well, although I never did advance one to 2nd level.  I made a lot of use of their light spell (MORPIC), as it has a permanent duration and reveals secret doors.  I tried to dispel some undead - skeletons and zombies, mostly - but never had any success.

Demondim: This class was no doubt inspired by The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant novel series, in which the demondim were an ancient race that spawned various nasties in that world. In Oubliette, they're exactly like Clerics, except that they are restricted to Chaotic alignment.  It seems that the creators of Oubliette just took the name, and nothing else. (I wouldn't be surprised if this class was a later addition to the game; the first Thomas Covenant book was published in 1978, and it should always be remembered that PLATO games were in constant development. The game that I'm playing is probably not the same as it was when first developed.)

Courtesan: Courtesans need a really high Charisma (19+), can't be Lawful, and must be female. I found the class reasonably easy to qualify for as an Elf, but I didn't survive long once I'd done so; they can't wear armour better than leather, and don't get many hit points. They can disarm the traps found on chests, but their main ability seems to be that they can "seduce" their foes. The documentation is unclear what this achieves, and the few times I tried it it didn't work.

Hirebrand: Your basic fighter, and the only class that I had any success with. My best character (the unoriginally named "Habgab", who succeeded his brothers Hobgob and Hubgub) was a 6th level Hobgoblin Hirebrand. They don't get any special abilities, but they get loads of hit points and can use the best weapons and armour.  I managed to advance two Hirebrand characters to 6th level, but both died from poison.

Mage: They have low hit points, but can cast magic spells. I tried a couple of mages, but the sleep spells I cast (NARGOR) were ineffective. Needless to say, these characters died quickly.

Minstrel: Minstrels have requirements in every ability score, and it took me about half an hour of rerolling to qualify for the class. They can cast mage spells and wear chain mail armour, and they also have the ability to charm enemies with their music. Alas, as with many other classes in this game, I never got this ability to work, and I died quickly. I probably spent ten times as long rolling the character as I did playing him.

Ninja: Man, I was excited to play a Ninja, and it took me a looooong time to meet the requirements - every stat except for Charisma needs to be high. They can disarm traps and are immune to poison, but unfortunately they're not that strong in combat. My Elf Ninja, despite sounding like a super-badass thing to play, was not long for the world.

Paladin: Paladins are super-difficult to qualify for: they must be Lawful, they must be male, and they require high scores in every stat except Dexterity. They can dispel undead like Clerics, and cast Cleric spells once they hit 9th level; they also get to use the best weapons and armour. My Paladin lasted a little while, but he didn't have enough hit points to survive for long.

Ranger: I was stoked to try the Ranger, as they can cast both Cleric and Mage spells. I spent a good hour trying to qualify for the class, a task made more difficult by the requirement that they must be Human. Of course, what I didn't realise was that Rangers don't get spells until they're 7th level, so I kind of wasted all that time. Do I even need to say that my Elf Ranger died quickly?

Raver: In the Thomas Covenant books, the Ravers are a trio of evil entities that can take possession of any creature. In Oubliette, they're Paladins with a Chaotic alignment. This may be significant, because evil Paladins weren't introduced to D&D until 1980. There's always the caveat that PLATO games were in constant development, but it's possible that the concept was introduced here first.

Thief: Thieves can disarm traps, and they can hide in combat. What they can't do is fight very well, so my thief didn't last long. I got through one fight by hiding while the Ninja companion I bought from the store killed everything, but in the next fight my hide skill failed and I was slaughtered by Undead Bears.

Sage: Sages are super-cool, in that they're not all that hard to qualify for and they can cast both Mage spells and Cleric spells. I suspect that a high-level one would be really good to have in a party, but the one I created wasn't viable as a solo adventurer. He died.

Samurai: Although this class is called a Samurai, it's more like the traditional Monk class that you'll find in later games: it can't wear armour or use weapons, but its Armour Class drops every level, and its bare-handed damage is better than that of other classes. The best thing about them is that they get two attacks per round; killing two monsters at once is very satisfying whenever it happens. The class is hard to qualify for though, so I only played one. I enjoyed it for the short time the character was alive, though.

Valkyrie: Super-difficult to qualify for, with high stat restrictions and a requirement to be female (your gender is randomly determined along with your stats, which makes it even harder). They have good fighting ability, can cast Cleric spells at high level, and also get the same "seduce" ability of courtesans. It's weird enough that the two female-only classes have seduction as a special ability, but the best armour that a Valkyrie can wear is a breast plate - let's just say that the CRPG scene in the early days was not exactly the most mature. Anyway, the Valkyrie that I played lived for about five minutes, so I can't say much else about it.

As you can see above, survival in this game is far from assured. I found that the best bet was to create a character with a high Constitution and Dexterity, and choose the Hirebrand class. A lot of hit points are essential, as is a high Dexterity for avoiding surprise. I liked to play as Hobgoblins; they had a high bonus to Strength, Dexterity and Constitution, as well as the ability to see in the dark.

Perhaps this character would be best served by returning to his farm.

Reading over the documentation (and some other notes on the fan-site I mentioned above) I've come across a bunch of other interesting things about the game that I never got to experience first-hand. I'll run through some of them below, as well as some things I noticed myself while playing.

• Apparently when you form a party your arrangement of characters makes a big difference, as only the first three characters can fight in melee. Monsters can even attack from the rear, which makes things potentially deadly for any mages and thieves in the back rank. It's suggested that large parties have fighters at the front and back, which is a level of tactics far in excess of anything in CRPGs prior to this.
• If you buy a companion that is a Mage or a Cleric, said companion will cast spells in battle. Apparently some Mage spells can catch you in their area of effect, so those companions aren't really recommended.
• I didn't mention it above, but the last character I played was killed when an enemy hit him with a sleep spell. This was the point when I realised that there was nothing I could do to guarantee survival for a solo character, and quit the game for good.
• The Patriarch's Temple in Ligne Castle can be used to remove curses or identify magic items, but it requires a hefty donation before the Patriarch will see you. I tried it once, donating 12,000 gold pieces, and the bugger was still "too busy" to grant an audience. It didn't stop the temple from pocketing my gold, though.
• Higher-level characters spend a lot of time resting in hotels to regain hit points and spells. You can restore hit points at the House of Healing, but it costs a lot of gold. It wasn't unusual for my 6th-level character to rest for over 200 days between dungeon forays. Characters in Oubliette age as well, and can presumably die when they get old enough. (And yes, different races have differing lifespans. This game thinks of everything.)
• When you die, you can opt to either abandon your character or leave its body in the dungeon for others to find. You can pick those bodies up and return them to the Castle, or loot their gear, but I never found any. I suspect that, if there are any still there, they'll be on the lower dungeon levels.
• There is a large variety of magic items to be found in the dungeon, or bought at the magic shop. I found a scroll and a sword, but wasn't able to identify either. The sword must have been cursed, because my character died as soon as I equipped it.
• The dungeons don't have any fixed encounters as such, but every level has a special room where the fights are tougher and the rewards greater. I found one of these on Level 1; that's where I got the scroll mentioned above.

