Mostly though, it’s a game full of interesting ideas, and a whole lot of what they call “Nintendo hard”. Which is to say, rough, honest challenge where the game pulls no punches. Most folks won’t want to run their tabletop that way, though some people will.

Which makes me wonder just what I was doing in that game when I was nine years old. I think I spent most of my time trying to find the city of Dawn, because I loved the idea of a hidden city.

I went back when I was in high school to play the game again, and oddly enough, it seemed even more difficult in high school then it did when I was a kid. I guess when I played as a kid, I never leveled up, so the monsters stayed easy.

Anyways, that was a nice nostalgia trip! I suppose the biggest thing that appealed to me about Ultima was the exploration; there’s always someplace new, and interesting, to go to. Each city had something different or special about it, and that’s an idea I’d like to take back to my DnD game.

As for balance, yes, the game got harder and harder as you played and got better. In short, it was almost counter intuitive — you were penalized for doing better. I guess the concept to be learned here is power is relative. If you keep making it harder on the players, it will make them feel like they are going backward, not forward. I would actually recommend a GM occassionally bring back a previous tough combat (redress it a bit) and have the players square off on it once again to help them realize how much they have improved.

As for clarity, yes, Exodus was hard to follow. You had to keep a notebook of all the clues you received and put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Although tedius, I see this as just a method to keep the players moving from city to city looking for more clues. Obviously, having all the clues in a cheat book or walkthrough makes this much easier. I think what we can learn about clarity is to keep your clues more localized. Ultima was maddening on how you would get one clue per town and spend an inordinate amount of time running in circles. Some clue hunting is fine — even the one stored in a lost temple on island in the middle of the ocean — but try to keep most of them in smaller controllable regions. It’ll save your player’s sanity and keep things moving along. Also, I’d recommend limiting the number of open threads at a time — too many and the players may get confused.

Darn you and your evil gnomish ways!