2022-08-01

Pool of Remonstrance

Beat-up bandit leader

As I play through the well-loved 1988 AD&D computer game, Pool of Radiance (which launched the very successful "gold box" line of games), on the Wandering DM channel late nights Thursdays -- I'm reminded of the hard fact, for computer game developers, of how many ambiguities in classic D&D the programmers need to hammer down judgements for and back-fill in to complete the software. And this in turn leads to many surprises in store for the player who's become used to particular table rulings with their friends. I'm sure there's a similar phenomenon when players move between different human play groups. That's somewhat ironic, as AD&D was partly held out as a unifying solution to exactly those problems.

I'm still in the early phases of Pool of Radiance, but here's a small sampling of things that have jumped out at me as a surprise, many cases of which I've needed viewers to helpfully point out the novel ruling before I got in too much trouble. Keep in mind this is even while the designers and programmers have in very many cases been huge sticklers for hewing to the 1E books as written:

  • Initiative is in a different order for each party, and intermingled between parties, on every round; i.e., it seems to have an individual initiative mechanic. (To me the 1E DMG seems clear that party-based initiative is in order.)
  • Attacks against the back are determined not by position but by number of attackers -- one or two count as front attacks; the third or more attackers, or thief across from an ally, count as rear attacks. (This somewhat conjures the 3E flanking rule, abstracting where the "back" is on a figure. The 1E DMG kind of wants it both ways, arguing in some places for fully abstracted randomized-opponent melee dustups, and in others very exacting charts for the angle of flank or rear attacks. A chronic problem in D&D.)
  • When in melee, you can actually run circles all the way around an opponent without triggering free attacks -- the free attacks only occur when you step fully out of contact. (Which is a legitimately narrow reading of the DMG language, but perhaps doesn't make sense in the spirit of the tactical game.)
  • You can exchange items in hand -- weapons, shields, scrolls, etc. -- freely within any round. (This seems to butt up against the examples of rummaging in a pack or exchanging weapons in a fight; see 1E DMG p. 71.) Likewise you can thoughtfully look at all your gear and select any number of items to drop at your leisure within a fight (counter to the harrowing tale of Dimwall & Drudge in DMG Appendix O). 
  • Diagonal moves on the grid are measured 1-2-1-2, etc., spaces. (There's no whisper of this rule in 1E; prior to playing Pool of Radiance, I thought that was a 3E novelty.)
  • There's a "guarding" action option, in which you give up your action, but get a free attack if any enemy thereafter comes in contact with you. Likewise one can "delay" and wait for others to go first in a round. (Again, these are mechanics I associate with later editions.)
  • One can cast spells freely in melee contact, except if you've taken any damage previously within the same round. (This is sort of the reverse of the DMG rule on p. 65 which dictates advance declaration of spells, before rolling for initiative, and then the results of that initiative possibly allowing interrupting attacks. Like Pool of Radiance, I actually do prefer not dealing with advance-casting; but I wouldn't want to track who took damage at what point in a round.)
  • On the other hand, no missile attacks can be when one is adjacent to any enemy. (Which is quite sensible, but not in the books, and easy to confuse with the spell-casting rule which cuts the opposite way. You can't even shoot a missile if you're next to a sleeping enemy!)
  • Having had to painstakingly fight the trolls on the 1st level of the dungeon, I'm still not sure if fire is needed only as the final blow, or at some point in the combat, or what, to prevent regeneration. Also: preventing troll regeneration by standing on the body is not a ruling I think any DM would come up with (although maybe necessary here just for the issue of not having multiple figures active in one space). Also: having a downed troll get back up with full hit points was a real shock to me! (But: It seems basically in tone with Poul Anderson's original regenerating troll encounter, and I actually plan to have trolls play possum like that until fully healed in my future games -- watch out.) And of course trolls breaking morale, so critical to that fight in the Pool of Radiance slums, is exactly opposite to where they're labeled as "fearless" in classic D&D texts.
  • Also there's flaming oil which can be freely thrown, but there's no splash damage from misses (per the DMG). 
  • Training to advance a level costs a fixed 1,000 gp (as opposed to the greater expense by level in the DMG; a saving grace in Pool of Radiance).
  • The "option" the let characters go below zero hit points and possibly be resuscitated is in use (making combat much more survivable that if it was not). But the DMG dictate that a week's rest is then required is not used (although healing a downed PC in a fight does not let them get active again within that encounter). 
  • Casting hold person allows you to individually select the multiple targets (whereas Gygax said more than once that spells of that nature would affect random targets). 

