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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue Orange" data-source="post: 8083307" data-attributes="member: 7025997">Not sure if this counts or not, but I played the heck out of the old Goldbox games, Pool of Radiance (as mentioned before) and its three sequels, not to mention the three Krynn games and two Savage Frontier games, and worked with FRUA (the construction set) some. While no computer game can really simulate live tabletop play (especially in the 1988-1991 time period where dungeons were 16x16 maps and you could hide from monsters by running behind a wall), some of the things you're saying do ring true.Only the first game started you at 1st level (with read magic, shield, sleep, and detect magic as described). The inefficiency of the 1st level mage is well-described--sure sleep would take down a gang of kobolds, goblins, or orcs, but after that you were pretty much useless.The higher-level wizards got pretty powerful, though. One thing is that limits on damage output by level started with 2nd ed--the last in the series, Pools of Darkness, let your characters get up to 40th level, which meant your fireballs did 40d6 damage, in an era when monsters rarely had more than 100 hp. Even before that, though, the fights in the later games tended to devolve into spamming fireball on large numbers of monsters.The somewhat-famous (to retrogamers anyway) first sequence of the final fight in Pools had a sequence where you face about 8 dracoliches in addition to a similar number of custom monsters (Bits of Moander, shambling mounds with a petrification or poison touch attack, Blue Bane Minions, demon analogs with blue dragon breath weapons and Fire Shield permacast in the era when it did double the damage you struck the enemy with, and Pets of Kalistes, custom giant spiders with basically the spellcasting ability of a 13th level magic-user). The whole thing turned into a Wild West-style who-has-the-highest-DEX-shoots-first-and-lives, because you had to drop a Delayed Blast Fireball on them before they wiped you out with their lightning breath. The next sequence involved your party taking on seven beholders...and there's one after that.If you like tactical combat and can tolerate (or actively enjoy) over-the-top cheese, I actually recommend them highly. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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