I'm still sick and having a hard time focusing on anything actually useful so I felt like writing an update for this LP instead. I don't think I'll be updating this frequently on the reg.
We load the game from where we last left off and hit "Begin Adventuring", formally kicking off our playthrough!
We are immediately greeted with the image of a pier through a small viewport in the top left of the screen. I couldn't get a screenshot because Rolf here immediately starts sprinting at you the moment to disembark to greet you and give you a guided tour of the human settlement of New Phlan.
He walks us through some landmarks and facilities - the temple (one of three, apparently), class training schools, the city hall and, ending the tour, the gate leading out of town into the "monster-ridden areas of the old city".
Rolf's introductory tour is... kind of pathetic, honestly. Looking at the automap, he kind of just lead us down one street at pointed at all the buildings alongside it. Speaking of the automap - I'm playing this using the bundled-in Gold Box Companion, a tool that plugs into DOSBox running these games to provide really useful features such as automappers and a nice party UI. The whole setup looks like this:
You can also see the actual in-game map in this screenshot too. It's tiny, located in a frame inside a frame, but at least you can walk around with it pulled up. Still, I'm really happy to be using the GBC automap. You can even add notes to it! And so we take some time walking around town, checking out what it has to offer. So far it's mostly shops we can't afford, temples where the priests force us out if we don't need healing, and similar other things you'd expect in an RPG town.
Remember the Adventurers' Journal? Feel free to pop open your personal copy and page over to Tavern Tale 6. For those who have lent their personal copy of the Adventurers' Journal to someone, here's what it says:
A weird looking wizard, dressed all in black, sits alone and mumbles into his beer, "I'll return next time and show them all!"
Right on! You can also gamble in taverns but I feel like it's really not worth it. We're built for adventuring, not silly dice games, and that is how we'll be making our money. We leave the tavern and head... into another tavern. Upon entering, someone clumsily reaches for Trevorbrimbor's coinpurse. As he stops the would-be thief...
We get into our first ever fight! Here's what combat looks like with GBC:
The minimap is quite useful here - besides showing friend/foe and HP, you can also mouse over to see more detailed stats like their THAC0, damage and other stats.
That is a lot of dudes we are looking at. Fortunately, as you can see with the combat automap, only about half of them are hostile, and don't have that many hitpoints. Unfortunately, it looks like Margot is absolutely fucked, standing surrounded by 5 guys. She has just slightly above 0.5 hitpoints per guy surrounding her right now. I'd run her out of there ASAP but this game, being AD&D, has attacks of opportunity, so we need to clear those guys out first. Ideally the plan is to chip away at the thieves (red 4) and nomads (red 6) in this tavern while backing away and letting the aides (all the green 18s) take over for us.
First up it's Ondova, who misses the nomad in front of them completely, then it's on to Clara. I check her status real quick to see what equipment she has on her...
...and realise that the answer to that is "nothing". I forgot you don't actually start with anything in this game and have to kit yourself out at the shops before doing anything. Hoo boy. Okay.
Margot, as expected, bites it.
Albert's sculpturesque body takes a hit, and then a second, and soon enough he's on the floor. Ondova follows right after. Still, we're thinning their numbers out pretty rapidly - some decent unarmed hits by Thrigli, Ondova and Trevorbrimbor, as well as ranged support from the aides (okay, it's mostly all them right now - on a good roll they can take out one of our enemies ina single shot) means we're winning the numbers game. And, fortunately, our party members are only dying, not yet fully dead - if we get a friendly over to where their body is, we can bandage them and stabilize them for the rest of the combat.
The combat ends with everyone in the party except Thrigli and Clara on the floor. For Thrigli, I assume this isn't the first pickpocket-turned-brawl of his life, and I like to imagine Clara was the only person who realised she wasn't actually equipped for combat yet, and so she played it safe. We get some money and experience for our trouble. As we start making our way out of the tavern...
Uh oh. I'll be honest, I have no idea what the right choice is here. My hunch is that the city guard of New Phlan operate on a strict "no causin' trouble" law that does not have an exemption for fighting pickpockets so I decide to run away. Fortunately, this goes successfully and we are teleported to a random spot in town - right in front of City Hall. The party (specifically the two currently-conscious members of it) decide to take a look at the proclamations nailed outside - LXIV, LXXVIII, CIX, and LIX:
Be it known that the council is interested in acquiring information as to the disposition of various formerly-living entities rumored to be harassing honest citizens in the vicinity of Valhigen Graveyard. A reward is offered to any person who shall travel to said graveyard and return an eye-witness account.
Be it known that the council is offering a reward to any person or persons who can provide information as to the disposition of several council agents who have been sent to investigate the unseemly happenings in the vicinity of Valhigen Graveyard.
Be it known that the council is offering an inducement to any individual who shall serve in the rescue force for the mercenary band of Taimalg-the-Invincible which has disappeared inside Valhigen Graveyard.
Be it known that the council is interested in reclaiming the remaining blocks of the city of New Phlan. To reclaim said blocks they must be first cleared of monsters, vermin, and other uncivilized inhabitants. To this end the council is offering a reward to any person or group who is responsible for clearing any block of the old city.
