Anyone up for a challenge?

Start in Pool of Radiance.

The following rules applies:

No rerolls on character stats. What you get on the first roll is what you got.

Obviously no modifying stats or hex-editing.

Reloading save games only when you start to play for the day. No save-scumming.

Dead characters means going back to get them raised (or rolling a new guy instead).

If the party wipes, that's it for your adventure.


I've done it a few times and its a lot of fun, though I rarely made it that far.

Anyone up for the challenge? Obviously it'll have to be on the honour system, and its more about the shared challenge and experience than a real "competition".

What about just casting Raise Dead/Resurrection (assuming you have a surviving character capable of casting such spells)?

(Also, this sort of challenge is the thing I will never attempt; I never liked Wizardry's attempts to force such mechanics, so I will never impose them on myself.)

Raising them yourself is of course "within the rules".

I grew up playing tabletop games and rogue-likes, so it always seemed like a "natural" way to play, but it's not really "better or worse', just a different sort of approach.

The problem is that the best way for optimizing the chance for success is wasting a lot of time grinding to the level cap versus easy opponents.

What if the game crashes, or if an obvious glitch causes something bad to happen (like characters permanently losing the ability to move (a known bug, actually), a character being killed by an attack she should be immune to, going out of bounds without any way to go back in, or the game becoming unwinnable because quest triggers got messed up)?

Use common sense?

Most iron man challenges and communities online allow reloads due to crashes or game bugs.

I would do it this way if the character generation was not so backwards. In the pen&paper game you choose class based on the stats you get, while in the computer games you choose class first. So you are likely to get mages and clerics who can never cast high level spells.

My own system is to generate one character for each gender and non-evil alignment combo and choose the best. That means rolling 12 Clerics and choose the best one, for example.
Another method was just to reroll untill you get a Cleric with 18 WIS and choose that one.

Also, you won't be able to beat the final battles in Pools of Darkness with subpar Dex, as initiative is crucial.

yeah, rolling some extra guys and then choosing is probably a good idea.
Some of the AD&D rulebook methods had that as a suggestion, so its even Gygax-approved :-0

And I have no illusions this party will ever make it through POD, but I'll start it tonight and we'll se ehow they fare. Probably poorly.

I always wondered to what extent they counted on the players cheating with stats or save-scumming.

Personally, I have never considered what you refer to as "save-scumming" to be cheating; I just consider it smart to save whenever you have the opportunity to do so.

For stats, there actually are issues with the way stats are handled in these games:
1. Not all stats are created equal. Depending on the character's class, as many as 3 of the stats can be entirely useless.
2. In some cases, there's no difference between a stat of 8 (or 7) and a stat of 15. That's a huge difference numerically, yet (depending on the stat) it might mean absolutely nothing from a gameplay standpoint. (Also, the behavior is inconsistent between stats.)
3. There is no way to fix bad stats, unlike in other early cRPGs. (Wizardry had stats randomly change (usually up) at level up, Bard's Tale gave +1 to a random non-maxed stat, Ultima had other ways to increase stats, Might and Magic has events that permanently boost stats to the point where 18 is a low score.) The only exception is the various ways to boost Strength, which seems to have gotten more attention than the other stats.

Perhaps they felt that, because they couldn't fix these issues while still retaining the AD&D license, they would just let the players choose their stat.

I note that, if there were a way to increase stats during play, one wouldn't need to start with high Dexterity to beat the final battles in Pools of Darkness.

Sure but those are all limitations that the developers were aware of since they originate in the tabletop rules.

There's no inherent reason why the scenarios must be balanced towards the top end of the scale.

Hey there. I am actually SOMEWHAT doing this challenge (didn't see your thread here until today), and posted my results on youtube. Doing a search for "Pool of Radiance Ironman " should put me up there. :)

However, I re-rolled at character creation to get some decent stats. Here is where I will tell you, that isn't THAT big of a "cheat". The REAL killer is leveling up and getting TERRIBLE HP rolls. Sadly, due to my ironman limitations, I have to live with bad HP rolls and believe me, it happens way more often than you'd think and makes a dramatic difference against a lot of the bosses.

Anyway, save scumming for higher HP during level ups, duplicating items, "removing chars" to restart earlier in the game are all way more serious "cheats" in my opinion.

There are a lot of items to raise strength even in Pool of Radiance (3x gauntlets of ogre power). However, no items will really max your constitution (well, I suppose the manual of bodily health if you duplicate or -replay- the game with the same character). As for my characters, while I re-rolled a lot, I didn't really bank on max dexterity or max constitution for my fighters despite really needing them especially in the later games.

Furthermore, I am severely handicapped because my fighters will NOT have 17 or 18 int for dual classing. It really helps a LOT in the later games. I'm not sure if I will do the harder difficulty levels in Curse / Silver / Pools of Darkness (champion / veteran mode) because the game designers added those difficulty knobs to compensate for the rampant cheating that went on in the game.

However, even Pools of Darkness' manual basically says if you don't have an 18 int for a good mage, you might want to re-roll one and that demihumans are mostly trash due to the level limits. :)

Anyway, my challenge run isn't quite the same as yours, but I feel it has quite a challenge and I welcome you to please come and check it out!

Challange? I thought that was just the normal way to play.