Probabilities of Terror

The final boss of Crypt of the Sorcerer, the twenty-sixth book in the original Fighting Fantasy series and published in 1987, is the titular Sorcerer, Razaak. His combat statistics are SKILL 12 and STAMINA 20 - more or less the highest possible scores the player character can have. This is compounded by the fact that if Razaak wins two combat rounds in a row, you die automatically. Somebody actually did the maths on this thing and, provided you have the same or slightly higher statistics as Razaak when you fight him (i.e. you rolled the highest possible SKILL score, and near enough the highest possible STAMINA score, and are still at full health) then your chances of winning are 5.5%... which would obviously diminish the lower your scores are. This is an impossibly one-sided encounter.

For no good reason, let's compare this with the final boss of the fourth book of the GrailQuest series, the Mummy in Voyage of Terror. The Mummy has 33 LIFE POINTS, which, in the context that the player character can have between 8 and 48 LIFE POINTS of their own (calculated by a roll of two dice and multiplying the result by four), doesn't sound too bad. However, the Mummy is magically protected so that any roll you make against it has a -5 penalty, so if you ordinarily required a 6 to successfully hit it, you would need to roll 11 or 12! Even a weapon which would normally automatically hit would require a 5 or better to hit.

(A word on combat systems: Fighting Fantasy had you roll two dice for yourself and then two for your opponent, and add your respective SKILL scores, with the higher total hitting their opponent for two STAMINA points of damage. GrailQuest had each of you take turns to try and hit each other.)

There are two other complications to the encounter with the Mummy. The first is that the Mummy's touch is poison, and once it successfully hits you you will lose an additional five LIFE POINTS every time one or the other strikes. The second is that, owing to the premise of Voyage of Terror (the spell designed to transport you to Avalon has gone wrong and accidentally sent you to Ancient Greece), none of the usual weapons, armour or magic is available to you; therefore, the default position is fighting with your bare hands, at which you successfully hit on a roll of 6 or better. How much damage you score is calculated by how much higher your roll is than the minimum required to hit: a roll of 7 scores one point of damage, a roll of 8 scores two points, and so on and so forth (most weapons will often give you a bonus on top of this; the default weapon in the other books is Excalibur Junior, which only requires a roll of 4 to hit and offers a +5 damage bonus). Therefore, given the 5-point penalty, it's virtually impossible to damage the Mummy at all! The combat is effectively impossible if you don't find a way of arming yourself.

However, the book does offer you the opportunity to find alternative weapons. The big one is a special crystal-bladed knife which automatically hits (but of course would require a roll of 5 or better to hit the Mummy) and instantly kills whatever you're using it against; however, it shatters on use, so presuming you can find it you need to hope you don't need to use it in an earlier combat! Other weapons on offer are ordinary swords, which at least offer a +3 damage bonus, and an illusion spell which will create an illusory firestorm which will nonetheless destroy an opponent completely provided he believes it to be real. This is a great example of the GrailQuest's creativity, whereas Fighting Fantasy would sometimes fall down due to the author's desire simply to make things as difficult as possible (there's no way to get around Razaak's high stats, and just to get an opportunity to fight him at all you need to follow an incredibly specific path earlier on to find the three items which are the only things in existence that can protect you from his first three magical attacks). This is not to say that all boss battles in FF are similarly afflicted, though; probably the best final showdown in any solo fantasy adventure I have ever seen is Howl of the Werewolf's, which gives the player multiple ways of fighting the Arch-Lycanthrope depending on what items and codewords they have gathered and which sidequests they have attempted.

Sometimes, however, the GrailQuest's creativity could be its downfall (or at least a slight annoyance), probably because author JH Brennan was unable to keep track of all of his innovations. One example is the Invisibility spell, which was the only spell which could only be cast when the text expressly gave you the option. Despite said spell being available in most of the books, Brennan only actually remembered to give the player the opportunity to cast it in the first book in which it appeared!

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Just as a quick endnote, there's a problem with the French translation of Legion of the Dead which I wasn't aware of when I wrote the earlier article about it: when you first find the Sunstone, which you need to win the game, it's called Phoebus. By the time you reach the endgame, however, it's inexplicably referred to as Aventurine! How this error managed to come about, we don't know.