Pool Of Radiance Retrospective

It was just over 25 years ago that the first "real" electronic implementation of a pen and paper RPG arrived. Pool of Radiance was a joint project by a number of legendary TSR developers, including Jim Ward, Steve Winter, Zeb Cook, and Mike Breault. It inspired a lot of sequels, which themselves indirectly inspired next-generation RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

I recently hauled out the game and played through the opening scenarios. As is often my approach to CRPGs, I added a set of self-assigned "conducts" to play in a pseudo-ironman mode to make the game harder. (There are plenty of ways to cheat and make it easier, too!) After 25 years it's apparent how many of the user interface decisions from the era are painful in ways that I never appreciated at the time. Healing a wounded party sometimes requires dozens of keystrokes, and plenty of important information (like saving throws and buff spells) is hidden from the player without the use of unofficial third-party add-ons. Most of the spells are frankly useless, and thieves are an ignorable class due to having no stealth abilities. But I still regard this as one of the best RPGs ever made, and I figure it helps me understand my own creative process (as a game designer and referee) to think about why I like it so much.

Here's a list of all the things it does well -- in many cases, better than any game created since:

1. Random encounters to give a sense of peril: At every stage of the game, there are always random monsters waiting to jump you on the way back from a successful expedition. This creates a standard dilemma where you have a party struggling with the encumbrance a load of hard-fought loot, but it doesn't matter if you can't bundle it home across the forbidding wilderness or treacherous mazes. There's something deeply iconic about greedy adventurers clinging to their prizes even as they beat off pursuing foes. It makes the world feel more organic than being able to just walk back into town unmolested and then return to pick up where you left off, as if clearing dungeons were the same thing as picking fruit from an orchard.
   
   Better yet, encounters can hit you even when resting, in proportion to the time you spend in camp. So there's a constant tension between trying to re-memorize all your spells, or just the handful of essential ones you need to survive.
   


2. A robust morale system: All the Gold Box games had this, but many later games have mostly ignored morale. Morale is essential for allowing a game to have huge epic battles without becoming tedious. One the one hand, there's something awe-inspiring about walking into a room and finding not 5 orcs, but 50! On the other hand, who actually wants to hunt down and kill them all? In this game as in the original D&D rules every battle has a natural break point where the monsters start running (often triggering a cheer, or at least a sigh of relief).





Good news: We have the archers flanked! Bad news: That's a lot of archers...

Side note: The "morale" rules are a logical counterpart to the "turning" rules for undead (which themselves have no morale). The "surrender" effect mirrors the "destroyed" result for turning, and the "flee" effect mirrors the "turned" result. It's a peculiarity that, in later editions of D&D and its ilk, the undead-turning mechanic remains even as morale has been lost. This makes clerics feel weirdly overpowered against undead. In historical context, though, the undead themselves were originally weirdly overpowered due to their lack of morale checks. Clerics were just restoring them back to parity with other monsters.

Alas, due to poor pathfinding in these early games, morale sometimes just resulted in enemies cowering in corners while you had to slowly pick them off with arrows. So the system didn't always work as advertised. But when it did, and 12 kobolds unexpected surrendered to your sole surviving priest, it was a glorious thing.


3. A detailed adventurer's journal with an emphasis on tactile elements: Back in the 64K days, games couldn't squeeze much text into the game engine itself, so they resorted to including any long text-blocks in a separate booklet. This was often a blessing rather than a curse, since it allowed for materials that wouldn't be compatible with the primitive interface. That could include fragments of handdrawn maps, notes from some anonymous sage, and the ubiquitous "code wheel", a primitive copy-protection method that PoR actually appropriated as a way to translate various dwarven and elven rune languages in the game. Oh, and a lengthy history of the geography and politics of the region, which lots of players probably would skip today, but which I read extensively. All of this on faux-aged paper with custom script fonts. Unlike other computer games of the era (and too many games today) this one was made out of wood.





A map within a map within a map...

4. Legacy features from the early golden age of RPGs: In Pool of Radiance, you can wander around a random map and discover procedurally generated lairs full of the classic "Type X" minor treasure troves with gems, minor magic items, scrolls, and potions. If the encounters felt too hard you could hire a nameless mook or two as your henchman -- if you didn't mind them swiping some of your hard-earned gold after every fight. Time was strictly regulated as a game resource, and searching a room put you in danger of more of those random encounters. Party members could be swapped in and out of your party to create a motley group of level 7, 5, and 2 characters of any flavor you wanted, making it a matter of dumb luck whether the next encounter would be at all "balanced". (I'm facing skeletons... and all my mages have sleep spells, gah!)
   
   For that matter, large chunks of the game were horribly unbalanced, starting with the notorious room full of trolls the designers tossed at any new party wandering into the game's "newbie zone", the slums. (I guess you were just supposed to run away, and praise the valor of the fallen companions who perished as they were pursued...) Lethal poison, level draining undead, and instant-death traps were constantly lurking around every corner. None of this "poison slows you down a little for ten seconds and then wears off automatically" nonsense; a 500 pound spider sinks its fangs into you, and you're going down, kid. That's what spiders actually do. We're simulating reality here, not giving you the illusion of being a hero with some fun park ride.

All of this is in contrast to modern games which often feel too carefully designed to be part of an organic world. Monsters are neatly segregated by level into zones flagged with huge neon challenge-level signs, where they are just barely sufficient to cause you to break a light sweat but no more. Those brutally unfair trolls? I remember them well, 25 years later.


5. A turn-based tactical engine: I'm sorry, but turn-based combat is just better for RPGs. No amount of trying to cram the square peg of D&D into the round hole of real-time combat will convince me otherwise. There's nothing more depressing than realizing that the only necessary tactic in a modern RPG is to put one dude in optimally enchanted plate armor and have him run in circles while the rest of the party snipes away from range at the monsters stupidly chasing him. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.) Tension doesn't come from how fast the game forces you to play, but how slowly it makes you want to play as you agonize over each decision during a nasty ambush.

This isn't to say that PoR is actually a playable game today, at least by most consumer standards. The graphics are antiquated Atari-era stuff. The interface is all paging through block menus. And there are huge gaps in the documentation that make it unclear what aspects of the PnP rules were actually ported over. (Does Wisdom actually grant any saving throw bonuses? I have no idea how to even tell...)

But a modern game that tried to emulate some of these attributes would be greatly appreciated, at least by me.