I could go on. None of these are bad rulings -- it's just that it provides a neat opportunity to re-experience the game as a "new" player at a fresh DM's table, in some sense, and think about all the ways I get to be surprised and think about different legitimate ways of running classic D&D.

Of course -- the thing that grabs my attention the most sometimes is 1E's very wonky relationship with scaling of distance and time. Pool of Radiance almost manages to hand-wave that away, but not quite. AD&D "inches" of scale directly convert to "squares" in Pool of Radiance for movement and missile fire. Many spells follow the PHB ranges and areas, but others were significantly modified. For example, the sleep spell in 1E PHB has a range of 3" + 1"/level, but I've discovered that in Pool of Radiance (without any ranges being listed in the game manual), the range is 3" + 4"/level. That's a big difference, and would probably have changed a few fights if I knew my Nirjarini, my 3rd-level magic-user, could cast it 15 squares, instead of the 6 that I expected.

Furthermore: Simon Wood on YouTube helpfully pointed out that the Pool of Radiance Clue Book (which I'd been avoiding) has a Spell Parameters Chart on its last page. I observe that the range given for every spell there exactly matches what's listed in the 1E PHB (except in two cases of 0-range spells, the area is swapped in instead: i.e., prayer and friends). So now I wonder: Are there other spells than sleep that are secretly off-book? Was the Clue Book author working directly from the 1E PHB and not the game, or an earlier design document? Is the sleep spell range change a conscious design decision, or an outright programming error? (Note that 4 is directly above 1 on a numeric keypad.)

Finally, exactly how big is a battlemap square in Pool of Radiance? Consider the following. A one-square wide corridor in the strategic view converts to four-squares wide in the tactical view (i.e., 4 characters standing abreast). So how big is that corridor, really? If we think it's 10' wide (standard for 1E dungeons), then the tactical squares are 2.5 feet wide. Or if we say the corridors are 20' wide, then the tactical squares are a 5 feet each (in line with later edition sensibilities). But neither of those options are present in the 1E core rules. Of course, the 1E PHB states that all indoor ranges and areas are a scale of 1" = 10 feet, whereas the DMG says that 10 feet will be represented by 3 actual inches on the tabletop (i.e., 1 inch = 3⅓ feet). So everything's up in the air with that math, as usual.

Party in a 1-square corridor in Pool of Radiance strategic view.

Party fighting NPCs in that corridor, with both sides packed 4 characters across.

I think the Pool of Radiance manual almost managed to expunge any reference to "feet" distance, except oddly for two spells interacting with invisibility -- detect invisibility and invisibility, 10' radius both have their area of effect stated in terms of feet, not squares. (I mean: obviously it's embedded in the name of that latter spell. But for the former, the 1E PHB & POR Clue Book give the range as 1"/level, while the manual says 20 feet per level instead, so that seems like a conscious addition by the video game designers, and another thing not reflected in the Clue Book?) So when I get higher level I kind of want to prioritize acquiring invisibility, 10' radius so I can test how many squares its 10-foot radius area encompasses. Maybe someone's already done that?

Edit: I got to use silence, 15' radius as a test case, and found that it has a radius of 1 square in each direction around its target. So that suggests each space is intended to represent 10' -- which matches a lot of the 1E book rules, but contradicts the rule that one can fit 3 figures across a ten-foot span (1E DMG p. 10). It also means that the "standard" corridors, as shown above, must nominally be 40' wide. As I've often said, the inconsistency and weird scaling of 1E rules always make something unsatisfiable like that.

16 comments:

  1. Interesting. I wonder how many of these changes were due to:
    1. ease of coding?
    2. playability issues?
    3. the designers' sensibilities/house rules?
    4. misunderstanding of the rules?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Just had a look to see if they had spoken about developing the game on the web at all.
      This is the best and goes into the detail of making it a bit.
      https://www.pressreader.com/uk/retro-gamer/20201001/283643942369917

      This one just has a short reminiscence.
      https://dnd.dragonmag.com/2019/09/30/discovering-the-gold-box/content.html

      Including this one just for fun. It talks about mailing out a patch for the game in eight disks!
      https://medium.com/the-unpopular-opinions-of-a-senior-developer/back-in-my-day-10e967a55ce3

      Delete
    2. Those are great recollections, thanks for those!