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of this game; there's obviously much more to it than I've experienced. As such, I'm not entirely comfortable giving it a Final Rating, because there's no way that I can do so accurately. Still, in the interests of comprehensiveness I'll do so, and note that my experience of the game was incomplete.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: Oubliette has no story, beyond the presence of the dungeon and your character's desire to loot it for treasure. Like most other PLATO games, it takes place entirely inside the dungeon, but I'm tempted to mark this higher because the levels are well-designed and full of tricks and traps. The lack of special encounters hurts it though, as does the absence of backstory. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: There are no NPCs in the game, although I suspect that lack was made up for by interacting with the other players. The monsters, on the other hand, are numerous, with a wide array of special abilities. Yes, they're plucked straight out of the AD&D Monster Manual, but they're well implemented, with lots of different weaknesses, resistances and special abilities. I'm disappointed that I never got to encounter more, but the ones I did find were consistent with their D&D counterparts: mages cast spells, centipedes can poison you, shadows are immune to normal weapons, etc. There's no doubt that the monster selection and variety here is better than anything in any other PLATO CRPG. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Aesthetics: Oubliette's dungeon is depicted from a first-person perspective, with wireframe walls and doors. The viewing window is - as it was in Moria - ridiculously small. The screen isn't cluttered with character info like it was in Moria though, and the expanses of black on the screen make it feel suitably claustrophobic. And I do love that PLATO orange... Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: This might be the hardest category for me judge fairly. On the one hand there's just so much stuff in the game: loads of monsters, an extensive selection of spells, tricks, traps, guilds, multiplayer options, the list goes on and I only saw a fraction of it. On the other hand, I found a lot of it frustratingly opaque. Combat was especially irritating, because the messages flash by almost too quickly to read. There were a number of occasions in which I died while just walking around, with no indication of what killed me. (Pits, as I later discovered.) So there's a lot in the game, and much of it is well implemented, but there are things about it that annoyed me a lot. I'm going to split the middle here. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: This game is lethal to the point of unplayability, but then again I wasn't playing it as intended by the creators. If it were a solo game I'd give it the minimum rating and leave it at that, but I'm going to bump it up a point in acknowledgement that it's really a multiplayer game. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: The number of things appearing for the first time in a CRPG is staggering, and it would be impossible for me to name them all. There's a definite debt that the game owes to Moria, but there's plenty of originality on display as well. Oubliette was also massively influential on Wizardry, to the point where some have called Wizardry a rip-off. I wouldn't go that far, but that's a debate for another time. Wizardry is an influential CRPG in its own right, which makes Oubliette one of the most important games of the PLATO era. Rating: 7 out of 7.

Fun: This is the most purely subjective category in my rating system, and unfortunately, despite all of the innovative things about Oubliette, I didn't have a great time with it. Most of the enjoyment I derived came from mapping. This would be a far different score if I'd been able to survive with any reliability, but as it is I have to mark the game low even though I know it's probably unfair. Rating: 1 out of 7.

I'm going to award the bonus point to Oubliette, both because I recognise that I should have played it with other people, and because I'd like to go back to it at some point. The score above totals 22, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 44. That's a respectable total, and puts it just below pedit5 and Orthanc, and well above Moria. I've no doubt it would have scored higher had I been able to experience more of it.

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 CRPGs with a category for Combat.  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: The many character class abilities and spells give this game a wealth of options, and the monster special abilities mean that different tactics may be required.  Unfortunately, I never really got to experience this game to its fullest, but from what I did see I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2. Oubliette is the primary influence behind Wizardry, one of the most important games in the genre. It also seems to have been the PLATO game that did the most with its multiplayer functionality (not that I got to see any of it).

Oubliette's RADNESS Index is 36. It's in equal 7th place with The Dungeon (pedit5), but with a proper community in place I'm sure it would have scored much higher.  In terms of CRPGs it's equal 4th out of nine.

NEXT: It's on to Aldebaran III (more well-known by its filename of A3 to those who know it at all), a text adventure created using the Wander system by the system's originator Peter Langston. Langston's first effort, Castle, involved the exploration of a castle, the rescuing of a prince and princess, and an awkwardly sexual ending. A3 is a sci-fi game, and from what I've played it really ups the ante as far as story-telling in adventures games goes. It's also going to be a welcome change of pace to play something that's not a stupidly large mainframe CRPG; I'm looking forward to it.

Moria: Victory!

I've been re-reading the early days of The CRPG Addict lately, and it's made me realise two things. The first is that Chester had the right idea at the beginning. I suspect that he wouldn't agree, but the rules he started with meant that he was able to kick off his blog with a run of solid classics: Wizardry, Ultima, Rogue, Bard's Tale, pretty much all of the staples of the 1980s CRPG scene. All told, it seems like a pleasant way to ease into a years-long project, and I'm very envious.

I, on the other hand - using the fruits of Chester's research, I'll admit - started from the beginning, with The Dungeon from 1975. "I'll get through the 1970s quickly," I had thought. "All of the games will be really short, and I'll knock them out with no trouble." What a naive soul I was. Here I am three years later, and I've just beaten Moria, the fourth game on my list. The Game of Dungeons v5 took me about three months to complete. Orthanc took twice that. The Game of Dungeons v8 took up a whole year. Moria took me eight months, in addition to the several months I spent on it back in 2015. What I'm saying is, these games are much longer than I was expecting them to be, and have occupied me for far longer than I wanted them to.

Which brings me to my second realisation: I want to get to the 1980s really badly. As far as RPGs and adventure games go, the 80s and early 90s are my sweet spot, and if I can cover those periods with some semblance of completeness I'll be happy. I had this realisation last Thursday, and it was then that I made my resolution: I was going to play Moria at every spare moment, and get the bloody thing off my schedule. I would do no reading, no writing, no blogging, play no other video games, and watch no TV that would require more than minimal attention: Moria would be my life until I beat it or died trying. A little under a week later, I emerged victorious, though perhaps no more enriched from the experience.

Since my last post on Moria I had lost at least one character, and as of my resolution I was playing as Tarret, a member of the Union of Knights. Before Tarret I had been exclusively playing wizards, due to their ability to teleport back to the City from anywhere else in the game. I would have continued playing wizards, because the game is just too big to be going back and forth from the dungeons all the time, but my previous character had found a particular magic item that made the other guilds a viable choice: an Amulet of Home. Using the amulet worked exactly like the wizard's teleport ability, so when I found it I stashed it in my character's guild locker, ready to be passed down to my next character upon my death. Said death inevitably occurred, and Tarret inherited the amulet (along with the best weapon in the game and loads of good armour). Having failed numerous times as a member of the Guild of Wizards, it was time to try something else, and I went with the Union of Knights.

I'm convinced that this decision is the main reason that I'm able to write this victory post. Knights supposedly have two special abilities: they take less damage from enemies in combat, and they can occasionally behead their foes and score an instant kill. I say supposedly, because I never saw any messages telling me that I had beheaded a monster; it may have been happening in the background, but I have no way of knowing. Knights definitely do take less damage in combat, though; I would estimate about half of what other characters suffer. This made it a lot easier for me to survive on lower levels, and allowed me to explore a lot faster than I'd been doing previously.

In addition to the Amulet of Home, I also had a Life Ring, which might just be the most valuable item in the whole game. I've described it before, but I'll reiterate here that it effectively grants your character the ability to regenerate its Vitality. That, coupled with the Knight's ability to take less damage, made Tarret exceptionally difficult to kill.

I was still exploring the Forest dungeon, as I had been doing for eight months beforehand.  One of my characters had descended to Level 52 before, so I was pretty much done with mapping, I just needed to build a character that could survive.  My goal - the Reaper's Ring - was on Level 50 of one of the four dungeons. I knew this because it had last been discovered on Level 49, and every time that the Ring is found it teleports to the next level down. The trick is that, although you can find out what level it will be on, there's no way of knowing which dungeon it will be in. If it was in the Forest, I would only need to traverse 50 dungeon levels; if not, I might need to go through 100, or 150, or 200, depending on whether I guessed correctly. I was either very close to my goal, or nowhere near it.  (If you're wondering why said character was on Level 52 when I should have stopped on level 50, it's because I found stairs that skipped multiple levels. Then I died before I could find a way back up.)

I became Guild Master while grinding on Level 20 of the Forest, and decided that it was time to head to level 50 with reasonable haste.  I could have gone faster, but I made a point of fighting every battle along the way to get my stats as high as possible. By Friday night I had reached dungeon level 50 for the first time ever, and it was time to start searching for the Ring.

