The Making of Murkon's Refuge: Differences

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The Making of

Differences

The web version of Murkon's Refuge is close to a direct port of the original game, but with a few differences, which are listed here:

The dungeon maps were redone. The content of each level and their interconnectivity is mostly preserved, but the levels are much smaller. The levels in the original game were 80x23. In the web version, they're 30x20. Because the web version requires a delay between moves, smaller maps were used to minimize the movement required to navigate the dungeon.
The original game had a MELTWALL spell that would destroy a wall in the dungeon at the cost of having the caster forget the spell (it could be relearned the next time the character gained a level). This allowed some flexibility in how the dungeon was navigated, and it also made it possible to put secret areas in that could only be reached by destroying a wall first. Critical areas that shouldn't be bypassed with a MELTWALL spell were simply surrounded by enough layers of walls so that you couldn't get through. (The dungeon regenerated when you left the level, so you couldn't melt a wall, go back, relearn the spell, return, and melt through the next layer.) This spell was removed because the smaller dungeon dimensions made it impractical to surround critical areas with vast layers of walls.
In the original game, identifying the trap on a chest and disarming it was a two step process. You could have a thief examine the chest as many times as you wanted (risking it being set off each time, of course). When you went to disarm it, you had to type in the correct trap type. This process was too tedious, especially for a web port.
The original game did not specify the genders of the characters. Consequently, the initial attributes values of each character were exactly the initial attribute values for the character's race.
In the original game, equipment could only modify the IQ, wisdom, fire resistance, and speed stats. In this web port, equipment can modify any ability attributes, resistance values, and/or speed. Objects that do so were added.
Usually items found in the labyrinth were unidentified, so instead of finding a "Long Sword +1," you'd find a "?Sword" and had to get the item identified before you could tell what it was, although you could wield it without knowing. (There were never any cursed items in the game, so there was no risk in wielding an unidentified item.) You could identify an item by paying some cash at the equipment shop, or you could just have your rogue (called a "thief" in the original game) do it. Identifying items was a special skill that only thieves had. So periodically you'd trade all your equipment to the party's thief and identify all the items. There was never any reason to pay money at the shop to identify items. A low level thief would often take several tries before he could identify each item, but he would still get the job done for free. That whole aspect of the game didn't particularly add anything, however, and while it wasn't quite so much of a hassle without the delay of a page load between each move, it would have been horribly frustrating in the web version.
The original game only had one town, right at the beginning. There was never any charge for resting at the inn, but resting there did not heal hit points; you had to go to the clinic (then, the temple) and pay for hit point healing -- or have one of your wizards do it, which is always what happened. Extra towns were added to minimize dungeon movement -- you don't have to climb all the way back out of the dungeon every time you want to return to town and recuperate -- and a charge was added for the inns in deeper towns to resolve the issue of gold being essentially useless once you've advanced your characters beyond a certain point.
Charisma was used in a completely different way. In the original game, there were never any price adjustments based on charisma; all services cost the same amount per character level, regardless of charisma. Instead, the party's average charisma was used to determine how often certain monsters in the labyrinth would be friendly. Occasionally you would encounter a group of monsters that would hail you in welcome, and you could choose to greet them back and part company or attack them anyway. This was the only use of charisma in the original game; it wasn't used to benefit the individual in any way, just the party. Friendly monsters was a silly feature anyway, and I didn't want to implement it in the web port.
Initial hit points were tied to the race of the character, not the class, and you could use extra points to gain hits as well as ability attributes. (Two hit points per 'point left.') This silliness was removed, since it is never a good idea to use extra points on hits, because the change is only temporary. When you gain a level, your hit point increase is based on a static function of your class, vitality, and current level (and a random factor), so any initial increase you make would not be carried over after you gained a level.
You could never fight more than one monster in hand-to-hand combat per round. This made fighter classes less and less useful as the party advanced until the spellcasters were doing all the work. By allowing hand-to-hand combat against multiple targets in a single round once a character's speed is sufficiently advanced, it evened things out a bit.
In the original game, invokable objects were far less powerful than they are now. The code only allowed invokable objects to cast one of the regular sorcerer or wizard spells -- there was no provision for an invokable object to perform even a small variation on an existing spell. Consequently, the items were less interesting and also less useful; usually by the time you found a particular magic object, you would have no need of it. To amend this, items were written so as to be able to perform magic other than the pre-defined sorcerer and wizard spells, and the power of the items was drastically increased. Carrying a few invokable items around is now a lot more appealing.
In the original game, you could do anything in an ambush round. Consequently, if you ambushed some monsters, you could usually wipe them out right then with a couple of strategically chosen spells. That wasn't so much of a problem. The problem was that monsters could do anything they wanted when they ambushed you. So, far too frequently, entire parties of characters would be wiped out by a group of ambushing dragons. Not fun. Taking away all use of spells (and, in the case of monsters, elemental breath) did the trick. Furthermore, allowing the invocation of objects in ambush rounds helps a bit on the previous point by making magic objects more valuable.
Poison couldn't be breathed or used as a magic attack. There were no monsters that could cast spells to poison or breathe poison, and wizards (who can now wield poison spells against monsters in combat) wielded cold spells instead.

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