I have a specific question about the order of the first steps into the Dungeon.
I’m playing the Z3 version from IFDB. There’s probably a chance the behavior I’m discussing here might be dependent on which port or file version.
I’ll use spoiler tags to be safe, though I suppose the topic is such that everything is a spoiler:
If you go down through the trap door carrying the sword, and then immediately go to the art studio and then drop the sword to get up the chimney with the painting in order to deposit the first treasure, then you may find the sword is gone when you go back down. I don’t know if the sword will absolutely be missing every time. Presumably, the thief came around and picked it up while the player character was putting the painting away upstairs.
Question is, when you then go back down and find that the sword is gone, can you get past the troll without the sword?
This is actually a bit nuanced, and veteran Zorkologists may provide more details here. There have been reports of this being possible, technically, but doing so depends either on a rare stroke of luck, or exploiting a known bug that only affects version 5 (the original release on Apple II, a bit of a rarity). In any case, in a canonical playthrough, you are supposed to use the sword.
It is possible to use the knife for this purpose, but luck is not on your side. You’d be making things more difficult for you. Of course, as it’s well known, there is an easy “out”, throwing the knife at the troll, which may make him eat it and die. But the knife disappears, leaving you with no realistic means to handle the thief. So this is more an amusing diversion rather than an intended way of dealing with the puzzle.
I have to correct myself: I just tried this with the specific version mentioned (r119) and it was easier than I remember to use the knife to kill the troll. I seem to have a distinct understanding / recollection that it was far more difficult to kill the troll with the knife than with the sword, but either this is incorrect or it varies between versions.
Knife trivia (later in game than troll fight): the nasty knife is more effective than the sword against the thief! (not a huge advantage, but every bit helps with that rascal)
As a side note, I’m pretty sure the second knife was added to the game just to show off that their parser could do disambiguation.
Most other parsers of the era (including the original Adventure one and the Phoenix one) just looked up verbs and nouns in a database to see what matched, and each verb/noun would correspond to exactly one action/object. But the group working on the original Zork wanted to do something more elaborate, which is why they have puzzles involving multiple nouns in a single action, or objects with the same noun and different adjectives that the parser can distinguish between.
(The third option at the time is what was used in the Wander system and is still used in various MUDs, where entire commands are checked against a list of options specific to each room. This one has thankfully mostly fallen out of favor: if there’s a finite list of options that’s specific to a certain situation, better to list them explicitly than to make the player guess at them.)
The source has a table of VILLAINS that lists which weapon each monster is weak against. (Troll is weak vs sword, thief is weak vs knife, cyclops has 10000 strength and no weakness.)
So fighting the thief with the knife means he has strength 4 instead of 5. I don’t know how that affects the odds though.
Wow, those original Implementors really thought of a lot, especially for their time, but even in general, even in the company of their contemporaries, i.e., Wumpus and Adventure, the original MUD (probably? not sure – they certainly had a common ancestor), D&D and the tabletop world of the day. It may be a silly little world with silly fantasy that got away with being shallower than tabletop RPG fantasy would typically be allowed to me, silly jokes in bad taste, etc. – but those simple gameplay elements made for spontaneous dynamics centered around especially randomization and the the non-linear exploration routes. And those dynamics made the whole thing a lot deeper than the sum of its parts would suggest.
Right, the underlying room-based command mechanism was quite obvious in MUDs. A lot of simple MUDs had room descriptions or signs in the rooms that would helpfully tell players what special things they could do in that room. For a little while I played MUDs heavily… and while their syntax was different and probably inferior in most regards to most text adventure parsers… they definitely evolved a form of syntactic convenience that worked for them when it worked… but that was then, right? Are there seriously any MUDs left? Has anyone been paying attention? Is this what happened to the dodo birds?
Another bit of trivia: If I read the ZIL code correctly (specifically ROB, STEAL-JUNK and I-SWORD), the thief is much more likely to take the sword if you are carrying it. That’s because it uses the TVALUE property to store the “glowiness” of the sword (0 = not glowing, 1 = glowing faintly, 2 = glowing brightly), and in the thief’s eyes that makes it a treasure while it’s glowing.
ROB is used in a bunch of places, not just for the thief. E.g. if you disturb the skeleton, ROB is applied to the player and the room, destination Hades. I guess that would include the sword if it’s glowing?
On the other hand, the sword doesn’t react to the thief unless you spot him. In some cases (“he quietly abstracted some valuables…”) the thief robs you and leaves without ever being spotted.
STEAL-JUNK only steals non-treasures; it’s only applied to rooms, not your inventory. It is possible for the sword to be glowing on the floor. (If you drop it glowing, it stays glowing.) So this is a related quirk.
I tried using this to obtain a permanently glowing sword - just for the cool factor. Dropping the sword in the troll room and killing him with the knife results in the sword staying brightly glowing, but alas it goes out if you pick it up.
Probably? I wonder if that could also be used to separate the stiletto from the thief, if you knock him unconscious first. I’ve been wondering why there’s a special case for if the player is carrying the stiletto in THIEF-VS-ADVENTURER, because I thought you could only get it after the thief was dead.
I didn’t realize that! The sword seems to have been the source of a fair share of headaches. I noticed in Zork III that the sword daemon doesn’t start when you first get the sword. Only when you pick it up. So if you walk to an “infested” room, it won’t start glowing until you drop it and pick it up again.
I also remember being impressed in Zork III that the sword would start glowing when I told the Dungeon Master to set the dial because I thought “oh, the game realizes I’m trying to do something dangerous here”. But no, now I think it’s just that for a brief moment the Dungeon Master is the WINNER, and the sword daemon checks if hisHERE is “infested”. Which it is. By him.