Just loaded up Pools of Darkness (not yet ready to play it seriously) and decided to see which spells characters dual-classed to mage would have in their spellbooks.

First character was created as a Ranger and immediately changed to Mage. Her spellbook as a Ranger had all the first and second level Mage spells, and after class changed, still had all the 1st level spells. (Didn't test leveling to see if her spellbook still had the second level spells, as I didn't feel like figuring out how to hex edit experience yet.)

Second character was created as a Fighter and immediately changed to Mage. As a mage, her spellbook contained the following spells:
1. Detect Magic, which makes sense (seems like a fundamental spell)
2. Read Magic, which also makes sense (need to read scrolls to scribe them)
3. Sleep, utterly useless (maybe useful in Pool of Radiance, but the Hit Dice limit makes it utterly useless in Pools of Darkness).
4. Enlarge. Maybe useful, but why *this* spell rather than, say, Magic Missile? (Magic Missile seems like more of an iconic spell to me than Enlarge; in fact, the Infinity Engine games didn't even implement Enlarge, although Temple of Elemental Evil did. Also, why is this spell only first level anyway?)

I am curious as to why the character ended up with these spells, rather than other spells.

He he, Enlarge "maybe useful"? :-) It is a more powerful spell than Magic Missile. Well, at least it is for normal players that don't hack their characters. It is first level because it's rather useless to a first level mage anyway, so it's not overpowered, so in that regard it's like Chromatic Orb in the IE games.

Anyway I don't see the problem. By the time you reach Pools of Darkness you should have found enough scrolls to scribe any spell you want.

The issue isn't so much the power of the spells, but the fact that when I think of 1st level D&D spells, I think of Magic Missile before Enlarge. Magic Missile feels like a spell I would expect every magic-user to know, while Enlarge feels like it should be more esoteric.

When I was saying Enlarge is "maybe useful" I was comparing it to Sleep, which I expect to be useless in Pools of Darkness. (Now, if this were Pool of Radiance, the situation would be different, but the 5 HD limit makes it useless in high-level play.)

Also, if Enlarge is as powerful as I have read it is (something I could easily check by creating a magic-user, who would likely know this spell (seeing as the ranger, who isn't as good at magic as a magic-user starts with all the 1st and 2nd level spells in her spellbook) and casting it), why is it 1st level when Strength (which seems to be a weaker spell) 2nd?

A bit off topic, but is Enlarge useful in Temple of Elemental Evil (the one other D&D game I've seen implement the spell)? If so, is it good enough for a Sorcerer to pick the spell?

Of note, I did just test Enlarge out in Pools of Darkness, on a mage with 12 strength. (It took a few rerolls to get that, as the game kept giving me 16-18 strength. What stat rolling method does the game use anyway?)

From a new Ranger, it gave 18/91 strength. From a level 1 mage (former ranger) it gave only 18 strength. From a new mage, it gave 22(!) strength, which feels too powerful for a first level spell. Why was a spell that can give you fire giant strength 1st level again?

Of note, my hacking (during a serious play rather than just testing) will likely be limited to giving female characters the strength that male characters are allowed, as I consider the rule to be stupid and sexist.

Because, again, the effect of the spell is dependent on the castet's level. I consider you stupid and sexist if you can only play female characters.

It's exactly as you say: Sleep is useful in Pool of Radiance, Enlarge is useful in Pools of Darkness.

A 12th level mage can kill an ettin with a fireball if he's lucky, so fire giant strength doesn't seem that crazy to me.

I do agree with you that Magic Missile is more handy as it still lets you, say, interrupt a spellcaster even if you can't do any damage. Hey, it's the designers' choice; you can go post something on TSI games' website, some of them are there, and ask them.

Pools of Darkness is at the extreme upper end of the normal D&D level distribution; if you look through the Adventurer's Journal, they had to make beefed-up versions of many of the standard monsters, including some, like iron golems, that are more or less at the upper end of the monster list in their original state. By 20th or so, you were supposed to be questing for godhood.

Oh, and as for sexism: they listened to you, and fixed it in 2nd edition. This was before that.

C'mon, can't you just have a factual discussion or ignore each other? I find dtgreene's reactions to 20+ year old games a bit overblown, too, but your antagonistic reactions to them don't seem very rational to me either, if they make you resort to personal attacks.

Pretty much the reason you get Sleep is because it's the default loadout for a brand new 1st level mage as well, and the game simply doesn't have a separate set for dual classers.

The Ranger behaviour is indeed a little odd; it's possible the programmers simply decided it was too complicated to separate "Ranger Mage spells" from Magic-User mage spells (it would probably have required implementing the Ranger ones as completely separate spell levels in the engine, and on many of the systems the Gold Box games were released on, memory was a very limited and precious resource e.g. C64 which would discourage this sort of design). I presume the Ranger/MU's ability to wear armour while casting spells stems from the same programming decisions.