The search was a long one, as I made a point of fighting every battle and walking through every square. The map was a whopping 54x42 squares, for a total of 2,268. It was time-consuming, but it was also exciting for a while; after all, every square I searched had the potential to hold the Reaper's Ring. But as I filled in more and more of the map I started to get nervous. Not because of any danger: Tarret was a killing machine, and it was rare that he would lose more than half of his Vitality in any combat. No, I was nervous because I suspected that the Reaper's Ring was in another dungeon. It was a suspicion that grew, until I filled in the very last square of Forest level 50. No Ring. I would have to do it all over again.

Obviously it was disappointing, but it wasn't long before I got excited about starting a new dungeon. Firstly, I really liked the idea of being able to slaughter my way through some weaker monsters. Secondly, I had found an item while exploring Forest level 50 that would make my progress much quicker: the Map of Stairs. Normally, finding stairs up or down involved exploring every square of every Room in the dungeon, but the Map of Stairs made that easier. I've explained in earlier posts that Moria's dungeon levels are organised into alternating blocks of Rooms and Corridors (each comprised of 6x6 squares); the Corridors are usually empty, while in the Rooms you can find stairs and water holes. The Map of Stairs will alert you to the presence of a set of stairs as soon as you enter a Room, which is a godsend. I was freed from exploring every square, and could blast through the levels as quickly as possible.

Bless you, Map of Stairs.

Having done with the Forest, I moved on the the Desert (mostly because it was the next-closest dungeon to the City).  The division of the levels into blocks meant that I could explore them without mapping; I would head north, blasting through with Passwall spells, until I hit solid rock, then head a block west and start blasting my way south, systematically moving through the level until I found stairs down. At first I was fighting monsters, but eventually I just started running from them to save time. At most I was spending about twenty minutes on a level, and there were some that I was done with in only one minute. It probably took me about two hours to get down to level 50, whereas without the Map of Stairs it probably would have taken weeks.

The Desert had some different monsters to the Forest (Earth Elementals, Scorpions, Empresses), not that it made much difference in combat. Desert level 50 was quite a bit smaller than Forest 50 - a mere 1,296 squares. I was back to mapping for this level, but I was getting impatient, so I decided not to bother fully exploring the Corridors as I'd never found anything in them besides random encounters. Obviously it didn't take as long to search, but once again I came up empty-handed. I was less disappointed this time, as I now knew that reaching Level 50 of the next dungeon would take a few hours at most, and that the worst case scenario was that I only had two more dungeons to go. The end was in sight.

The next dungeon I chose was the Cave. This one took me longer to get to level 50, and it was around this time that I started to get frustrated. For whatever reason it felt like I was getting more random encounters in the Cave, and it also seemed like it was taking longer to find the stairs. I will admit that I lost my temper a time or two, which I find odd. I didn't get angry when I was losing, or when my characters died. I didn't even get angry when I lost a powerful character to an internet dropout. But now I was getting super-pissed, because I was close to winning. It seems to happen in games a lot; I'm fine with setbacks early in the game, but by the end I get really tense, because I just want it to be over.

Again, the Cave had new monsters. The most notable of these was the Horta, which might be the earliest Star Trek influence in a CRPG. Level 50 of the Cave was the same size as Forest level 50, but as I was still ignoring the Corridors it didn't take as long to finish. Once again, I came up empty, and I started to have doubts about ever finding the Ring.

The last dungeon was the Mountains, which was odd and temporarily disorienting in that it didn't display whether I was in a Room or a Corridor (normally it's written just above the viewpoint window). This might have been because I was playing the colour version, but I never bothered to check if this was different in the classic PLATO black-and-orange. The levels in the Mountains seemed smaller than the rest of the dungeons, and I made a quick descent. Level 50 was a mere 900 squares; once I'd determined its size I was elated, because I knew that I'd be claiming the Ring before too long. After all, there was nowhere else it could be.

It took me little over an hour to explore Mountains level 50, by ignoring the Corridors. With every block I cleared my fears mounted, until I hit the very last square. There was no Ring. It was nowhere to be found.

I had a momentary panic, thinking that perhaps I'd misread the documentation, and that the Ring would be on a even deeper level. I wondered if the Ring existed at all, thinking that perhaps it was part of an elaborate hoax played by the developers. The one thing I didn't consider was giving up. After a short break, I came back and took the only logical next step: I had to fully explore the Corridors.

I didn't find the Ring in the Mountains, so it was time to backtrack to the dungeons I had already explored.  Luckily I had last set up camp on level 50 of the Cave, so I was able to get back there almost instantly.  I was dutifully hitting every square, getting into a zen state of rote mapping and fleeing from enemies, and then out of nowhere it happened.

Like water to a man dying of thirst.

I found the Ring in one of the Corridors, tucked away in an area only accessible by using a Passwall spell. I feel as though perhaps the developers weren't quite playing fair here; at no other point in the game will you find anything of interest in a Corridor, Then again, it's not like finding the Reaper's Ring is a necessity. It's the closest thing the game has to an end goal, but players can ignore it if they want, so I don't feel too bad about it being difficult to find.

The final battle was against 16 Reapers, 16 Wondarks, and 16 Iconoclasts. All three of these are among the toughest monsters in the game, even if Reapers are easily killed with a Holy Word prayer. I had to run from the battle once, and was surprised to find that when I returned the monsters I had killed remained dead. (This is normal for the game, but I had thought that this battle might work differently.) On the second try I was able to kill all if the monsters with little difficulty, and claim my prize.

The Final Battle!

To be honest, the Reaper's Ring is a disappointment. All it does is add 100,000 points to your Score and reduce your Age by 5 years. Then it disappears, presumably to the next lower level of one of the dungeons. Certainly I gained some satisfaction in finding it, and quite a lot of relief, but I expected more. And just think of my poor character, who spent 41 years of his life looking for the thing. Sure, it made him five years younger, but he'd have been better off retiring as the Guild Master at age 32 and living off his millions of gold pieces.

Worth every second I spent looking for it.

Before I get into the Final Rating, here are a few more things I discovered about Moria while playing:

• In addition to the four dungeons mentioned above (Forest, Desert, Cave and Mountains), there's  a secret fifth dungeon called the Ocean. To find it you need to go to the absolute upper left corner of the Wilderness map and cast a Passwall spell. The whole dungeon is underwater, and you will slowly drown in it unless you have some Magic Gills (which can only be found as a random drop after combat). I did a small amount of exploration, but other than being underwater it's not much different from the other dungeons. Even the monsters are much the same; I fought some Mermen and Stingrays, but I also fought Reapers, High Priests and a bunch of other things that didn't really belong in an aquatic setting.  (Thanks to the readers who e-mailed me to let me know about the existence of the Ocean.  I do wonder why you guys are sending me e-mails though; I'd really prefer you to drop your comments in the tumbleweed infested barrens that are my comments section.)
  

Fighting in the Ocean.

• I also descended all the way to Level 60 of the Cave, just to see how tough the battles would be. I was encountering monsters in groups of up to 25, but they weren't significantly stronger than those on Level 50. The fights were longer, but they weren't any deadlier.

An average battle on Level 60.

