Just wanted to start taking a critical look at the trilogy of SSI First-Person games (Strahd's Possession, Menzoberranzan, Stone Prophet).

The first thing I'm realizing is that they probably intended that there would be a LOT more of these games than the three that were released.

Part of the problem with different spells is that since you can't SEE anything their effects are so deep under the hood that unless you had someone who could crack the game open and watch the math that was done as attacks were made & etc. it doesn't look like they're doing anything at all.

Thief: So the most obvious Thief ability - Open Locks - is all but useless in Strahd's possession (I think there are two pickable locks in the whole game) and entirely useless in Menzo. This immediately led people to dismiss Piotra (the Vistani Thief NPC) in Stone Prophet as worthless -

And surprise: Every single locked door in the game is pickable. Having Piotra in your party means you can essentially ignore the 'hunting for keys' aspect of exploring dungeons. If you put him in the back row and give him one of the staves of lightning, he's a decent enough combatant.

Thieves can also use any magical item wizards can use, which means that if you have any surplus scrolls in your party, your Thief can use them. This makes Piotra essential if you decide to do Stone Prophet on hard mode and not bring a wizard with you.

Other thief abilities, I'm less certain on. I THINK Detect Noise is supposed to be an enemy-spotter but I've never tested it to see if it works, and identifying the location of enemies in the SSI games isn't super important, since most of them have the advanced AI of 'Wade into melee range and start attacking'. Hide in Shadows makes the Thief invisible, at least until they attack, which can keep some aggro off of them. I thought it was supposed to set up a backstab too, but trying it I never noticed any bump to their damage from it. Maybe backstab was contingent on putting the Thief in the front, which only a lunatic would do instead of a Cleric, Paladin, Fighter or Ranger.

I THINK Find/Remove traps was supposed to remove a trap on items like boxes that would go off if you tried to access the contents. I read in the Menzo walkthrough that a chest was trapped at the end of the game, so I tried it and nothing happened when I opened it in my inventory. It does nothing to floor traps that I've been able to figure out.

So essentially, Thieves are an OK 'Back Row' combatant and backup magic item user in the first two games which got them pooh-pooed in SP... when having one makes the game significantly less irritating. Seriously, try bringing the Thief along in Stone Prophet.

Cleric: Awesome. A must-have in all three games. People usually suggest multiclassing to Fighter/Cleric and... eh. Either way. A single-class cleric will have a higher total level, which is great, especially in the Ravenloft games. Tons of buffs which actually are helpful, except that everything happens under the hood, and even a single-class Cleric is decent in combat.

Amusingly, I think the mechanism they used for Levels and Level Drain precluded them from including 'Restoration' in Stone Prophet. So your level is set by the amount of XP you have, a fixed number, like an odometer. Kill monsters, the odometer ticks up. If your character's number hits a certain threshold, they go up in level. When a monster like a wight or a vampire hits you in Strahd's Possession, it rolls back that Odometer to the start of the previous level. So any Restoration spell would roll your Odometer forward... and to do that they'd basically have to make it a free leveling machine.

I haven't been able to finish Strahd's Possession, being honest - the level-draining undead infuriate me.

Healing spells... they're fine. They make it so you don't have to rest as often. Maybe my twitch skills aren't sharp enough, but I found that in fights I was either gonna win, or get merc'd so fast it was hard to make Healing spells effective.

Clerics don't have the ranged damage spells that wizards have (Flame Strike is... aight but it's high level and you have other things you need Clerics to be doing) but they do have way better MELEE damage spells. Flame Blade rocks in every game, and so does Spiritual Weapon.

In Strahd's Possession, Clerics also offer the only defense against level-draining undead with their Negative Plane Protection spell... even though it only protects for one hit before it discharges.

Turn Undead makes Strahd's Possession much easier since there are some diesel undead monsters (Bone Golems, Zombie Golems) that become pushovers once you turn them. There are no undead enemies in Menzo, so they didn't even bother including the power. In Stone Prophet, there are plenty of undead but they aren't anything special.

Fun fact - if your Cleric gets powerful enough they follow the 2e rules where their Turn Undead power will destroy weak undead monsters. You don't need it to kill Desert Zombies in Stone Prophet but it's fun to aggro all the jerk jerky loitering around the Temple of Set and then nuke them with a single Turn. The floating pharoah head... things are also undead and Turning them can get them off you so you can put some distance between yourself and them and not get damaged when you destroy them and they explode.

Note: I finished Menzo with a Dwarven fighter-cleric, and despite being restricted to bludgeoning weapons overall, there were still edged weapons the character was able to use - battle-axes and Drizzt's scimitars were the ones I tried.

Fighter: Tank hit. Swing weapon. It's simple. It's effective. You love it, I love it, we all love it.

Paladin: Fighter-Plus, a fighter with a minor in Cleric who gains levels slower than a fighter but will be better at swinging on monsters than a Multiclass fighter-cleric but not as good at the Cleric part. You have to be Lawful Good but in the three games that got released this means bupkis.

Ranger: I've barely touched Rangers at all. I've yet to try it out except for bringing Trajan Khet along for a little while. Also, I realized while playing the game that Trajan Khet (Ranger/Cleric) is supposed to be a Druid - pretty novel way to end-run the limitations of their engine.

Any of these three classes can dual-wield, as long as the off-hand weapon is shorter than the main weapon. When I got Vonar back in Menzo I gave him the Gauntlets of Stone Giant Strength, a long sword and a short sword and he was an even better blender than Drizzt.

I THINK that a Ranger can dual-wield two weapons of the same length, so two longswords or W/E. More testing is required.

