I had to buy them as soon as they popped up on GOG. I played these games for years as well as the original NWN on AOL. I'd just like to throw out some info for those who are new to the games.

Call them cheesy exploits...whatever...It made it fun for me to figure out a way to get over on the game/level designers.

-Curse of the Azure Bonds and Gateway to the Savage Frontier have the same file extentions/structure so characters can be copied from one save directory to the other (same for Pools of Darkness and Treasures of the Savage Frontier BTW).

-a quick way to level up a character is to create one in Gateway and once you're able to leave town, equip your character with a mirror then head east to the troll moors. You'll run into an orc battle possibly on way there and possible troll battles in the troll moors, but the real prize are the basilisks....worth high xps and many gps...and they stone themselves if you have a mirror equiped :)

-the invisibility spell is your best friend in all of these games. Use it to flee useless long drawn out battles.

-Gateway (and possibly Curse) in interior battles has tables and chairs in some areas...standing on a table will draw monsters to you...they can often get stuck on the other side of a wall and can't target you with spells/weapons but you can launch spells or shoot arrows over the wall.:)

I used to play as a single character a elven F/M/T...a very useful character who works well up through Silver Blades, but isn't so great for Pools of Darkness due to racial level limits as Fighter and Mage though.

I hope everyone enjoys these games as much as I have over the years.

Interesting, but this begs a few questions:

1. How well do characters who are above the level cap behave? In particular, are there any glitches (like having a three digit THAC0 or being able to memorize 251 spells) that come up here?

2. Is there any way to get inside a wall during combat? If so, is it possible to go out of bounds this way?

By the way, another game it can be fun to exploit is Morrowind. There are multiple major exploits that have not been patched.

The only way I can think of that possibly happening is by casting Dimension Door, and I'm pretty sure you need line of sight for that one. Enemies on the other hand can get stuck in walls at times depending on the game and encounter specifics (it's something FRUA module devs in particular need to be careful about), but that isn't a showstopper - see below.

There is no such thing as out of bounds:

a) if you try to leave the "bounds" of the battlefield, then you're simply treated as attempting to flee the fight (or move to the adjacent battle area in Gateway's final battle).
b) if you or an enemy somehow gets stuck in some isolated la-la land where it can't reach the opposing team, that combatant is, indeed, for all effective purposes hors de combat, but there is a failsafe in the Gold Box engine to cover just this possibility: if several consecutive rounds (I haven't counted it but it's around 10 or so) pass without any interaction between player and enemy units, the game ends the battle - and what's more, it actually ends it in the party's favour (How nice is that? After all, how often do you see a game default to the player like that, especially an old school RPG? ...).

(And why yes, b) above means a cowardly cop-out option for the final battles in Pools of Darkness is to put a wall between you and all the enemies and then simply idle after the few enemies that are smart enough to follow you are taken care of ...)

Interesting that they put in an anti-softlock mechanism in the game's code. I would not have expected that (but then again, I can't see any situation where that would actually happen in these games).

If all battle participants are defeated, is it still a game over as you would expect? (This could happen, for example, if both the last surviving party member and the last surviving enemy are killed by the same fireball.)

Is it, in any of the games, possible to go out-of-bounds *outside* of combat? That is, go to a part of the map that is not intended to be reachable?

Dark Queen of Krynn, apparently, had the most issues (albeit still infrequently) with inaccessible enemies; I'm not sure if it's possible in the other "fixed" Gold Box scenarios (the monster placement algorithm in older versions of the GB engine seems not to lend itself to it, though it could well be a simplistic "okay, that spot's a wall, can't put a monster there" check) but it is definitely possible in FRUA (where setting encounters to be "nearby" or "far away" instead of "up close" can easily lead to inaccessible monsters depending on circumstances).

If the entire party is dead under ANY circumstances, it's a Game Over (unless it's a battle flagged for "the party can't really die"), regardless of the state of the enemies; I'm not 100% sure whether it is considered a win or a loss (you'd have to set up a "party never dies" fight in FRUA and see which way it's adjudicated, I suppose - however, even that's not useful because unfortunately the event code in FRUA doesn't actually let you act on whether the party won or lost the "never dies" fight :(); although, I did have one very curious exception happen to me after a tavern brawl in PoR (see attached image) ... I was supremely lucky there too, since I had exactly one platinum piece remaining at the time, otherwise I'm pretty sure I would have had to reload/restart (as the only way to "get back in the game" was to rest at least a day ...).

There are several cases in the games where you can go "off the edge" of a map; in most cases, this serves as an exit to the overland map or to an adjacent area, but there are some dungeons where you remain in the area and wrap around to the opposite end (e.g., east from 15,7 on a 16x16 map takes you to 0,7). In UA, if you place yourself on a "blank" map and try to go off its edges, you will wrap around in the same fashion, so I presume that in most cases if you somehow accidentally went "off the edge" and the case wasn't specifically accounted for that you'd do the same (although it could cause a sequence break; I can't think of any actual confirmed cases from gameplay to test). Not sure what would happen in the case of those weird huge areas in Secret of the Silver Blades, though (the logic governing those areas is rather complex, so that might actually break something).

The only true case offhand I can think of of what looks like "you aren't supposed to be here" is in Dark Queen of Krynn: if you fall down one or two specific shafts in the "Tower of Flame" dungeon, you end up taking a bit of damage and landing in a boxy room with no exit (there are doors on every wall but none openable) and the Look command, which in this dungeon informs you what level you are on, tells you you are on "level 255". Since you're trapped in the room it's a game stopper; I'm not 100% sure what's up there (after all if the fall was intended to be fatal it would easily have been coded as so) ...

Treasures of the Savage Frontier had this quite a bit in some of the optional dungeons. Mercifully, as you said, it just ends and lets you win.

When doing a single-character run through Curse, I had a similar experience where my guy got paralyzed by the Dracolich and it wouldn't reset until I went into a combat...so I had to go to Zhentil Keep, break into the house, and lose that (which doesn't kill you), then of course defeat the monsters in the arena when I got unparalyzed.

The games got a little smarter as time goes on.

It's also worth mentioning that some games actually use the wraparound to their advantage--Vingaard Keep in Death Knights of Krynn is pretty easy to map if you just realize it's a 16x16 map that wraps around.

The Ruins of Old Verdigris are a single 16x16 map with lots of teleport events and rotation of directions. That's why (a) there are so many similar rooms and (b) there are so few encounters per unit area--they used all the memory in the dungeon on teleporters.

Actually, I wouldn't mind having fewer encounters in a dungeon like that; It's enough trouble dealing with all the spinners and teleporters!

(Although, I can't see it being as bad as Wizardry 4's Whirling Dervish floor, but at least that game has the DUMAPIC spell (displays your coordinates and facing) as well as Jeweled Amulets for when 9 casts of DUMAPIC aren't enough.)

Hello all. I wish gog would get the krynn games also.

Correction: it's not exactly teleporters--it's an internally consistent Euclidean geometry if you map it out--but they used one 16x16 map to make a much larger ruins map. You can imagine using an internal variable that records which side you're on and events only firing if you are on the correct side to make 2 maps out of 1; this is a much more intricate version of that.