• When I was playing as a member of the Guild of Wizards, my number of attacks had gone up every time I increased my rank. As a Guild Master I was able to kill five enemies a round with my spells. I had thought that the other guilds might be the same, but I can say that, at least for Knights, this is not the case. I was stuck with a single melee attack every round, and I really did miss the ability to wipe out large groups quickly.
• I eventually got the 'Pray for a Miracle' ability to work. When you use it, it wipes out an entire group of monsters at once. Handy, but the manual warns that the gods "tire of helping" if it's done too often. After I found the Reaper's Ring I want around spamming Miracles in every battle just to see what would happen, but there were no ill effects. I was hoping I might get struck by lightning or something.
• I found a number of new magic items. I've already mentioned the Amulet of Home, the Magic Gills and the Map of Stairs. I also found a Water Wand, which lets you know when water is nearby. There was a Healing Wand, which instantly raised my Vitality to 100 when used; I suspect it would run out eventually, but it never did for me. I found a Teleport Rod that worked exactly like the Amulet of Home. I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting.
• In the Forest dungeon, there were magic apples that could be found randomly, that had a variety of effects when eaten. The other dungeons each have their own object that functions exactly like the apple. The Desert has mushrooms, the Cave has crystal crocuses, and the Mountains has wildflowers. I didn't explore the Ocean long enough to find out what's there.
• Monster icons in Moria are weird. Bears are depicted with swords and shields. Lions have wings. Giant Ants and Spiders use an icon that looks like a bat. Even the Hydra uses the bat icon, when there is a multi-headed lizard that would have been perfect. Some of them really are baffling.

Moria has a problem with monster icons. Also, plurals.

So, I say with much relief, that's it for Moria. Let's give this one a Final Rating and be done with it forever.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: Both are practically non-existent. Pretty much all the manual says is that the land of Moria is a "world of underground rooms and corridors". There's some mildly intriguing business about everything in Moria being comprised of the four elements, but it never factors into the game. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: There aren't any characters you can interact with in Moria, unless you count haggling with the shopkeeper. The game has a lot of monsters, but they're functionally very similar. Some of them have resistances and vulnerabilities to certain attacks, but ultimately combat is the same regardless of what you're fighting. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: I do love that orange-and-black PLATO colour scheme, but I spent the vast majority of my time with Moria playing the multi-coloured version. Even if I hadn't, this game would get docked for the teeny-tiny viewpoint window. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: Everything in this game seems to function well, but it's so good at obscuring its mechanics that it's difficult to say for sure. Combat has a lot of options, but ultimately it boils down to repetitively going over the same routines. I should probably bump this game up for its multiplayer features, but I didn't get to experience them, and ultimately I have to rate Moria on its single player experience. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: This is a difficult one. The game isn't exactly hard, it's just long. The trickiest part is learning to wait between battles so that you can heal back to maximum Vitality. It also doesn't have an end goal, really, as the Reaper's Ring is more of an optional quest you can undertake if you want. I lost a lot of characters in this game, and there were quite a few times that I couldn't explain why; suddenly I just wasn't able to run from a battle, or a monster would be inexplicably hard to kill. As I've said before, the game obscures its mechanics very well.  So while much of the game feels easy, these sudden moments of death and the sheer length of time it takes to find the Ring make it feel just a little too difficult. So I'll go with my gut here. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: It's the first 3-D first-person perspective RPG, the first RPG where you could form parties with other players, the first with hunger and thirst mechanics, the first where you could join a guild, the first with haggling, and so on and so on. It's also an influence on Oubliette, which later spawned such games as Wizardry and Bard's Tale. There's no doubt that Moria has an important place in CRPG history. Rating: 7 out of 7.

Fun: You would think, given that I played this game for eight months, that I had fun with it.  After all, who would be crazy enough to devote so much time to a game that they weren't enjoying? Well, you're looking at him. While I wouldn't say that I outright hated the game, I did find it fairly tedious. The act of playing it was highly repetitive, and not all that rewarding. And while I like mapping dungeons, it's not much fun if there's nothing in them to discover. In the end, it was a mindless activity to do while I was watching TV, and I was rarely looking forward to it. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Moria does not get the bonus point, because I am never laying eyes on it again as long as I live. The scores above total 18, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 36. That is perhaps a bit low, but the sheer length of time it took to find the Reaper's Ring, as well as the large, empty dungeons really hurt this one. I'm certain it would have scored higher if there had been some active players around while I was logged in, as the multiplayer options seemed intriguing, but in the end I prefer single-player games, and that's how I experienced Moria.

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 CRPGs with a category for Combat.  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: This might have the simplest combat of any of the PLATO CRPGs.  Yes, there are four styles of attack to choose from, but they all amount to pressing the same key over and over again and waiting for your opponent to die.  You can bribe opponents, but I never got that to work. Similarly, I don't think the Divine Intervention ever did anything for me.  Combat in Moria was a rote, overlong experience. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2.  This game has so many firsts it's hard to remember them all, but the most significant would be it's first-person perspective viewpoint (as minuscule as the view is).  It also has some multiplayer functionality that I never got to experience, so it definitely deserves full marks here.

Moria's RADNESS Index is 26. That places it 13th so far, and 6th out of eight CRPGs. It's innovative, but a little boring to play solo, especially so if you decide to quest for the Reaper's Ring.

NEXT: And with that, I'm almost done with the PLATO era of CRPGs. I only have another posting or two to do for Oubliette, and then I won't encounter another mainframe CRPG until Avatar in 1979. What that means is that I can finally start making some headway through my list; I don't anticipate encountering any games that I'll be stuck on for close to a year, at least until I reach the early 1990s.  Short games, how I have missed you.

Moria: Late Night Victory Post!!!!!

I DID IT!

I DID IT!

I FOUND THE REAPER'S RING!

NOW I CAN STOP PLAYING THIS BLOODY GAME!

Aaaah, that feels good. Now I can sleep, and dream of a life beyond Moria.

Oubliette: Blessedly Difficult

I've been playing Oubliette here and there, between Moria and various and sundry console games, and I have good news to report: it's too damned hard, so I won't be getting bogged down in it for any great length of time. Difficult games don't normally bother me, and I think that the solid year I spent trying to finish The Game of Dungeons v8 is a testament to that. I have to make a rule for games that are primarily intended for multiplayer, though. For those games, if the difficulty is too steep, I'll play them for a bit and move on.  My list is long enough, and I need to draw a line somewhere.

(As a general preference, I prefer single-player games anyway.  That's not to say I don't like multiplayer; some of the most fun I've ever had gaming has been with friends.  I'm not a big fan of on-line multiplayer, though.  If I'm playing with other people, I want them in the room, if only so that I may witness the breaking of their spirits in person.  On-line multiplayer doesn't do a lot for me, for which I'm grateful; MMORPGs are a rabbit-hole that I'm glad to have avoided.)

There's no doubt in my mind that Oubliette is balanced for multiplayer, and is nigh-impossible to survive for any significant length of time with just one character. I suppose that I could get another cyber1 sign-on and test it out, but multiplayer games ain't what I'm here for. My current plan is to map level 1 of the dungeon, testing the various classes as I do so, and after that to move on.  The level is large enough that exploring it fully should give me a decent chance to try out the game's many options.

I see this a lot.

I've lost track of how many characters I've sent to their deaths in this game. Of the classes that I've tried, Hirebrands and Clerics seem to last the longest. I haven't tested all of the classes yet, because the list you get to pick from is dependent on race, gender and statistics, and it's hard to know exactly what's needed for the more exotic types. Hirebrands, Thieves, Clerics and Mages aren't difficult to qualify for, and pretty much anybody can be a Peasant (though I'm not sure why you would want to be).  Your class determines which weapons and armour you can use, and what spells you have available; I'm sure there are other differences that aren't so obvious, but I'm yet to figure those out (and I doubt that I will in the time I'll be playing the game).

As far as statistics go, a high Constitution is a must (for hit points), and a high Dexterity also seems to be important, as it determines how easy it is for monsters to surprise you, as well as how often you are able to act in battle. It's not uncommon for beginning characters to be surprised and killed without ever getting a chance to react, so obviously a high Dex is crucial.

