Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Retrospective: Pool of Radiance

My late childhood and early teen years coincided not just with the ascent of fantasy and science fiction in popular media but with the (likely related) ascents of RPGs and video/computer games. By the time I first encountered roleplaying games, there were already serious efforts to combine these two hobbies – and my friends and I were very interested in seeing what they had to offer. That's why we greedily snapped up Wizardry and Telengard and Adventure and many more, all of which we enjoyed but none of which fulfilled our dreams of an electronic entertainment that truly brought the fun of a fantasy RPG to a console or desktop.

There were many reasons why we felt this way, most of them related to the technical limitations of computers in the early to mid-1980s. Another reason was that none of the computer or video games at the time made use of a rules system as complex as that of most pen-and-paper RPGs, which had a negative impact on their depth of play. Wizardry was a solid step in this direction, which is why I loved it, but it was still sufficiently primitive in the scope of its rules that it couldn't hold a candle to Dungeons & Dragons or any other tabletop roleplaying game.

This largely remained the state of affairs until the late 1980s, when advances in both computer technology and program design saw the rise of increasingly sophisticated offerings. By this time, I was away at college and, while I didn't have a desktop computer of my own, many of my friends did so. It was through one of them that, in the Fall of 1988, I was first laid eyes on Pool of Radiance. Produced by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), Pool of Radiance was the first official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons computer game. Unlike the AD&D-branded Intellivision games of earlier in the decade, this one made use of the actual AD&D rules available at the time. This was a huge selling point to me, since all previous fantasy computer games used their own rules systems, which, as I noted above, were much less robust. 

The other thing that caught my attention was that Pool of Radiance was not a generic fantasy game. Instead, it made use of the then-new official AD&D setting of the Forgotten Realms. I'd been a fan of the Realms since I first encountered Ed Greenwood's articles in the pages of Dragon, so the use of the setting in Pool of Radiance was also a point in its favor. Further, the overall scenario of the game was designed not by the staff of SSI but by a team of RPG designers working at TSR, among them James Ward, David Cook, and Steve Winter. TSR fanboy that I was, this last fact assured me that, with Pool of Radiance, we were finally getting the goods: an honest to Crom digital adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons rather than a knock-off.

As one might expect, the centerpiece of Pool of Radiance was its character generator. The player is given the ability to generate up to six characters for use as his party of adventurers in the game. Ability scores are generated randomly, though the player possesses some capacity to alter them according to his preferences. Characters can belong to any of six races (human, dwarf, elf, gnome, half-elf, and halfling) and any of four classes (cleric, fighter, magic-user, thief, with demihumans given the opportunity to multiclass). Though representing only a portion of AD&D's full possibilities – there are no sub-classes or half-orcs, for instance – everything included in Pool of Radiance works the way it ought to in the tabletop version of the game. This was not a version of the game simplified for computers but the Real Deal™.

The game assumes the characters have come to the city of New Phlan and entered into the service of its council to reclaim the Old City, which has fallen into ruin and is now inhabited by a variety of monsters and evil humanoids. As the characters venture into these ruins, they gain experience and treasure, which enables them to explore ever more dangerous – and lucrative – areas. In time, they become sufficiently powerful and accomplished to move beyond Phlan and explore other locales that likewise would benefit from their presence. In short, Pool of Radiance is a good translation of the structure of most D&D campaigns into computerized form. 

The game's scenario is not groundbreaking or revolutionary in any real way, but it is nonetheless quite enjoyable, precisely because it is so similar to many people's experiences of playing AD&D. This similarity is buttressed by the inclusion of myriads of little rules and game elements, like saving throws, spell selection, magic items, and even demihuman level limits. To play Pool of Radiance is to play AD&D, albeit one that lacks the social interactivity that is, in my opinion, the foundation of why roleplaying is such a fun hobby. Even so, the game had a lot to offer and my friends and I spent far more time playing it than we probably ought to have.

