Dumah: Looks good, hope they tweak the games a bit especially the third one as it is encounter rate was very high and made the whole game a slog
There are ways to deal with that in BT3, if you have a bard in your party:
Outside (that is, when not in a dungeon), just play the Safety Song; no outdoor encounters will appear while this song is playing. (Doesn't work in dungeons, unfortunately.)
Inside a dungeon, play Sir Robin's Tune. This won't prevent encounters, but this will guarantee that you will be able to run from all random encounters. (As a rule, it's not possible to run from special or boss encounters IIRC, except in at least one case where it's scripted to produce a result different from killing the boss (hint: if you get into a fight with someone who doesn't want to fight, try running away).)
There's also the Speedboots, which I believe guarantess running away, and in BT3 I believe it doesn't matter who wears it.
(By the way, you probably meant to say "its", not "it's"; "it's" is shorthand for "it is", which does not work in the context of your post.)
Hillsy_: Hopefully Bard's Tale II has an automap. I got soooooooo lost in the starter dungeon, dropping down numerous pits not knowing where I was...
wvpr: In the oldest dungeon crawlers, mapping was a large part of the gameplay. Wandering around lost with the risk of losing everything was part of the design. Some had traps that spun you around without realizing it. When you take that aspect away, there's not much else to do besides fight endless battles.
Mapping disorienting dungeons is tedious, which is why nobody makes games like that anymore. But having the computer draw perfect maps could leave games like Bard's Tale feeling underwhelming.
It's not quite true that nobody makes those games anymore.
Elminage Gothic, for example, has some levels that are difficult to map; while there's an automap, it is not free to access (you have to use a spell or a consumable item), and it doesn't show teleporters and certain other dungeon features.
Also, the Etrian Odyssey series on the Nintendo DS; the games actually used the bottom screen as a place to draw your own map. (Although the first game had some floors for which the provided mapping tools were inadequate.) With that said, the mapping difficulty is somewhat cheapened by the way the game constantly shows your current location and facing on the bottom screen. (The third game does have a few areas, late in the game, where you don't appear on the map; that makes things much trickier and scarier, though the first such section is just a medium-size room that's easy to map.)
Bard's Tale 3 has an automap in all versions. At least the 2gs version of Bard's Tale 2 has one as well. Those maps are forgotten once you leave the floor, and they don't show facing (there's a spell that will make a compass appear no the screen that's present in all three games and appears pretty early).
Bard's Tale 3 even has a few auto-map related spells. It's a while before you get the ability to learn and cast those spells, but they do things like show health-drain squares on the automap or even automap the entire floor for you (though note that the map doesn't show dungeon features like stairs).