I've developed a routine for new characters. My first destination is Corwin's General Store, where I supply them with whatever arms and armour I can.  Most new character start with something in the vicinity of 60 gold pieces, which is enough to buy a weapon and maybe some armour. The choice of weapons is limited (daggers, maces, short swords, axes, hammers,clubs, and the legendary pointed stick) and there are three types of armour: leather, chain and plate.  In addition you can buy shields and helmets, as well as an array of random gear ranging from cloaks to boot to the intriguing Golden Diaper +3. Normally I can afford one weapon (usually the mace or short sword depending on my class) and maybe a shield. Treasure is plentiful in the dungeon, and it only takes one successful foray before I can return and purchase some plate mail and a helmet.

What is that mystery item at the end for 1 gold?

Once I have a weapon and some armour, I'll buy torches if I need to.  The dungeon is dark, and impossible to navigate without a light source of some sort.  Some races have Infravision, the ability to see in the dark: dwarves, orcs, hobgoblins, and presumably a number of others I've not played yet. These races have been my favourites to play so far, because not only is it nice to not have to worry about torches, but Infravision lets you see one square ahead, whereas torches only illuminate the square you're standing in. Mapping with torches is a pain. Magical light is even better than torches, but I'll write more about spells lower down.

After buying equipment I head to the On the House Used Monster Shop, where a follower can be obtained for free. I normally go for a Stone Giant or a Pyrohydra, for maximum hit points and killing power. I tried getting a high-level cleric, hoping that I'd be able to use his spells, but either it's not possible or I wasn't able to figure out how. A follower is necessary for any kind of survival, and meat shields are nice, but I'd really like to have a healer. I still feel like there's a catch to using this store, though. Why would they be giving me monsters for free? It seems to good to be true, and I'm sure that I'm missing something.

After that, I head into the dungeon to start mapping. The first-person 3D view is very reminiscent of Moria, but the view is larger.  The dungeon levels are 29x29 squares, which isn't excessively large, but it is big enough to make the process time-consuming. At first my maps showed that there would be plenty of unused space, but eventually I found some secret doors (by walking into walls) and it became apparent that every square would be used. There are pits scattered around that deal roughly 1-10 points of damage. There are also a number of navigational tricks introduced here for the first time in CRPGs that will go on to plague gamers in the 1980s: teleporters, squares that extinguish your light sources, and "spinners" (squares that randomly change the direction you're facing). It reminds me very much of Bard's Tale and Wizardry, and there's more to come on that.  (Given this game's obvious influence on Wizardry and Wizardry's influence on CRPGs in general - particularly those from Japan - it wouldn't be a stretch to say that Oubliette is the most influential of all the PLATO CRPGs.)

Combat is plentiful and quick. I've been fighting a who's who of the AD&D Monster Manual - goblins, orcs, giant centipedes, skeletons, and even some low-level fighters, clerics, thieves and magic-users. It's a large variety of monsters, rivalled only by Moria so far, but I suspect that the monsters in Oubliette offer more in the way of special abilities. Already I've been poisoned by a giant centipede (which drained 1 hit point per step), and come up against some Shadows which I was unable to hit with regular weapons.  (This is consistent with AD&D.)  Some monsters are found in small groups, and others - such as goblins - might be found in packs of 15.

The main problem with combat is that, unless you're playing a spellcaster, your options are limited: you can Fight, Hide or Evade.  (You can also scream for help, but that's not very useful without other players around.) Hiding doesn't always work, but when it does it allows you to avoid being attacked by enemies and let your companions finish them off; it's probably great as part of a group, especially for Thieves. Evade lets you run away, but most of the time I haven't been able to do so successfully. Fight is your basic melee attack, and most battles are spent pressing F over and over as you trade blows. Your Dexterity determines how quickly you get to act in relation to your enemies: I had one character who was attacking three or four times before the other side got their turn. It also seems to me that the monsters only attack you one at a time, perhaps due to narrow tunnels or some such justification. Whatever it is, it makes the game at least vaguely survivable.

Getting the drop on two kobolds (which are depicted with an 
icon straight out of Moria).

With those limited options, though, Oubliette is pretty much nothing but a game of chance for a solo character. You might survive for a while with a suitably strong character (one with a lot of hit points and a high Dex), but eventually it will go against you. And that's just on dungeon level 1, with basic monsters; I imagine things get even hairier on the lower levels. Spells might make a difference, but most of the spellcasting classes don't begin with enough hit points to survive for long, so I haven't had much of a chance to experiment. Taking a look at the Help file, I think I need to try out the Ranger class, as it has good fighting ability and can cast both Magic-User and Cleric spells. It's difficult to qualify for, but it looks to be worth it.

Magic is another part of the game that is reminiscent of Wizardry in particular.  The spell selection is pure AD&D, but every spell has it's own name derived from a consistent set of syllables each with their own meaning.  The sleep spell, for example, is called NARGOR (meaning not-thought) , fireball is FIEMINAT (meaning fire-opening), cure light wounds is KOMINAH (meaning close-opening), and so on  And if you doubt the influence this game had on Wizardry, the light spell is named DUMAPIC, just like the location spell in that game.  Spells are split into separate lists for Clerics and Magic-Users (with the Cleric list focused on healing and the magic-user list on offense), and the spells are also organised by level, with the least powerful spells at first level and the most at level 7.  Every time you cast a spell in Oubliette you need to type in the full name, which can get a bit irritating, especially in combat. It's necessary, at least when starting out, to have a cheat sheet with the spell names written down on it for reference. The only one I've used with any regularity is MORPIC, the Cleric's light spell, which has greater range than a regular torch and Infravision, and also reveals secret doors.

Uhhh, in English please?

Sometimes after combat you will find a treasure chest, and can inspect it for traps, which can THEN be disarmed. As with spell-casting, you need to type in the complete name of the trap to be disarmed, and even if you get it right there's no guarantee you'll be successful. I've encountered Sprinklers (which put out your light source), Teleporters, Poison-Needles, Stunners, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting.  Apparently there's even a trap that changes your gender, which is Gary Gygax as hell. Again, this is exactly like Bard's Tale (and possibly Wizardry, which I'm not as familiar with). The similarities are inescapable.

So far, I've only had one character that survived for more than about 15 minutes - a Hobgoblin hirebrand named Hobgob (I'm expending minimum effort on names, due to the game's high mortality rate).  I'm not sure what level I reached with him (as I can't find where the game displays character level), but I estimate that I was level 5 or 6, as I had 59 hit points.  I spent a long time angsting about not being able to figure out how to level up, only for the game to do it for me automatically when I returned to the Castle. (Or perhaps it was when I returned to my guild, I'm not sure.)  I had become virtually immune to combat by the time I had 40 hit points, aside from the aforementioned Shadows which I had to run away from. Traps were my biggest worry, especially pit traps - those are often strategically placed to be unavoidable, and I never figured out a way to cross them without taking damage. In the end I was killed by a Poison-Needle trap on a chest; most chests on dungeon level 1 aren't trapped at all, but this one got me, and I wasn't able to make it back to the castle before I died.

Oh, he was level 6, it says it right there.

To be honest, I was relieved when Hobgob died, as I was starting to believe that, with enough grinding, I'd have a decent chance of survival. Perhaps that's still the case, but I don't aim to find out. I'm going to finish my level 1 map, and get the hell out. I don't even have to feel that guilty about it, because the single-player version for Commodore 64 will come up on my list eventually. When it does, I'll tackle that game with greater diligence. As for the PLATO version of Oubliette, I'll be happy to leave it in the dust after another post or two.

Game 17: Oubliette (1977)

After far too long, I'm starting another game for the blog.  That doesn't mean that I'm done with Moria. Far from it; I'll still be plugging away at that monstrosity in the background, but there's little more that I can say about it.  It'll get another post once I'm finished with it, and in the mean-time I'll be pushing ahead and playing more games from 1977 and 1978.

There's always a sense of excitement that comes with starting a new game, but this time around it's mixed with quite a bit of trepidation.  Oubliette is another PLATO RPG, and as readers of the blog will know the last few of those have consumed my life.  I really don't want to get bogged down in another one, and I really don't want to be bogged down in two at the same time.  The good news is that Oubliette is nowhere near as large as Moria. (At 240-odd large dungeon levels, few games are.)

