Withdraw money out of your own purse

Remove all ads!

1. Would you even remember the number of gold in your inventory? What happen if you cheat back too much, or too little? Clua command should be the help you use at desperate times, not constant tool. or you risk breaking the game.

2. LARPing in style. For one thing, it's common sense not to drag your money around. For another, you are gathering money to save Imoen, why would you risking them in some freak accident? I can barely tolerate money has no weight, but an invisibile account on an invisible internet bank is too much.

 

The wild surge destroys 80% of your gold. I think you can manage to multiply what remains by 4. And the console carries no inherent risk.

Gold weight is one of the worst mechanics and has no business being in a computer game. Inventory management is enough of a chore as it is.

 

I agree it was extremely annoying in the Gold Box games, but it was somewhat realistic. My main issue with the Gold Box games was twofold. Arrows, darts, and quarrels did not count towards your weight limit, but coins did. Second, the coins weighed too much. IIRC A character with 18(01) strength could only carry a little over a thousand coins, and I think 18(100) less than twice that. I've carried several thousand pennies to the bank when I was less than 8 years old as my dad used to put all his pennies aside into a bank and give them to me to show me the value of saving a few cents here and there and how they add up. I'll grant the coins had the minimum weight value allocated to them, and they only used numbers from 1 to 255 in the code as the game was on an 8-bit system (Apple II, C128. Not sure if it ran on the C64 but the Apple II version of Curse of the Azure Bonds used 128K of RAM)

I'm trying to recall what other games allocated significant weight to money. Dungeon Master II the weight wasn't very significant, nor was Quest for Glory, but they had weight. The only thing that comes to mind was Adventure Construction Set, where it was up to the Adventure's author how much money weighed. It was even possible to give it a negative number, so the more money you had the more stuff you could haul around (great for a sci-fi adventure where something like "Unobtanium" from Avatar could be used, although ACS was 20-30 years before Avatar).

 

As a general estimation, in D&D, 50 coins (of whatever kind) weigh about 1 lb., so carrying 1000 coins should only amount to about 20 lbs. Ergo, the games had a shitty system and you can't blame it on the fact that they were 8-bit games. You can do a lot of fancy stuff with just 8 bits.

But even by D&D standards, where you're commonly carrying around hundreds of thousands of gold pieces, having the money weight system be non-trivial is stupid. Unless you're trying to loot a mountain of coins from a dragon's hoard, where it makes sense to introduce a temporary challenge, it should always be assumed that you're not actually lugging around entire carts of coins, but instead use other forms of currency with stable values (like rough-cut gemstones or something).

 

I too remember the Gold Box series, especially a Kobold Cave in Pool of Radiance where you find a huge amount of treasure next to a genie bottle that consists of more coins than a full party, all members having full STR due to cast spells, could carry. It did hurt my packrat soul to leave thousands of copper coins lying around and lose them when returning to Phlan...

However I do not think that the ingame coins were too heavy. Modern coins of sometimes low-weight alloys (I remember lowvalue italian currency in Lira on a holiday as a child that seemed like thin aluminium foil to me, being used to german coins) have next to no inherent value and are valued for the numbers printed on them - in ancient times coins had to have the weight in metal of copper, silver, gold or electrum to be worth their value.

 

Yes, but if we take an ancient shekel as an example (which was both a coin and a unit of measurement), they weighed between 10 and 15 grams on average, regardless of their composition (silver, electrum, gold, etc.). Anything above that would have made things inconvenient and it's safe to assume that D&D worlds would have roughly the same standards. What that means is that even judging by our own history, one would be able to carry around 35-50 coins per pound. Which is just a long way of saying I disagree with your assessment that the coins in those games were in any way appropriately weighted.

 

Having money have weight just makes for more tedious inventory management. Sure, it's more realistic, but so is having to eat and drink and sleep, and that hardly makes for more fun gameplay. Or having to recover for months after getting near fatal wounds, or being permanently crippled after certain injuries. Realistic, but not fun to play.

 

I have a feeling of Deja Vu somehow as if we had that discussion before...

But - on the contrary. A finetuned level of realism makes games more immersive and feel real. And I do not mean simply the level of realism of the Ultima series where you could bake bread from flour, but "Das schwarze Auge"/Realms of Arkania where a lack of boots and winter clothes and of course blankets and eating equipment in harsh weather or while travelling over a mountain pass meant a risk to catch a fantasy-cold.
Even simulations like "Die Siedler"/Smurf City would be rather bland without the food production chains to supply the mineworkers.

