Koki on 24/5/2012 at 18:12
Rockpiles are indeed bitches. Nice to know they're weak to poison; I kind of figured this out by myself, pew-pewing them with poison bolt. Never squashed a single monster with a door on my solo run.
It's weird you ran out of food. I used to play with full team as a kid and I never had any food problems. Maybe you're resting too much? Brew health/stamina potions instead.
(And of course if you're going solo then food is a joke. I started with collecting/eating only real(non-monster) food but eventually even that limitation was too much and I switched to 100% drumstick diet and eventually even THAT started spilling out of my inventory. I did have a little trouble with water at lower levels though because I was too lazy to backtrack to a fountain)
Stitch on 24/5/2012 at 18:27
Quote Posted by Koki
It's weird you ran out of food. I used to play with full team as a kid and I never had any food problems. Maybe you're resting too much? Brew health/stamina potions instead.
Yeah, the whole food issue was baffling to be too. In retrospection I think this was partially due to moving around too much (coming off Grimrock probably had me conditioned to think that dancing around monsters was more necessary than it really is) and also partially due to having a poorly optimized party (which resulted in battles eating up more of my health and stamina than was probably intended). Low health and stamina is replenished from food and water, so it sort of makes sense that the above mistakes would result in starvation.
And not to jump ahead of my story too much, but after filling up on screamer slices and leveling up my dudes a bit, food hasn't been anything resembling a problem. I do actively brew health and stamina potions a lot more now, as my party has gotten powerful enough to have the mana to spare.
ERH+ on 24/5/2012 at 19:21
@Stitch, You probably feed party members when they don't need this. Wait till they start get injuries from starvation.
Rockpiles are immune to slashing and bashing, while stabbing is fastest attack type and makes to them same amount of damage. If You just keep stab them with swords and projectiles, You will kill them very easily. Also improvise and pick up any boulders and clubs to throw as extra attack while weapons are recharging. Doors as weapon will save Your time, You can always train in peaceful place.
Maybe I don't know something about DM -but why You saying about XP? If you will keep swinging a weapon or cast any spell into air You will gain levels without any kill count, so You can get rid of monsters in any way. In this Screamer room You could get "dungeon master" rank for any character and proceed with maximized stats.
I'm not sure if difficulty level at game is to high, if You now restart game You will probably jump over most of this obstacles with grater agility -so game testers does I guess.
Stitch on 24/5/2012 at 19:43
Quote Posted by ERH+
Maybe I don't know something about DM -but why You saying about XP? If you will keep swinging a weapon or cast any spell into air You will gain levels without any kill count, so You can get rid of monsters in any way. In this Screamer room You could get "dungeon master" rank for any character and proceed with maximized stats.
And this is basically what I did (well, within reason--I don't have the patience to grind for very long, and the game is balanced to make leveling up disproportionately high from the screamer room very time-consuming).
As for my comments about XP: the game is weighted to reward more XP if you are directly next to a monster--or, better yet, receiving damage from it--so by dispatching monsters with doors or pits you are depriving yourself of the ability to earn XP most efficiently. Yes you can swing your sword at an empty wall and gain experience, but you're going to level up a lot faster if you are swinging that sword at a beast.
This is why the screamer room is a favored training spot--you can put yourself in an environment in which you're earning max combat XP (next to a monster, receiving damage) for a minimum of risk. Of course, it's only on level four so the level-wide XP magnifier isn't very good, but you can't have everything in life.
smallfry on 24/5/2012 at 22:40
I've never played dungeon master (or grimrock) - I didn't even know the first thing about it - but thought I'd give Return To Chaos a go. After I figured out you can click on things inside the 3d view, I built up my party, as follows:
* Leif the Valiant (our fearless leader)
* Sonja She Devil (the brute force)
* Syra Child of Nature (the magician)
* Alex Ander (the mostly ninja)
They seem like a good bunch and so far so good. I went downstairs, collected a bunch of keys, fought and killed a few monsters (yikes, didn't know combat was real-time!), and started to hoard a bunch of food. I haven't cast any spells yet, although I put some runes into my spell book. Well anyway, this game is surprisingly playable for being 25 years old. I'll keep at it!