My advice: in Strahd's Possession and Stone Prophet, bring a Paladin with you. There's a great pair of weapons only a Paladin can use in Strahd's Possession and if you port your Paladin over to Stone Prophet they'll come with. In Menzo... a Fighter/Cleric's fine. Or a single-class Cleric. There's plenty of Pretty Good fighters throughout the game.

Mage: There's no single-class Mage NPC in Menzoberranzan (Vonar's a Fighter/Mage/Thief, which dilutes his potential as a spellcaster quite a bit) and no Mage at ALL in Stone Prophet. So... I recommend one of your characters be a single-class Mage, probably an Elf. If you want to do a Fighter/Mage, eh, fine, but I think you're watering down the mage part for a fighter who can't wear armor.

Upside, mages have the most damage in a single shot in the whole game, some decent buffs and some good utility spells (you don't NEED Improved Identify... but it sure is handy). Downside, you need to FIND their spells as you progress through the game. Their melee spells actually *aren't* as good as a cleric's, though I imagine Claws of the Umber Hulk would be pretty clutch on a fighter/mage.

Funny: If you take a single class mage with you by the end of Stone Prophet they'll make it to 20th level, but the engine has no spells higher than 6th level. Womp womp.

HUH ? You can't be this uninformed...
SSI Started as TSR and my favorite TSR Games were a Saga:
Pool of Radiance
Hillsfar
Curse of the Azure Bonds
Secret of the Silver Blades
Pools of Darkness
then the underwhelming but still functional - Pools of Radiance II - No Character import.

Others were:
Gateway to the Savage Frontier
Treasures of the Savage Frontier
Unlimited Adventures

Other thoughts - you can see the tuning that occurred between games if you play them in the order of release (Strahd, Menzo, Stone Prophet).

Strahd's Possession - full of level-draining undead. Fairly linear. Monsters are SUPER aggressive (sigh in disgust as you watch a vampire legging it across the graveyard to come eat your levels). When they close into melee range they'll start to juke to the left or the right to get away from your cursor and make it so you can't swing on them. If monsters aren't aggro, they're stationary.

Menzoberranzan: No undead. You need to get MUCH closer to monsters before they'll start to aggro onto you, and if you catch a monster on a corner you can often swing on it with complete impunity. Monsters no longer juke to the left or right once they close into melee. Monsters are stationary otherwise. Monsters with a ranged attack (Derro Savants, Drow Priestesses) will fire on you mercilessly from out of the dark. Rush them. Kill them fast. There are a couple of areas in the game where Derro Savants or Priestesses can catch you in a crossfire and eat your cookies while you're blundering around in the dark looking for them. Totally linear, you progress through this game in a completely straight line, with only one truly optional part.

Stone Prophet: Undead yes, but no level-draining undead. Monsters with ranged attacks only start shooting at medium range, so you can reliably identify where you're being shot at from. Monsters aggro from a longer distance away BUT most aren't stationary; they roam the hallways of dungeons. Stone Prophet leans WAY harder into fireball and lightning bolt traps, both pressure plates and death corridors. The way Wandering Monsters are programmed, they don't avoid either. This means as you play the game, you'll get messages updating you when a monster in the dungeon you're exploring has wandered into a trap and gotten obliterated. Almost completely NON-linear, you can go almost any direction you want from game start and gradually assemble the pieces you need in order to finish the game.

Whenever a monster dies in Stone Prophet, you get XP whether you killed it or not. You'll gain almost as many levels from monsters who kill themselves in traps as you will the old-fashioned way. The programmers TRIED. And I'm sure there was much laughter about it in the SSI office when they realized the unintended consequence of making critters roam the dungeon. I'm aware. I'm talking about Strahd's Possession, Menzoberranzan, and Stone Prophet, which used the same first-person engine. *shrug*

None of those are Goldbox games. Goldbox games used a different engine. Most of them had a gold box.

I mean...if you have no other problems.

These games aren't a trilogy.

The two Ravenloft are only related by using the same campaign setting. Strahd's Possession takes place in Barovia while Stone Prophet takes place in Har'Akir.

If you look at a campaign setting map: https://imgur.com/undefined.jpg

Barovia is clearly marked and can be found south of The Shadow Rift in the middle. Har'Akir is a bit tricker in that it was originally one of the Islands of Terror then later relocated to be part of the Amber Wastes as in that desert area to the south-east on the map. What this means is that while these games use the same campaign setting (Ravenloft), that's all they have in common. The two games really are completely independent of each other.

Menzoberranzan is a Drow city in Faerûn, which means that it is part of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.

As far as I've read, when SSI's exclusive license lapsed, it was open season (relatively speaking) for anyone who wanted to make a deal with TSR to make a D&D/AD&D game. That would be why, starting around '94 or '95, you start to see licensed D&D games popping up from many different publishers (including SSI still).

He seems to have played them all, so I would imagine he's aware to what degree they are (not) related in terms of story and setting. :P They did (as he noted) all use versions of the same engine; think of them, then, as a "technological trilogy".
The games using the so-called "Gold Box" engine (which these do not -- and that is the bigger issue with the title of this thread) are often referred to collectively as if they compose one big series, despite the fact that the various "sub"-series under the "Gold Box series" actually comprise at least 3 different story arcs in different locations in two different campaign settings (and that's not even counting the Buck Rogers titles!). This is the same thing: barely related/unrelated games utilizing the same engine and general gameplay.

Really, the most confusing thing about the topic title is that it sounds more like it would be about the Eye of the Beholder trilogy, which also used first-person view, and where each subsequent game was actually a numbered sequel! :D