The best part of Fireball was how it did damage to one thing at a time so you got to slowly see who lived and who died.
Besides saving on disk space, the Tavern Tales/Journal Entries served as copy protection.
And pretty good protection at that! I remember using a hex editor to change all the code wheel answers to the same word so I wouldn’t have to use the wheel any longer. Then I thought that I could make a copy to upload to a local BBS but realized that it was pointless unless I hand typed all the journal entries as well (including turning the maps into ASCII representations). Too much work for my book so my Pool of Radiance pirating career was over before it started.
Check out the Gold Box Companion. It helps if you’re running the Gold Box games on a windowed DOSBox with a HUD, automapping, journal lookup, and more.
There’s a lot of hype behind this game. Let’s hope it delivers.
I hope so too - I kickstartered the Thing, and the dev updates have been very interesting. At the very least you can see the Owlcat guys really love the game. They are actually running the campaign as Pen&Paper with all the devs, to make sure everybody gets the spirit of Pathfinder.
But back on Topic, Buck Rogers was my go to for the old games. The first one I played together with my brother. Retro-SciFi is such a great style for this kind of game.
I played both the Pool of Radiance and Buck Rogers series.
They were great at the time, but I don’t feel they hold up now.
I echo that gog.com have done a superb job in providing versions that run on modern machines, but the old game I regularly play now is Master of Magic (1994.)
For modern roleplay I enjoy Lord of the Rings Online (a 2007 MMORPG.)