In the decades since its release, computer RPGs have become vastly more sophisticated and immersive than was Pool of Radiance. Everything from their graphics, scenario design, and rules implementation have advanced by leaps and bounds, strengthened by improvements in technology and years of experience. Because of this, I doubt I could go back and play Pool of Radiance (or any of the many SSI AD&D computer games that followed in its wake) with any enjoyment. Yet, there's no question that this game was an important milestone in the development of the CRPG genre and for introducing a wider audience to Dungeons & Dragons – quite the legacy, if you ask me.

12 comments:

  1. Pool of Radiance, and all the Gold Box games, have a project called the Gold Box Companion that gives them a bit of modern convenience like maps and journals you don't have to flip to the manual for. Definitely still old, but also remarkably playable. I need to get back to it at some point, but I've got a bit of a backlog to work through.

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  2. Pool of Radiance was certainly a pleasant surprise to this D&D player. There had been the wildly successful release of The Bard's Tale a couple years earlier, and at first glance it appeared the SSI game borrowed heavily from that EA hit, right down to the subdivided graphical interface with a quasi-3D POV in the upper left.

    But then you saw its 'portraits' were actually straight-up (and animated!) translations of Trampier and Sutherland's 1st Edition Monster Manual illustrations, the addition of a strategic battle screen which replicated miniatures play, and the aforementioned exhaustively detailed character "rollups'.

    Just a class act all around -- SSI really took that license seriously!

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    1. You hit the nail on the head.. I still remember the first time I played it and saw the goblin portrait come up. I actually got it running on an Linux laptop I have here beside me (and it looks so much better in color than on the old amber monochrome monitor I originally played it on) but I haven't actually made it through character creation yet.

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  3. James, you can and possibly should revisit Pool of Radiance and its sequels. With the Gold Box Companion, the games are much easier to play now and there's a lot of great content in them and in games created by players through a program called FRUA, which is an acronym for Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures.

    I have played most of the D&D licensed computer games that have come out since Pool of Radiance, and while some of them are measurably better - particularly the Infinity Engine games - the Gold Box games are still challenging and fun to play.

    You may not have the time to delve into it, but if you have any interest there are a host of resources available online.

    Out of curiosity, have you played Baldur's Gate?

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    1. I did play Baldur's Gate when it was first released and loved it. I tried to return to it a few years ago, when the remastered version was released and found its UI too clunky to get back into, unfortunately. I suppose I have been spoiled by more recent improvements.

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  4. Loved Wizardry as a starting point. Wore that game out when I was young. Amazingly, I've never encountered anything since that captured the spirit of DND as well. (Never came across Pool of Radiance, so can't speak to that.) Skyrim is awesome from a solo play standpoint. Would love to hear from others if there are any other good options out there.

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    1. There are many other options, though whether you enjoy any will depend on your tolerance for different rules. Bioware and others put out some games in the early 00's using the Infinity Engine; isometric, real-time with pause games: The Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series. The former is more story-forward and the latter more combat focused.

      Troika put out a version of the Temple of Elemental Evil using the 3.0 rules that was almost unplayable when it was released, but for which there are now fan-made patches that both fix most of the bugs and add content. There's even a version of Keep on the Borderlands using that game engine.

      More recently there's a couple of games called Knights of the Chalice that are based on the 3.5 rules. They are punishingly difficult and use very dated graphics but are fun if you can get into that mindset.

      I'm just scratching the surface, and really only focusing on isometric-style games - as opposed to 1st person perspective games like Skyrim, but those are a good place to start.

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  5. I remember being pretty disappointed that you didn't get to create a whole party in Baldur's Gate.

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    1. You could but you had to get a bit hacky with the multiplayer IIRC

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  6. The CRPG Addict has an excellent blog post about this particular game, beginning here: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2011/05/game-57-pool-of-radiance-1988.html

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  7. These came out during my "computerless" era, but I've been having a meditative time watching Dan from the Wandering DMs (a Youtube channel that James has guested on several times) play through Pools of Radiance. It's been fun interacting with Dan and other viewers, and I'm surprised how much of the AD&D rules have been adapted. He plays every Monday, 8 pm Pacific:

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  8. "Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Computer Product" - how very TSR.

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