So the original Bard's tale games is 3 bucks on steam sale.

It's fun, but hard

There's a remake of the first games in the works that might up the notch over the IIGS and Amiga ports.
$3 isn't a whole lot but you could always just emulate it first. Do you have experience with other party based dungeon crawlers like Wizardry or Might and Magic?

I played a little ways into the first one earlier this year when Amazon was giving away the Android version (it's just Apple IIgs disk images and the kegs emulator for Android).

The oldest RPG I'd played prior was Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves for Atari 800 when I was a kid in the 80s, which is still "modern" in the way it handles recording changes in the world, and overall a pretty user-friendly game.
I'd been aware of Wizardry and knew a kid that had it, but never actually played anything like that myself.

The big thing that surprised me in The Bard's Tale was the way it doesn't save any kind of world-flags/progress of any kind. The only thing you save is your characters.
Upon learning that, at first I figured progress would be kept track of via acquiring items that you save in character inventory, and there does seem to be some of that, but that's not really the main thing you do: Recording progress through The Bard's Tale seems to mostly take place outside of the game itself, in the form of filling out your own map and recording the hints, riddles, passwords, that sort of stuff that you encounter while exploring.

I'd originally planned on downloading maps other people had made and playing it on a sort of easy-mode, but I quickly came to the conclusion pretty quickly that you can't really play Bard's Tale like that. Navigating and learning the dungeons is the core of the game, so you're not really playing it if you use someone else's maps.

>>2768812
>$3
>is it worth it?
Emulator poorfag detected.

>>2769382
The odd thing is that doesn't save you characters all at once but each on his own when he's removed at the guild.
It was easily possible to multiply items that way.

>>2769382
so you have to beat the game in one sitting?

>>2770302
It's a grindfest. 95% of the game time is spend fighting the same enemies for exp.

>>2770302
No. Your characters can be saved in the guild and with them the key items you need to advance.
You can however get as many of those items as you want.
For instance in older to reach the tower of the good mage you need an eye from the catacombs.

>>2770309
That's just one poor way of playing it. You can just explore normally and grab XP and loot along the way.

>>2768812

Lame. Gay.