Stitch on 25/5/2012 at 14:42
Awesome!
Yeah, the game is a monster. As I get deeper into the depths of the dungeon I'm continually impressed at the sheer size of the gauntlet that was thrown down when this game came out. It's surprisingly well-realized for a first game in a series; often times it takes a sequel or two for developers to really figure out how far they can take things (e.g. Baldur's Gate), but Dungeon Master really knocks it out of the park from the start. If you look at the other games that were current in 1987, DM could easily have cranked out a five hour experience and coasted by on the graphics and quasi-3D engine alone, and yet they crafted a deep, challenging dungeon that gets increasingly weirder and less linear with each floor deeper.
Despite a childhood spent poring over maps my dad downloaded from a BBS somewhere and an adulthood that featured no small amount of reminiscing online over a game that has been in discussion for 25 years, my current playthrough still surprises me from time to time with moments of discovery (like the skeleton stairway I just unlocked, which is cool as shit).
It's pretty rare to revisit a thing loved in childhood and have it stand up, it's even more rare to go back and discover that the damn thing is even better than I ever suspected.
Stitch on 25/5/2012 at 15:36
So, dungeon diary:
After filling up on food and practicing some skills enough to achieve something resembling proficiency, my party tracked their way back through level four to kill all the worms they, erm, frantically ran past initially. It was a surprisingly less burdensome task than I had anticipated, as it turns out a party with something resembling proficient skill can actually dispatch the beasts without too much sweat.
I remember as a kid watching my buddy play this level. I followed along with the maps that my dad had downloaded from a BBS somewhere. I had printed out the maps and stapled them together, with a frontpage on which I'd record each new spell we learned and sketch a drawing of each new monster we encountered.
The maps were pretty thorough and arguably took some of the fun out of the game, but they didn't show everything--monsters weren't listed and items were only distinguished by an all-purpose "x" that didn't actually indicate what the item was.
I remember my friend taking the teleportation shortcut that enables skipping a portion of level four, and I remember looking at the map and seeing that this meant missing out on at least one "x" of indeterminate item identity.
"But we'll miss out on this item." I said.
"You saw the monsters up in that hallway, it can't possibly be worth it," my friend said.
"Are you sure?"
"It can't possibly be worth it."
I don't even know now what the "x" was (so it probably wasn't worth it) but as an adult I tackled this passage that my childhood brain had amplified into some sort of hallway of instant death, and I found it pretty straightforward with a minimum of trauma. I reached the second teleportaton field that marked the end of the passage, meaning I had cleared it out quickly.
"Huh," I thought.
With the level as clear as a monster-generating level can get--oh yeah, I killed the horde of purple worms that flood out of the door at the end, too--I moved down to level five.
Koki on 25/5/2012 at 16:39
The Wormzone almost made me quit. Somehow I didn't figure out to dodge enemy attacks yet by then(I really didn't figure it out until Grimrock which forces you to do it on the grounds that even with four characters you'll get raped by just about anything in melee, much less solo) and the level was just get poisoned every fight, so brew antidotes, so you have no magic, so you have to rest.
Ugh.
Stitch on 25/5/2012 at 19:16
While DM certainly rewards the attack and back up, attack and back up two-step, it's not quite like Grimrock in which you essentially want to dance around enemies as much as possible. In fact, like I mentioned earlier, my attempts to bring this fancy footwork strategy to Dungeon Master just resulted in a shitload of food consumption. And hell, your actions result in more XP if your dudes get hit, anyway.
SubJeff on 25/5/2012 at 23:20
Well this is balls. Koki was right. Grimrock is dumb. There are loads of spiders and nowhere near enough antivenom plants. I can progress but it's a tedious grind with boring backtracking to the regen point. I'll give DM another go.