We were hoping for something maybe more along the lines of "be it known that we're giving 500 gold to everyone who survives a bar brawl with no equipment" but I guess the Valhigen Graveyard thing is cool too. Looking at the map in the Journal, this graveyard is at least 4 blocks and a river away, so we're not really going to be able to do anything about it in our current state.
What we need to do right now is rest for like a week to restore all our health bars. The safest way to do this right now is buying a room at an inn, which, would you believe it, costs 1 platinum piece? The good thing is once we buy a room we can stay in it as long as we want to (until we leave). The bad thing is I cannot seem to convince the inn lady that 5 gold pieces is the same as 1 platinum, so we need to do some cash conversion.
Fortunately, this isn't too hard to do - if you go to any shop, pool your money together and buy something, all your various coins are converted up into whatever the highest possible denomination they can be. We head back to the inn with 90 platinum and 1 gold piece in hand, buy a room...
...and proceed to set up a campfire inside. Rustic! Besides just resting, the encampment menu also lets us save our game (there are no quicksaves as far as I can tell which makes some stuff scary, but if you just want to save you can pull this menu up any time), change some options like combat speed, and so on. We can also prepare spells on our clerics and magic users, which gets really tedious eventually since you have to manually pick each spell slot every time, but thankfully the GBC lets us memorize and quick-prepare spell lists too, which I'll start doing once our guys have more than like 2 spell slots.
The party takes like a week nursing themselves back to health. No judgies, I know how it goes sometimes. After that, we head out of the tavern and to an arms and armour store to get kitted out with whatever we can afford for 89 platinum.
I love this menu. Do you know what the difference is between a glaive, glaive-guisarme, fauchard-fork, guisarme-voulge and a bill-guisarme? Most of these weapons have the exact same stat block, but AD&D is a war game so you have to have 15 different polearms. It's great. There's even more polearms on page 2.
Our fighter-hybrids get kitted out with a sword and board and some chainmail. Albert gets a trident. Thrigli gets a shortbow. I've found it's super useful to have bows on all your party members just to get some opening shots into faraway enemies, but we can't afford to buy more right now. Thankfully the next block will have plenty of bows to plunder. Magic-Users cannot wear armour aside from protective cloaks so all Margot gets at this shop is a souvenir dagger.
I was going to make fun of this UI at the start of the game like "uhh yeah I sure need to see my party's AC at all times" but actually I guess I do, if I had remembered that 10 AC is low in AD&D instead of mediocre I would've realised I needed to buy equipment first. Anyway...
For our last act of this update, the party heads back to the gate leading out of town. Chests puffed out, newly-bought mail clinking and clanking across the streets, hands at the hips, thoughtfully tracing the pommel of a mace or broadsword or glaive-guisarme-bardiche-de-corbin-fouchard. If we managed to ace that bar fight without any equipment, what kind of shit could we get into with actual hardware?
Find out on the next episode of...
Let's Play Pool of Radiance
i'm not gonna keep rechosting every update here since you can just follow that account but i did want to say that it's been weirdly exciting to get into a form of game presentation i had a really strong fondness for as a teen. games weren't super easy to come by in my childhood so i 'played' a lot of stuff as a kid by reading walkthroughs and imagining what was going on in the game. then in like 2006 i started lurking SA and reading all the proto-LP threads that were popping up there... i remember at the time thinking video LPs were an obvious upgrade in every way over screenshot but looking back on it there are some games that really benefit from a format where you can abridge boring/slow parts and PoR is definitely in that category.
sorry to @swords for writing an essay inside a rechost. this website created our cozy new circle of hell and i am simply dancing to this fresh devil's tango
A problem with video is that it is, objectively, a gigantic pain to alter after it's recorded.
A screenshot LP probably takes as long to compose as it takes to actually play the corresponding segment of the game. Not only do you have to pick all your screenshots, figure out where they go and which ones tell the story best, and possibly resize and thumbnail them, but you also have to write all your narration in retrospect.
Since you aren't describing things as they happen in the game, you have to remember what happened and summarize it, with the benefit of knowing what happened later, and what events were particularly interesting vs. ones that didn't amount to much. You can spend as long as you like thinking about exactly how to say everything, since you're creating a single cohesive work. Go back, make changes, and only post it once you feel it's top quality.
Meanwhile, a video LP is done... when you click Stop Recording. Much, much faster! But also, it's done. Crystallized. Whatever you said in the last hour, off the cuff, is what viewers will hear. Your options for modifying it are very limited, but you can literally just drag the .mp4 onto youtube, and now that segment of the LP is done.
You could go back, cut it down, and ADR out all the narration, replacing your ums, ahs and guesswork that didn't end up being right with polished voiceover, but from what I've seen, this is not all that common, partly because it's not expected (the format presumes a full, unabridged playthrough) and partly because it's a holy! hell! of a lot! of work!
It's all the effort of a text-and-images LP, having to write prose based on what you remember happening, and selecting specific parts of gameplay to showcase. But add on top the additional work of VO recording and video editing, and you have three new jobs, and at least 2-3x the effort.