 

Castles seem to be the standard thing to put on your PLATO title screen

Oubliette was created primarily by Jim Schwaiger, and released on PLATO in November 1977. Like most PLATO games it was in continuous development for a number of years, with changes being made to it up through 1982. I have no idea what differences there might be between the game as it was in 1977, and the 1982 version. Presumably the one on cyber1 - which is the one I'm playing - is the version from 1982.  The game was later released on home computers, and even on iphone (as the title screen above indicates). I'll cover the home computer release when I get to it in the timeline, but needless to say I'll probably never get to the iphone version.

Oubliette is a dungeon exploration game that is viewed from a first-person perspective. The game is intended for multiple players, who each control a single character and interact within a shared environment. It can be played as a single-player game, but survival is difficult, and the intention is that characters will band together to form parties before braving the depths. As far as I can tell, there's no goal to be achieved in Oubliette: characters simply band together to explore the dungeon for treasure, and presumably the multiplayer interaction and competition was incentive enough to keep people interested. It's a relief, to be honest; I can drop this game at any time without feeling like I've missed something.

Beginning the game, with my character standing on the stairs to the dungeon.

Character creation is more complex than anything that's been seen to this point.  The first step is to choose from one of 15 races.  The standard D&D races are there, along with some from Tolkien (Uruk-Hai, Eldar), some monsters (Ogre, Pixie, Goblin, Hobgoblin, Kobold), and one pulled from Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series (Ur-Vile), which is surprising considering that the first book of that series had only been released a year prior.

Following that your attributes are determined, and they're the standard six from Dungeons & Dragons: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, Constitution, and Dexterity. The race you chose earlier determines the range for each of these attributes.  Your gender is also randomly determined here, which seems an odd thing to leave to chance. You can reroll as many times as you like until you get a character that you like.

Once you've accepted your attributes, you choose an Alignment from one of three: Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic. Some races will have restrictions here (for example, I created an Orc character that could not choose Lawful). I'm not sure what effect this has on the game at this point, except to affect what class you can choose in the next step.

Choosing a class comes next, and there are fifteen in the game: cleric, demondim (another one from Thomas Covenant), courtesan, hirebrand, mage, minstrel, ninja, paladin, peasant, ranger, raver (Covenant again), thief, sage, samurai, and valkyrie. The classes available to you are determined by race, class, and alignment. The unusual classes are harder to qualify for, whereas pretty much anyone can be a peasant.

Creating a character. Even with good stats like these, I only 
have a few classes to choose from.

Once a class is chosen, you get the option of starting in the castle or the dungeon. I always opt for the castle, and I'm not sure why you'd choose differently; starting in the dungeon with no gear or followers is basically suicide.

LIGNE Castle is the hub of the game, where characters can stock up on supplies, form parties, and do all sorts of other cool stuff. It's big - 29x29 squares - and there are tons of things to do. I'll hit some highlights below:

• There's a separate guild for every class, and you need to join one in order to level up.  You can increase your guild rank by making donations, but there's no indication of how much is needed. I donated about 1,000 gold pieces with my first character, and my rank was still 0.  Once you have a ranking of 1 you can hire a companion that will follow you free of charge, but should that companion die your rank drops by one.
• There are shops where you can buy charmed monsters, ranging from lowly kobolds right up to Orcus himself. There's even a shop where you can get these monsters for free, though I suspect that there's a catch with this that I haven't twigged to yet. These monsters stay with you until you rest, but you can get around that by selling them back to the shop then buying them back later on.

Obtaining a charmed monster for free.

• Hotels where you can rest and recover lost hit points. You can rest anywhere in the castle, but it's quicker to do so in a hotel (and I'm pretty sure that character's age in this game, so time is a factor).
• Taverns, which are the place where you go to join up with other adventurers and form parties. (Because even this far back, it was understood that all adventures begin in a tavern.)
• Corwin's General Store, where you buy weapons, armour, torches and holy water.  Torches are valuable, because you need them to see in the dungeon unless you choose a race that can see in the dark. This is the main reason that I chose a dwarf as my initial character.
• Merlin's Magic Shoppe, where you can buy and sell magic items. Items to buy are listed by category. You type in the category you want, and you get a list of available items with nothing to differentiate them but price. What you're buying is a mystery; presumably the more expensive the better, but I haven't bought anything yet so it's impossible to say.
• There's a Jail where you can look for character's by name. It's not clear how you end up in jail, or what you can do should you find the character you're looking for.
• Hidden in an out-of-the-way spot is the Patriarch's Temple, but said Patriarch will only see you if you make a donation. According to the documentation he can help identify magic items, but I haven't tested this out yet (nor have I actually found any magic items).
• The Morgue is another place where you can search for character's by name. I understand that you can find the corpses of dead characters in the dungeon and return them to the city; this is probably where they go if you don't have the gold or the desire to resurrect them.
• You can visit Kesim's Casino and gamble on blackjack, craps or cockroach racing. These Are the first gambling mini-games in CRPGs to my knowledge, and the cockroach racing is delightfully odd. It's a good place to build up your gold before buying weapons, I've found.

Winning money on the roaches.

• Brand's Potion Shop, where you can buy various potions and scrolls. When your basic healing potion costs around 70,000gp, though, the prices are probably too high.
• Honest John's Bank and Trust. I haven't done anything here yet, but I can only assume that you can deposit and withdraw gold here. (I can't check right now, because cyber1 is down for backups.) I need to come back here to check if I'm able to rob the bank.
• Ghenghis' Army Recruiter, which is a mystery. There's a sign that says it's closed due to budget cuts, and there's nothing else that can be done here.

With the city mapped, monster companion recruited (a pyrohydra), and armaments purchased, it was time for me to take Axebeard the Dwarf into the dungeon.   I did quite well for a while, surviving a number of battles and forays.  The monsters that I encountered were the usual array of low-level D&D types: rats, goblins, kobolds, etc, in groups of about 6.  My character gained about 3,000 experience points, but I couldn't figure out how to level up, or even if I had enough xp to do so.  It's supposed to be done at the guild, but the option never appeared for me.

In the end, I was killed by a band of 7 kobolds.  It happened very suddenly: one second I was at full hit points, the next I was dead.  Combat was a little hard to fathom.  The word 'Options' appears under the name of the enemy, and you have a limited time to input your command (F for fight, in most cases).  A message would come up telling me if I killed an enemy (and if my charmed monster did so), then a message would flash telling me what the monsters did.  That message was very quick, and I never did get a good look at what it said.  At the moment, the combat workings are a bit of a mystery to me.

Deciding whether to delete my character or wait for someone else 
to retrieve his body. Odds seem slim for the latter in 2017.

The influences here are strong, and obvious.  The first is, of course, Dungeons & Dragons. More specifically, the original pre-AD&D version of the game.  The monster list makes it obvious that they're working from the AD&D Monster Manual, but there are enough references and bits of terminology that I'm confident in saying that the rest of Oubliette is based on the original D&D rules. More than any other game previous, this game emulates D&D, right down to the way that early campaigns were played.  The first D&D campaigns were run by a single referee in a single, huge dungeon, with a rotating pool of players that all explored the same location.  Oubliette emulates that exactly, and copies over a lot of the rules and monsters as well. The main deviation is in the number of races and classes, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jim Schwaiger and his players had homebrewed all of the new types for their own campaign. It's how things were done in those days.

The other influence is Moria, which was also a first-person dungeon exploration game where you could join up with other characters. It had a large city, shops with loads of stuff to buy, guilds, characters that age, and a bunch of other similarities to Oubliette.  As far as I can tell, Oubliette takes those ideas and expands on them, providing a more varied and interesting game experience.That's my first impression, anyway; we'll see if it holds up.