Enlarge vs. Strength is an odd idiosyncrasy - I believe it largely derives from the limitations of the Gold Box engine itself. In pen and paper, Strength simply buffs the ability score, while Enlarge actually, exactly as it says on the tin, makes the character physically larger in addition to stronger, which would presumably make it in most cases power at a price (next thing you're squeezing and crawling through those tunnels like the Frost Giants from EOB 2 instead of being able to comfortably explore!). However, as Gold Box doesn't have provision for things like physical character size in this fashion, the result was that Enlarge became simply freed of its only weakness and became the go-to Strength buff, while Strength became practically useless (mainly because in AD&D it honours the character's normal racial maximum, a convention which pen and paper also abandoned later on, the 3rd Edition equivalent Bull's Strength doesn't cap out at the natural maximum).

Magic Missile actually scales pretty strongly as well, because of the fact that none of the "dice per level" damage spells in Gold Box are capped as the pen and paper rules indicate they should be - thus, at level 40 in Pools, Dark Queen, or FRUA, a Magic Missile will actually deal 20d4+20 of mainly (barring Globes, Shield, or blanket magic resistance/immunity effects) unblockable damage which tends to not only "interrupt" but obliterate many enemy mages in a single go (and the GB games are not very good at countering it either, the only enemy mages I've seen be smart enough to protect themselves against this are Dracandros and the Zhentrim - but not the Zhentil - Mages in Curse and the infamous Dark Wizards in Dark Queen of Krynn).

The upshot is that spell levels don't maintain a universal level of usefulness at higher levels. The 8th and 9th level slots tend to be very weak (apart from Power Word Kill but only a few enemies really justify its use), while 1st, 3rd, and 7th level slots are of disproportionately high value with the others ranking in between ...

Miniscule nitpick: Marcus the Wizard (who only casts clerical spells) in Pools of Darkness had a full set of precast spells. Otherwise...yes, Pools of Darkness could have been a lot harder if the mages actually cast their spells before entering combat (and, after all, your party does!)

Basically, it's as you claim: stuff like 'Time Stop' and 'Wish' would have been too hard to program at that point, so Delayed Blast Fireball becomes the most powerful spell there is. ('Meteor Swarm' has a niche role for killing groups of Rakshasa.)

You could tell these guys were really limited by 640K; the variety of items declines dramatically when you go from Curse to Secret, likely to accommodate the new spell levels. Similarly, in Gateway and Treasures, item variety goes up again (you have all sorts of random named items)....but spells only go to 5th level. As an ex-FRUA hacker, you can see all the little shortcuts they did to sneak in under the limit.

Time stop could have been implemented by having the spell simply paralyze every other participant on the map for a few rounds, no save or spell resistance. In other words, have it affect everything else instead of the caster. (Also, this spell appears in the manuals for Eye of the Beholder 3 and Dungeon Hack, but the spell is not actually in the latter game.)

Wish is harder, but we can look at Wizardry for guidance here. Wizardry has two spells, HAMAN (which I can compare to Limited Wish) and MAHAMAN (compare to Wish) that could be adapted. The way those spells worked in Wizardry 2 through 5 is that, when cast, the game chooses 3 random effects (from a list of 7) and then the player chooses one of those 3 effects. As a side effect, the caster was then level drained (though that could be replaced with aging to conform to AD&D rules).

Also, see how the Baldur's Gate handled those spells. If one would skip the genie, it wouldn't have been too hard to program, I think. From what I have read, the cap was actually not written in the rules until 2nd edition, and the game is based on 1st edition rules. Note, in particular, the ranger's ability to cast magic user spells, which is not useless at high levels thanks to Magic Missile and Enlarge. The way I see it, the character is using the same spellbook for both classes. Also note how, in the Infinity Engine games, Ranger/Clerics share the same spell slots between Ranger and Cleric spells, and those games were definitely *not* limited to 640K RAM.

Edit: Of note, Pools of Darkness *does* separate cleric and druid spells, unlike Baldur's Gate 2 and Icewind Dale.

The devs had to put half the text in the game into journal entries that were printed outside it, that's an idea of the kind of limitations these guys had to work with. You're dealing with inferior graphics and sound, that's just a fact of old-game-playing--graphics have improved over the years (in fact, improvements in hardware are largely game-driven these days).

You know, I think you should look into hacking FRUA and maybe making a mod or two. You seem like you'd enjoy it. I even saw Sticks to Snakes implemented as a low-end Time Stop (remove level limit, increase area of effect and duration).