I started playing Pool of Radiance with just one dwarven Fighter to see how the game works before I created a party, and I was encountering a lot of orcs and kobolds, but only one at a time. So this got me wonder:
1.) Does the party size of the PCs determine the size of the encounters? In other words, do encounters scale to the size of the party, or are they set.
2.) Is is possible to beat Pool of Radiance without using all 6 character slots. Like could I go through the game with only 4 characters without too much trouble?

2. Sure you can. But it's not recommended. It just means you will hit the XP cap even sooner, which will again lead to disappointment and anger (which seems to afflict 99% of gamers hitting XP caps) sooner.

Are you sure?

https://www.gog.com/forum/forgotten_realms_collection/something_i_have_been_wondering_pools_of_darkness

(regarding point 2)

Further for point 2, even using non-humans can already cause some trouble....(best read the thread above ;) )

For point 1: Not sure, but in the later games I am sure that even unconscious people would count per this rule as well! And I was never crazy enough to even try this :D

In Pool of Radiance, the level caps are not much of a problem, as many of them will not be hit at all. (The one notable exception I can think of is that Half-Elf Clerics will never reach level 6 and will therefore never get the ability to destroy weak undead when turning them.)

The rest of the series, of course, is a different story.

(There's a reason the Infinity Engine games did not implement racial level caps.)

And guess which character I did choose loooong time ago ;)

Because of Midgard and other games I did go for half-elf for not having a problem with age, you gotta love haste :D

Best Scenario fighter/thief attacking twice (haste) and twice (fighter) with backstabbing. You can really kill 'any' opponent in one round.

But age seems not to play a role in the games. I do remember that one RPG did have age bonus and mali implemented.......(not talking table top, but computer).

I can think of a few CRPGs with age stats that matter:

Wizardry 1-5 (excluding 4): When you level up, your age determines the chance that a stat will go down instead of up. (Note that death by old age happens as a result of Vitality dropping below 3; with a little tool assistance (or just re-loading level ups by some method) one can make a young elf die of old age upon reaching level 5).

Might and Magic 1 and 2: If you reach 80 years old, you might die when you rest. (The number might be different in MM1, which I still haven't played.) Aging doesn't occur naturally in these games, but some spells (Divine Intervention most notably) have aging as a side effect.

Might and Magic 3-5: As you age, your stats change; Strength, Endurance, Accuracy, and Speed decrease; Luck stays the same, and Intelligence and Personality actually increase. If a stat drops to 0, you might die at any moment, but the maximum stat change is 50 (and I believe it doesn't jump from 20 to 50 until something like 201 years old). If you are somehow under 18 (that is, if you hacked the year or the character's birth date), you will suffer stat penalties; interesting that they implemented that, even though it isn't something you'll encounter in normal play.

Wizardry 6-7 and Might and Magic 6-7 also have age, but I do not know how it works in these games.

The various Japanese Wizardry spin-offs and clones do tend to implement age, though games that don't copy Wizardry quite as closely (like Etrian Odyssey and The Dark Spire) typically don't. The Elminage series *does*, and in some cases being too young isn't good for stat growth (in Elminage Gothic, use Spirit Pact on a summon, and then try leveling up the resulting monster; you will get a lot of stat loses unless you age the new character a bit first).

Another interesting example is SaGa Frontier 2 on the PlayStation; character's ages change solely due to the fact that the game takes place over a span of 85 years (70 if you exclude pure cutscene scenarios), but there are changes in HP and SP (maybe WP as well) that occur as a result of aging. The one time there's a really old character in your party, his HP isn't what it was when he was young, but his SP has certainly grown.

cut the part which doesn't apply to me ;)
Never played anything but commodore/Amiga or PC ;)

By the description, it might have been Might and Magic 3-5. The part of Strength etc does ring a bell.

I only remember (for sure) that I kept hexing the age in the SSI games as I was always afraid of dying of age :D
All rule books I know and knew were always 'warning' you about this side effect of haste.
Did M&M had racial level caps as well, I admit I can't remember... (Main reason for going elf or half-elve as age does not apply)

No, no racial level caps in the M&M series. No gendered stat differences either (though the first two games have a strange mechanic where enemies have gendered physical immunity; some enemies can't be physically hurt by male characters, others by female ones).

Of course, your leveling is still limited by 8-bit integer limits (in 1 and 2, though I haven't heard of anybody reaching that level in 1) or by limits on how high you can train (in 3-5).

Sorry, but really had to laugh :D

Why are you surprised?

Look at history/ancient mythology:

Vampires can seduce the opposite sex.

Zeus, Aphrodite....
Circe
Casanova
the infamous mermaids
just to name a few ;)

History is full of those figures, right?

If so the devs only incorporated this into the games as they did with a lot of our mythology, or?

And even us nowadays some languages still use references to those days....right? ;)

And as usual thanks for the other info!

So I've searched the internet a bit more, and it seems like no one can answer the first question: does party size affect encounter size. But I've run a few experiments myself and it looks like I assumed correctly. The less party members you have seems to decrease the amount of enemies you face in any given encounter. When I play with one character, I only faced one kobold at a time; when I made a party of 3, it seemed like each encounter was 2 to 3 kobolds, and with the classic party of 6- yep, we faced 6 kobolds at a time (and this was all tested in the opening area of the game).
So until I can get some sort of definitive proof- it looks like the encounter size does scale to your party size.

Also, since this seems to be the case, having 4 characters would not make you hit the level cap faster because you would face less enemies and so you wouldn't get any more experience points.
Or course I still have no proof, but just from running through the first few encounters with different sized parties it seems clear to me that the encounter size does balance out with your party size.

Did you check during your test run also for HP differences?
Your assumption would actually work out, as this would also be a way of countering the XP boost. Less enemies, less XP. So no problem with the cap.

But I don't think that the Boss-fights will change though (IF they would, then real Kudos to the Programmers of the old days ;) )

Ah, I didn't really pay attention to stats or HP. But still, for the most part- less characters means less total HP, or stat power. I assume :p

The random ones do scale. The set encounters do not.

I can;t find it right off but there's a youtube video up where one of the Let's Players answered this and showed what happened with 1 character with no armour or equipment and there fore poor stats, 6 characters with no armour or equipment with again poor stats and a 6 character party filly loaded.

There was a big difference in the random encounters. There was no difference in the set fights.

He had planned on doing a Let's Play with a single unequipped character just to show it could be done. He didn't get too far. :)

Hope this helps.

Thank you, that was the answer I was looking for! It would be interesting to try to play through with a party of 3 or something different like that.

This discussion has made me wonder about something:

If you somehow have a party of size 0 (this would require a glitch (if there is one) or some save hacking), will there be encounters with 0 enemies? If so, would those encounters end in victory (because there are no enemies alive) or defeat (because there are no party members alive)? Or would the game crash or otherwise behave strangely?

Incidentally, this made me think of another game that could be played solo without equipment: Final Fantasy 2 (provided you keep killing the rest of the party when the plot revives them). In this case, it isn't because of scaling enemies, but rather because the growth system is broken in ways that happen to favor an unequipped solo character.

(Note that I am referring to the real FF2, not the SNES game that was released under that name, which is a whole different story.)