      Delete
  2. I would note that the game does internally track the half-squares for diagonal movement, but it only displays the numbers in alternating steps of 1 and 2 points. If you have exactly 1 square of movement remaining, you cannot make a diagonal move - and in fact, attempting to do so will forfeit your last space of movement while leaving you stationary!

    My understanding of the trolls/fire rule is that it is unimplemented in Pool of Radiance. I believe it may work as intended in some of the sequels.

    It's also interesting to note that the ability to freely move around an opponent as long as you don't leave melee range is the same as what 5E uses. It's also almost the same for ranged attacks as well, though in 5E incapacitated enemies are specifically excluded, and it's softened to only impose disadvantage rather than preventing ranged attacks altogether. The more things change, the more they stay the same!

    For the "Guard" action, while it wouldn't be codified until halfway through 2E, ever since OD&D there was the idea of "weapons set to receive a charge." So it seems like a pretty obvious interpretation of that concept.

    Good find on the Sleep spell range, by the way! I tried my best to find that out, but all the online sources just reiterate the erroneous range printed in the manual. Did you find a source for the 3 + 4/level, or was that just trial and error off-screen?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for those! Great point on the 1E Gold Box <-> 5E similarities, those cycles are pretty fascinating. And thanks for the point that trying to go diagonally with too little movement terminates the move -- think I've gotten tricked by that once or twice without realizing what was happening.

      You're right, my _sleep_ assessment was done by some careful experiments offline. I've done a few things in that vein now (e.g., confirm morning stars do full damage vs. skeletons).

      Delete
  3. Wait until you get to the wilderness encounters, where the game tries to do the AD&D feet/yards conversion

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not 100% sure about PoolRad, but generally the Gold Box series implemented the volumetric fireball rule, where the radius outdoors is reduced because of the lack of a ceiling.

      Delete
    2. ^ I agree, I see that in the manual (radius 2 vs.3). At least it looks like it doesn't shape-fill a space to blow up more PCs.

      Delete
    3. I never noticed any difference outdoors except for a few things like Fireball's radius. All movement and ranges are the same as far as I can tell. My biggest gripe with outdoors was figuring out which terrain features block movement/LOS and which are merely decorative.

      Delete
    4. Okay, I could be wrong. I always thought the fireballs were smaller because the squares were 10 yards instead of 10 feet.

      Delete
  4. In regards to indoor scaling, it seems to me that it only works with the combat scale if the corridors and rooms are 30 ft. per square. Old school D&D modules have a habit of squeezing a lot of monsters into rooms that are too small to hold them (if you're using a grid and minis, anyway). Possibly this was SSI's way of making that work.

    As for rules interpretations, my friends and I were playing the Gold Box games very shortly after we started D&D. For that reason we went to these games when it came to resolving ambiguities. I'm sure others did the same, so I wonder how influential they were on D&D from this point on.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's fascinating about that experience. Likewise, WDM Paul came from B/X initially, with Pool of Radiance his first impression of AD&D. In particular, he was boggled by the "sweep attack" rule which was left out of B/X.

      On that point, recently working sweep attacks into my games, I realized that it exponentially increases tat problem of more-monsters-than-fit in the dungeon space. If I have 1 HD monsters in a place for 4th level PCs, I can't fit enough in a standard dungeon to make it a threat. Maybe in a giant cavern or something.

      Delete
  5. Some interesting spell details: Fireball checks whether figures are line-of-sight from the center point, so walls / doorways can give shelter. Lightning bolt can do double-damage if it rebounds and strikes a target twice (this is explicitly not how it works in 2nd ed, ambiguous in 1st). Charmed targets begin acting "for the other side" but their actions are not controlled by the player. Held targets can be instantly killed by any physical attack without an attack roll, and that includes missile weapon attacks. Stinking cloud causes the "held" condition on a failed save, and the save has to be re-rolled every time a target exits and re-enters.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brilliant, thanks for all that (going into my notes document). Now you've got me curious how the angle of the lightning rebound works. Is it always directly back at the caster?

      Delete