Reducing the level of realism and abstracting away all of that reduces games to the level my 3 year old nephew plays when he takes up his plastic knights and rams them together to have them fight...

 

Except games are all about reducing and abstracting a particular subject to the very essence of what makes it fun. The vast (and I do mean vast) majority of players simply do not enjoy reality simulators to such a fine detail. Giving a player chores that contribute virtually nothing whatsoever to the overall experience instead of allowing them to actually play the game is just poor design. Good visuals and ambience do far more for immersion than having to take bathroom breaks and fix holes in your boots ever could. So, I'm sad to say that your 3 year old nephew has the right idea here.

 

I was given Curse of the Azure Bonds first, but there were a couple of similar treasure troves in that game, although I can't recall off-hand where they were. I haven't played in at least 10 years although now that I've got DOSBox working I can probably play the PC version as I was given the Forgotten Realms Silver Edition years ago but could not get it working on my Windows 98SE system (I did say years ago, like 15) without glitches.
It always bothered me that any treasure not carried by your party would disappear forever and there was no way to make multiple trips back to sell all that loot to buy things like Javelins of Piercing (best missile weapon in the game, but horrendously expensive and semi-heavy) or more magic-user scrolls so all your mages could have all the spells available for sale (only 3 spells per spell level IIRC, but it tended to be the two best spells and a not-so-useful one).

 

Me, I dont care about the number of gold than the fact that I cant manipulate it however I want. it goes against the soul of private property concept.

As for the number of gold. I am thinking it's just a non-mention functionality of Waukeen, the goddess take care of wealth, trade, and banks. She probabbly can provide an exclusive for money data universe-wide network the like of magic web that Mystra manage.

In details, they do have memorizable materials that contain magic (scrolls and wands). Making an item like a credit card with memory function would not be hard. Security control would be Waukeen divine power come into play. Details, details.

Repeat: I am not bothered by the number of gold in the game as there is plenty of explainations not ingame. I do be bothered by the inability to manage said number.

 

I don't recall anybody being bothered by the number of coins other than the fact that the authors were cruel in giving you thousands of copper coins (along with a smaller amount of silver and electrum) that you could not possibly carry back to town and that once you leave the "take treasure" screen, they disappear forever.
Also that each character could only carry 2,000 coins (I think, forgot the amount a fighter with 18/00 strength could carry without any equipment in game units).
That, and the lack of a bank or any place to store gold and items when there were ways to lose items in the game.

 

Sound like FNV Dead Money's choice.

 

For F:NV in general I just increased my carry weight by console. For Dead Money, I increased it even more.

 

Greed is great, innit~

 

It's more like satisfying the inner packrat, rather than greed, I think. Maybe it's the same thing, but I wouldn't be happy to leave the stuff all behind, and not have my display rack complete.

 

I recall being annoyed at the CotAB stash because I had a bunch of dual-class and multi-class magic users and I was trying to scribe all the spells available from the purchasable scrolls and literally could not carry enough money to buy them all for everyone. Of course later I found out it was the double-price shop (IIRC there were 3 shops, one that sold at half price that you could only access for one quest, one at normal price in Zenthil Keep that ended when you did the Zenthil Keep quest, and one at double price).
I also found the Javelins of Piercing to be be the second best missile weapon in the game after the dart of hornet's nest, but they were horrendously expensive.
Having to leave all that money behind meant I was "cheated" out of several javalins that were good for killing Beholders, and I'd just used all my stash up facing the Mulmaster Beholder Corps (yes, I did the optional boss challenge, my first experience with that phenomenon of an optional battle harder than the final boss, although the soul sucker from Bard's Tale I in the catacombs came close).

 

We all were noob once upon a time~

 

No sure how that was being a noob. Plus, this was back in something like 1989 or 1990. I'm not sure how many optional boss challenges were actually around back then before it was made famous with the weapons in FFVII in the late 1990's. This also predates the World Wide Web.
Well, other than playing CotAB first because I'd never heard of Pool of Radiance until AFTER I got CotAB for Christmas. The very next game I got was PoR.

 

To this day, Pools of Radiance (EGA / DOS version) is the best AD&D RPG I've ever played. The depth, open storyline, and every aspect of the game is superior to every other AD&D game. If I could have Pool of Radiance *exactly* as it was, but with the sound / graphics / shortcut commands of Treasures of the Savage Frontier, I'd be ecstatic.

Curse of the Azure Bonds is good too... but I'm stuck in a situation where the game is unbeatable. I cracked the game using NEVERLOCK from back in the day. I was able to level up and get to the last battle, only for the game to essentially be completely jacked up. I'd hate to have to re-do the entire game... but I may have to.