Another Pool of Radiance Review

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(Originally posted by Mollusken)

This time we go to Wewp! to find the Ruins of Myth Drannor with another medium rating of 6.

Several aspects of the game got quite annoying. The fact that none of your characters could travel off the screen from each other. So much for having your Rogue go up ahead and scout, eh? Some skills were activated automatically instead of manually. Search was one of these. All you need to do to find a secret door is walk along the walls of the dungeons. If you have rolls turned on, you will see all your characters instantly make roll checks when you pass by a secret door, informing you that there is in fact a secret door there even if no one made their checks! You could turn rolls off, but then you wouldn’t see what I am about the rant about. The random number generator algorithm is F’d UP!! My Paladin had a +15 to hit, yet he always seems to roll just under what he needs to hit his opponent, like a 3 or 4. I found most of my other characters like to roll 6’s quite a lot. This is NOT my imagination either. Every single friggen’ combat was like this. 4… 1… 12… 6.. 5.. .6.. 15.. . 16… 6…5 etc.. The monsters somehow always rolled high. My Sorcerer/Monk with an Armor Class of 25 at get hit roughly 1 in every 6 swings. I check the type of monsters I am fighting to see what kind of attack bonus they have and it was usually +1 to +4.. (according to my official 3rd Edition Monster Manual, which I guess means D*CK in this game). That means they need to roll a natural 20 to hit me. How does that come out to me getting hit about every 6 attacks? Seems like.. oh.. roughly every 20th attack should hit me (a 1 in 20 chance after all)? At this point, I turned off rolls and played the rest of the game ignoring the grossly misprogrammed number generator.

Read all of it here.