Playing an RPG without a manual

[jhd]

In about 1989 or 1990, a friend gave me a copy of the first Might & Magic game . Alas, I did not have any of the accompanying documentation. 

 

Now, I already had some experience with 8-bit RPGs so I understood the basic concepts, but with Might & Magic, spells were cast by number. I could randomly select numbers, but I had no clear idea what they actually did. By trial and error, I eventually discovered some spells that were offensive, but I was never able to determine the function of most of them.

 

Obviously this made the game significantly more challenging, and so I never really got much past the first town. 

 

Did anyone else have a similar experience where a game was mostly unplayable without the original manual?  

 

 

 

 

[Leonard Smith]

I think Dungeon Master II (on the Mac) is another where the manual is a must, especially to understand all the various spells and skills.  You can probably muddle through without it, but it'll be tough.

[newtmonkey]

The first five Wizardry games are basically unplayable unless you have the manual (or at least have copied out the relevant information by hand), since you have to manually type a spell out by name each time you want to cast it.

 

I'd also include many of the Ultima games, as the world would be significantly more difficult to explore and make any progress, without the included world map.

Edited July 8, 2022 by newtmonkey

[youxia]

There were no legal games where I grew up, only pirated copies. And RPG/sim/strategy games were my favourites, so yeah, it was often a problem, sometimes a big problem. I'd usually try and manage to figure most things out anyway, but in some games it was just too much. Occasionally a kindly pirate would include some hand-typed docs, but that was a rare occurence.

 

I remember distinctly refusing to play the Goldbox series on Amiga, despite wanting to immensely, since I was enamoured with its best-in-class combat. That was easy to figure out, but these games also relied on external "journals" to tell you the story and give assorted gameplay clues (a form of copy protection) . So you'd enter some place and the game would say "You see a dwarf chained to a wall. Please refer to the Journal page so and so". You could play without reading that stuff but it  was too heartbreaking, so the only game from this series I played back then was Dark Queen Of Krynn (the last in the Dragonlance sequence!) because it came with the docs.

[+Gemintronic]

Never had that problem with computer games.  However, as a teen I had some Japanese console RPGs.  Got through Landstalker without a manual and just an archaic Japanese-English dictionary.  Dragon Quest 5 defeated me though.  Some event trigger wasn't obvious and no amount of blind back tracking or random menu options helped.

[MrMaddog]

I can't imagaine playing any CRPG w/o a manual.  Aside from telling you what the heck to do for combat phases, they have real nice detailed descriptions inside.  I got spoiled from the room-by-room descriptions from the Temple of Apshai manual that really bring the world alive compared to just looking at the sparse computer graphics.

 

Thank goodness we have sites like Atarimania that has PDF manuals for each game and also GOG who also includes digital manuals for their games.

[zzip]

By the late 80s, early 90s when they made games hard drive installable,  many games abandoned disk copy protection and shifted to looking up answers to copy protection questions in the manual.  Many games became unplayable without the manual for that reason.   I bought a number of DOS game compilations that didn't come with physical manual that still had this protection in.   The manual is on the CD in some proprietary format, or if you're lucky PDF.   That makes it really inconvenient to play these games today.  

[TheGameCollector]

On 7/7/2022 at 7:13 AM, jhd said:

In about 1989 or 1990, a friend gave me a copy of the first Might & Magic game . Alas, I did not have any of the accompanying documentation. 

 

Now, I already had some experience with 8-bit RPGs so I understood the basic concepts, but with Might & Magic, spells were cast by number. I could randomly select numbers, but I had no clear idea what they actually did. By trial and error, I eventually discovered some spells that were offensive, but I was never able to determine the function of most of them.

 

Obviously this made the game significantly more challenging, and so I never really got much past the first town. 

 

Did anyone else have a similar experience where a game was mostly unplayable without the original manual?  

 

 

 

 

I had Wizardry for NES and it took a lot of trial and error to figure out which spells were which because of the made up language used for them.