I'm not setting myself any goals for Oubliette just yet; I've learned my lesson with Moria.  There aren't any goals I can set really; the game itself doesn't provide any.  It will all depend on how difficult it is.  If I find that I can survive on my own, I'll try to map out the 10-level dungeon.  If it proves to be too deadly, I'll play it for a few weeks and then move on.

The Games of Summer: 2016-2017

I've done one of these posts over the last few holiday seasons, so I figured I might as well make it an annual tradition. Usually summer finds me playing a lot of games, but not doing much in the way of writing and blogging. This year was no different. These are the games that have been keeping me occupied, and holding up the blog.

Final Fantasy 1 and 2: Smartphones are great for portable gaming, but I find that most modern phone games don't really do it for me. So rather than limit myself to what's available on the Android store, I downloaded a NES emulator and have been running through the first two games in the Final Fantasy series.  The first game is a cracker. It draws heavily from Ultima and Wizardry, and provides a really complete RPG experience for 1987. I can't think of any areas that it's weak in, to be honest, and it avoids a lot of the over-linearity that plagues later JRPGs. Final Fantasy 2 (I'm playing a fan translation of the Japanese game, which was never officially released in English in its original form) has much more of a story focus, and although the combat and magic are similar the character advancement is completely different (FF1 had classes and levels, whereas FF2 has skills that level up through use). It's refreshingly open world - my first foray into the wilderness ended when I wandered into an area full of monsters that I had no business fighting yet. It's not as immediately enjoyable as FF1, and I'm starting to lose my grip on the story a bit, but there's a lot of potential.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: I'm a bit of a Zelda nut, but I'd taken a fairly long hiatus from the series after Wind Waker (which I loved). I spent much of the early part of last year completing Twilight Princess (which is good but too long) and now I'm trying to wrap up Skyward Sword before the new game comes out. I like it, but it's lacking a lot of the exploratory fun of the older games in the series. There's also a lot of backtracking, and it can get tedious playing through the same areas over again. The motion controls for sword-fighting are really well done, though. There's a lot of clever stuff in this game, but it doesn't really give me what I'm looking for in a Zelda.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Recently I got bitten by the retro collector bug, as well as the authenticity bug, so I acquired an old CRT television. Now I have my old consoles ready to hook up to it, and I'm planning to play through all of my childhood games before building up my collection. I decided to start with Ocarina, mostly because I couldn't find the cord to my Super Nintendo which meant that I wasn't able to play A Link to the Past. (Yes, A Link to the Past is better than Ocarina of Time. Why is this even a debate?) Ocarina basically ruled my life for a good chunk of the late 90s, and I remember it very well. I thought I'd discovered everything in it, but this time around I'm still finding new stuff. It's a little ropier than I remembered, but then again it is nearly 20 years old. It holds up remarkably well.

I've also been watching quite a bit of FIFA '17, as my son plays it a lot, as well as playing Moria of course.  This might seem like a lot of games to have on the go simultaneously, but it's not so bad.  I have a phone game for when I'm out of the house, a game connected to the main home TV, a game to play on my CRT when the main TV is being used, and a game to play on my laptop for the blog.  I'm just covering all of my bases.

As for Moria, I have a character who just became Guild Master of the Circle of Wizards, the second time I've achieved that mark. I might be jinxing myself here, but I'm making good progress. I've also started on Oubliette, another PLATO RPG, so expect a post on that fairly soon.

Moria: Equipment and Treasure

There are moments in life where there's nothing you can do except stare vacantly, with a stunned expression on your face. These moment might be surprising, or shocking, or perhaps even traumatic, but however you got there it's so overwhelming that your body freezes, and your brain locks up, and the only sensation you feel is a slow lurching of your stomach as the reality of the situation sinks in.

I just had a moment like that while playing Moria.

For regular readers of the blog (assuming that I have any left after my long hiatus) this will be a familiar story: I'd started over with a new character, and I was slowly grinding his stats upwards until I felt confident enough to explore the deepest levels of the dungeon.  Then disaster struck, and I died once again. My previous failures, however, had come at the hands of monsters, or perhaps my own impatience. This one was inflicted on me by the game itself.

I'm playing Moria through a PLATO emulator, which means that I need to be connected to the internet. The dangers of that are obvious: the internet is an unstable beast, and drop-outs occur from time to time. For a game with perma-death that could be game-breaking, but what I've found with all of the PLATO games I've played so far is that the games take this into account. All of them so far, without fail, have saved my character's status and location during a drop-out, and I've had no trouble logging back in and picking up where I left off.

Until now, that is (or some time in January to be more accurate; this post has been a long time coming). PLATO was running particularly slowly that night, and I'd already experienced a couple of drop-outs. After about the fourth of fifth, I cracked the shits with it and rebooted my system, hoping that it might help. At which point my computer had to install some updates, because I never turn the bloody thing off. So half an hour later I load up Moria again, and cue the stunned shock because my character was gone. Dead, gone, gonzo, wrap it up, nothing to be done about it but start over from scratch.

And when I say start over from scratch, I really mean it. I've lost strong characters before, but starting over wasn't so bad then because I had built up a hefty list of powerful weapons and armour in my guild locker that could be passed down to my next character. Whenever I died I would just create another guy right away, and all of those goodies would be passed down to him. It's a good leg-up that makes the initial grinding process much more survivable. Well, this time the contents of my guild locker were gone. Your gear only gets passed down if you create a new character right away, and I must have taken too long. I was back to fighting naked with a club.

I'm not really sure how this death happened. It can't be because I took too long to log back in; I've gone days before getting back to it in similar situations. It can't be because I was in the middle of combat; I've had drop-outs in the middle of fights before, and the fight has effectively paused until I came back. Maybe it was a combination of these two factors? Maybe it was a freak occurrence? I'd like to blame the PLATO emulator, but I've been playing games on it regularly for nearly three years, and this is the first time I've had this problem. I think that's a pretty good track record.

I've got to admit, this is the closest I've come to throwing this game in. I'd be justified, I think: I've made the Hall of Fame, and I've become the master of a guild. I can't do it, though. The Reaper's Ring would haunt my dreams forever. I have to find it. So yes, once again I'm grinding away with WWE and New Japan Pro Wrestling in the background. The treadmill of life goes on.

(I wanted to put a shot of the death screen in here, but I've never captured one, and I'm not about to try.)

On that cheery note, it's time for my final special post on Moria: equipment and treasure. This might be a big one, because it covers a number of topics, and is probably the most extensively detailed part of the game.

Armour & Weapons

Buying new weapons and armour is your main path to getting stronger in combat, and there are a lot of them in this game. They come in five categories: 2-handed weapons, 1-handed weapons (including shields), Body, Head, Arms, and Miscellaneous. Each item in these categories has a rating for Attack and Defense.

You start off only being able to wield a 2-handed weapon, because you can't use 1-handed weapons until you have a Valor score of 15. 1-handed weapons start out about the same as 2-handed, but they range up to an Offensive rating of 30, whereas 2-handed weapons cap out at 21. You can also use a shield with a 1-handed weapon, which is a big Defensive boost. Once your Valor reaches 30 you can wield two 1-handed weapons at once, which is the best way to boost your Offensive rating; it doesn't have much of an adverse effect on Defense either, because the better weapons boost that score too. Weapons range from daggers (with an Offensive rating of 3 and a cost of about 150 gold) to Tridents (Offensive 30, Defensive 10, cost of over 1 million gold).

Body armour is purely defensive, and again caps out with a Defensive score of 30 for the Cloak of Death. There are only three types of armour for Arms, with Gauntlets being the best (as they provide an Offensive bonus to go along with the Defensive). Similarly there are only four pieces of Head armour, with the best being the Helmet of Life (Defensive rating 24). There's only one miscellanous item, and that's the purely defensive Holy Sash.

