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Wizard's Crown

Game Mechanics

Wizard's Crown is a medieval-fantastic role video game in which the player controls a group that can contain up to eight adventurers.

The player controls a group of up to eight adventurers that he can choose from the predefined ones of the program or create any pieces. Each character is characterized by its strength, dexterity, intelligence and vital energy. The force determines the weapons and armour that it can carry, its ability to force doors and its speed of healing; dexterity determines its speed of action; his intelligence influences his ability to launch spells and his vital energy determines the amount of damage he can suffer before dying. In addition to these statistics, it is characterized by its experience, which reflects its capacities in its art. The game does not propose to choose a race for the characters. The player can thus create his characters freely by distributing points in the different characteristics. On the other hand, he offers five character classes: warrior, storage, thief, priest and magician. The characters can be multiclassed at will. However, this tends to slow down its progression. Instead of a conventional level and class system, the characters improve their statistics and skills ' such as hunting, shopping, alchemy or swimming' with a progression system, probably inspired by tray games Runequest and Traveller, very similar to that of newer games like Fallout or Neverwinter Nights. During the fighting, the characters gain experience that must then be exchanged for skill points. The ratio between experience points and skill points thus obtained varies depending on the level of competence. The experience necessary to improve a skill thus increases with the level of it.

The game begins in the city of Arghan. After leaving the city of departure, the player moves his group on a card representing the game world in a similar way to Ultima. The player moves his group through eight numbered keys of the keyboard, the direction corresponding to each number being indicated at the bottom right of the screen. To move to the northeast, it must press button 2. Travel is limited by the different types of land on the map as well as by the time of day. It is thus not possible to enter a city after the nightfall because its doors are closed and reopens only the next morning. By exploring the game world, the player can chat with other characters to get clues. In the cities, it can allow its adventurers to rest, to heal their wounds and to recover energy. He can also buy what to equip his characters, or sell the objects discovered during the adventure. He can finally train his characters to improve their skills. Cities also contain dungeons, in which the progression is made upwards rather than downwards, like the guild of the thieves of Arghan.

In the dungeons, each member of the group is represented on the screen but only one is directly controlled by the player, others that can be programmed to follow it or stay on site.

The combat system, inspired by wargamesemphasizes tactics and military competence. The game includes more than 20 different combat controls, including a particularly unusual one that makes a character more difficult to hurt with an arrow but more vulnerable to body to body. Like in Questron and Phantasiethe effectiveness of weapons varies depending on the situation. However, the game goes further than these in this field by making this system more realistic. The effectiveness of a shield thus depends on the direction of the character who wears it and can be reduced to nothing by certain weapons, such as axes or scourges, which allow to destroy it or circumvent it. It is also one of the few role games that takes into account the increased reach of the lances, allowing the characters who use it to attack a monster at two distance boxes, when a standard mix weapon does not allow to attack monsters remote from a single box. The game also includes guns that can play an important role in fighting. The characters can be injured in two different ways: injuries, which result in temporary statistical penalties, and bleeding, which continuously drain their points of life. These injuries may be more than two levels, normal or severe. The game also takes into account the morale, which takes into account the fatigue and nervousness of the characters. This one can be found by allowing the characters to rest, or to party to the tavern.

Each spell costs a certain amount of magic points but having enough of these points is not enough to ensure that it will be successfully launched. The chance to succeed a spell depends in fact on the level of difficulty of the spell, and the character's skill in spelling. The level of difficulty is subtracted from the statistic of throwing out the character, the result giving the chance to be successful. Magic points can be regenerated by allowing the characters to rest.

An option allows the fights to be solved automatically, but this system usually gives more unfavourable results for the player, his characters usually suffer more damage than if the fight was played normally.