In between the text-and-images LP, the "uncut hour-long .mp4" and the polished, abridged video narrative is a gulf spanning a spectrum of talent, effort, quality, intent, and free time and energy.
People sometimes tell me I should continue the Big Blue Disk videos I made for a little bit, but what they probably don't realize is that if those were engaging at all, it was solely because I put in a disproportionate amount of work to create them. They were scripted! Fully! I was using the software and doing the VO simultaneously, off a .txt on a second monitor.
That meant that I had to spend a day (or more!) going through all the software and writing down my impressions, and then I had to do it all again while narrating in order to make it all roughly line up: trying to use these ancient apps without flubbing my inputs, so the footage would be smooth and not require a thousand cuts to clean up, while reading text off another monitor and trying to keep my voice even and my mouth close to the mic.
The alternative would have been to record gallons of B-roll, do the narration entirely after the fact, and then try to line it all up in post. This is a miserable experience where you have gigs of undifferentiated h.264, and you have to figure out, "If I'm talking about PC memory in the 80s, what's the most representative clip out of these 3 hours of footage to put behind that?" It doesn't actually matter - but your brain will not accept that answer.
This is probably why Chrontendo's voiceover is so consistently 5-20 seconds behind the video. Dr. Sparkle seems to do all his VO while watching his edited footage, and trying to move back and forth between reading the script and reacting to what's on screen. I can't figure out why the delay is so enormous, but I'd guess it's because he often finds out after the fact that his pacing didn't quite fit after removing or adding a segment.
Can't be sure without bothering the man ("Hey person I don't know, would you mind telling me why your work has problems") but I can say that I've encountered similar issues, and they're pernicious.
So if you're not up for committing to six hours of grueling work to produce a one-hour segment of a 16-part Let's-style Play, then you're kinda stuck with the "upload a bare .mp4," and there's simply no way that that kind of presentation will be universally enjoyable.
If you're well-spoken, especially for off-the-cuff commentary, then you can make a video LP work, but that doesn't mean the whole thing is engaging. Even if you aren't um'ing and aw'ing, it's just... very hard to talk through an entire Wizardry playthrough, when 85% of the content is And Then I Hit The Skeleton Again.
This is, in general, the Same Old Story: Making video that achieves a professional style and level of quality* is hard, but making, well, amateur video is very, very easy.
Anyone can press Start Recording and just do stuff for an hour, especially if you have the gift of gab. The result will not be as easy to consume, but you will have made it, and if you weren't willing to invest the time it takes to make it commercial grade, then at least you have something to show instead of nothing.
The same is true for text-and-images work. It's simply much harder to create. You have to write it all, select the screenshots, find a hosting site or blog system or forum that provides a satisfactory audience, get everything uploaded, make sure the images flow into the text (if you're doing that), and so on. It's still much more effort than a bare .mp4 recorded on the fly.
This is (one of the reasons) why all online tutorials pivoted to Youtube over the last decade. Making tutorials is utterly thankless, and a gigantic pain in the ass. I don't think anyone even disputes that video tutorials are far less accessible** than text-and-images, or that they're far less navigable, and harder to consume piecemeal.
They're a highly specific format that is not well tailored to a lot of the things that are now only available that way. But as the person producing the tutorial, looking back and forth between "click Start Recording, do ten minutes of work, then upload the mp4" and "try to figure out how to work HTML/CSS or Wordpress, and get your images scaled and uploaded to a host somewhere," etc., etc., who can blame anyone?
In summary: It could be valid to call the Old Style "static" LPs better. This is unquantifiable, but I imagine that people pay less attention to the details of video LPs, because there is simply so much to watch - literally hours and hours of content that does not really fit the timescale of many peoples days.
But when it comes to things that aren't getting people paid, and do have limited audiences, better is probably the enemy of getting it done at all.
It's pretty cool, then, that I have seen a couple different people doing static LPs up here, and at least one other person talking about doing one. It means that this website feels to people like it does hit that crystallizing double point, of ease of use + audience.
When people talk about wanting the old web back, they don't, actually. What they want is for the lowest-effort options for community participation and socializing to be better tailored to their actual desires. How many LPers on youtube actually want to make videos? How many love their voices that much - rather than simply realizing that if they put in the immense effort to make a textpost, they have nowhere to put it where someone will ever react to it† and make them feel like it was worth their time?
Forums used to provide this, to a point, but as they fell out of favor, people stopped having a place to put text and images and actually get the attaboys / attagirls / attatheys that we all want.
Cohost is vBulletin finally stepping out of its ancient, worn-out boots that it bought in the 90s, picking up a pair of crappy Skechers, and greeting the modern world. God willing, staff will lean into that, until we're all dead or we learn a very important lesson.
* That is, having runtime, pacing, and engaging narration on par with e.g. a professional television production** I assert that while some people do better with video, they can at least get by with text-and-images, but conversely, there's a set of people who simply cannot pay attention to a video, it is impossible. I am speaking for myself here. If the only format is video, then I am basically excluded from the tutorial. I just can't watch them, it kills me. My brain tunes out. I start thinking about plums.
† Ask me how many people ever emailed / tweeted at me about an article on my site, or used the disqus forms I added.