All of the various types of weapons and armour (91 in total) can be bought at the Weaponry stores in the City. As you may have noticed, they can get expensive: the best items can cost over 1 million gold. Between these and the guild fees for advancement, it takes a long time until gold becomes worthless in the game. (It happens eventually, but at that point I felt like I was pretty close to finishing the whole thing.)

All of the one-handed weapons and shields

You can also find armour and weapons after winning a battle. There's no apparent rhyme or reason to when they show up. It seems just as likely that you'll find an item on level 1 of the dungeons as on level 50, and the same goes for the strength of the items as well. Once I found a Helmet of Life within about ten minutes of starting a new character. I can't say for certain, but the sense I get is that any item could show up at any time in the game, and it's all down to luck (although apparently members of the Thieves' Guild will find them more often).

Haggling

As mentioned, some of the items cost more the 1 million gold. Now here's a quandary: your character can't carry more than 1 million at a time. (I discovered this the hard way, when I sold a gold nugget for about 800,000 gold when I already had over 900,000.) That's where haggling comes in. Whether buying or selling, you can negotiate the price with the shopkeeper, suggesting totals or refusing their offers until you hit on a total you're happy with (or the shopkeeper gives up). Generally you can sell an item for about triple the initial asking price, or buy an item for about three-quarters of the initial price. It's a fun mechanic at the beginning of the game, but when you end up doing it for every single purchase (for months and months on end) it gets really tedious. I would have preferred them just to price things lower and be done with the rigmarole.

Negotiating the price of a trident.

Treasure

Most monsters will leave a treasure chest containing gold and jewels after a battle. (Curiously, the priest-class monsters are the ones that most often leave no treasure behind.) Most of the treasure you find is in gold pieces, but there are also gems with a greater value; pearls are worth 150gp, rubies are worth 800gp, emeralds are worth 4,000gp and diamonds are worth 20,000gp. The total value of treasure found increases the deeper you delve into the dungeons. Every now and then you'll get drops that are much higher than the normal value (say, 25,000 gold in an area where I would normally get 1,000). Rarely (and I mean very rarely) you might find a Gold Nugget or a Precious Stone. I've found three of these treasures in the whole time I've been playing, and they all sold for upwards of 500,000 gold.

I should mention that the chests are sometimes trapped, and there's no way of knowing.  You just have to open the chest and hope.  The most damage I've ever seen a chest trap inflict was 49, so I make sure that my Vitality is over 50 before opening one.  There's no other way to avoid being killed.

Taking the spoils from an opened chest.

Magic Items

In addition to dropping treasure and armaments, monsters occasionally leave behind magic items. These are items that all have some sort of special effect. I'll list the ones I've found below. The effects I've listed are my best guess in some cases; it's impossible to know what they do except through trial and error, and even then it's a mystery. I've done my best.

• Torch: Simply put, it's an item that casts a Light spell. Casting Light costs a negligible amount of Vitality, and lasts practically forever, so I never found a use for these.
• Aura of Light: Again, this one casts a Light spell. I couldn't find a difference between this and the Torch (except that this one can be sold for more gold).
• Ring of Valor: I never did figure out what this ring does. My assumption is that it gives a bonus to Valor, but there's no way to tell. I keep them when I find them, but I have no idea if it's worth it.
• Treasure Ring: I could be wrong, but I think this item cast the Treasure Finding spell when used. I find that spell pointless: all it does is tell you whether or not a group of monsters has any treasure. I make it a point to kill every monster I find, so I have no need for it.
• Ring of Flight: You might think that this one gives you the power to fly, but in actual fact it increases your chance of fleeing from combat. Escaping is a necessary part of this game, so a Ring of Flight is a great item to have: I found that when I had one it never took me more than two tries to get away. (At least until I hit Level 52 of the dungeon, and a battle that I just couldn't run from no matter how many times I tried; I'm thinking that this item contributed to my death by making me overconfident.)
• Life Ring: The best magic item in the game: when I was wearing it, I found that monsters did a little bit less damage. Some blows would even restore my character's Vitality, which was a great help. I can't be sure about it, but what I noticed was that more Vitality would be restored the longer I went without being hit; if I was hit two rounds in a row, the Life Ring had no effect on the second hit, but if I went four rounds without being hit the next hit would do four fewer points of damage. This and the Ring of Flight are the two items that I most want to find again.

There's no limit to the amount of magic items that you can equip (except for the overall limit of twelve items that your character can carry, which includes weapons and armour). Unwanted magic items can be sold at the Magic Store in the City, and haggled over just like weaponry. You can't buy magic items, unfortunately, and the ones that you sell are gone forever.

Magic Apples

Magic Apples are found at random in the dungeons, and have a variety of effects if you eat them. (Now that I think of it, it's possible that the other dungeons have replaced Apples with another item. I've been exclusively exploring the Forest, so I have no idea.) These effects are:

• Casting a spell: The apple casts any one of the non-combat magic spells: Light, Protection or Locate Treasure.
• Negating a spell: If you have one of the above three spells functioning, eating the apple will negate it. It's a minor nuisance.
• Restoring Vitality: The apple restores your Vitality back to 100, which is a nice time-saver, but as you'll see that's utterly negated by the following effect.
• Reducing Vitality: These apples drain your Vitality, and are the main reason that I always wait until my health is full before I eat an apple. (That's the negation I was talking about above; the healing saves time, but I've probably just waited to heal up anyway before eating the apple.) I've had apples that reduced me from a Vitality of 100 to one of 4, so I always use extreme caution. I've never had one take me from 100 to 0, but I occasionally get anxious about the possibility.
• Reducing Stats: The apple takes away 1 or 2 points from your Valor, Piety, Cunning or Wizardry. It's irritating, especially when you're trying to grind them up.
• Raising Stats: As above, but the apple adds a point to one of the four stats. This is literally the only thing worth eating magic apples for.

I go back and forth on whether to eat the magic apples or not. Of the six different effects, two of them are actively harmful and three are pointless. I still like to take a gamble on getting a small stat boost, but it's not worth the risk of losing points, or being killed. Currently, I've stopped eating them, except on rare occasions when my health is completely full when I find one.

So, that's it for Moria, at least as far as special posts go. I've covered the game in about as much depth as I'm capable of, and I doubt that I'll do another post until my eventual victory. (Yes, eventual. Shut it, you.)  In the meantime, it's back to my list, which will hopefully make things around here a bit more interesting. Here are the upcoming games:

1. Oubliette (1977) - Another PLATO RPG (boooo). I understand that this one is heavily reliant on multiplayer, though, so I might be able to knock it out in a single post and move on. Here's hoping.
2. A3 (1978) - The second text adventure created using Wander. It's a sci-fi number that at first glance comes across as quite sophisticated for the time.
3. House of Seven Gables (1978) - Another text adventure joint from Greg Hassett, the 12-year-old prodigy.
4. Acheton (1978) - A British text adventure that I've seen described as "enormous". Joy.
5. King Tut's Tomb Adventure (1978) - Yet another game by Greg Hassett! Did that kid even go to school?
6. Library (1978) - The third game created using Wander.
7. Stuga (1978) - A swedish text adventure, which translates to "The Cottage". Sounds riveting!
8. MUD1 (1978) - The first ever text-based "multi-user dungeon". I'm probably going to ignore multi-player games, but I'd like to take a look at this one out of historical curiosity.
9. Treasure Hunt (1978) - Sounds like a variant of Hunt the Wumpus.
10. Mystery Mansion (1978) - A murder mystery text adventure

That takes me to the end of 1978. That's a long run of adventure games in a row, which is the unfortunate side-effect of not really planning ahead. To be honest, it will be a welcome relief from the unrelenting slog of PLATO RPGs. And many of them will probably be short. Hopefully I can start making some headway, and actually get to some games that sane, living people have played.