You’re right about Wizardry originating XP as incremental character progression. In Ultima 1 and 2 you gain a level with every 100XP as a crude character scaling mechanism – stronger monsters spawn at higher levels, and of course enemies get tougher the lower you go in a dungeon.

I never got into Wizardry and although I have the later games from GOG (never played them) the unmodded releases of the dungeon crawlers lack automapping and that’s a hard pass, though I’ve been known to bother to mod museum-piece CRPGs before.

How is the NES port? Does it require one to buy a pad of graph paper? As I said, I just bought the remake of the first one and one of the Japanese ones. It’s good to know you don’t have a huge rack of games to play like Ultima or Might & Magic and I can proceed to Wizardry 6 when I’m done with number 1.

Just for the hell of it, I’ll see if I can remember all the Ultima 1-5 keyboard commands. I had no problem picking the games back up adter 20 years away:

Attack
Board (sc. a ship or shuttlecraft) or mount a horse
Cast a spell
Descend (stairs, ladders)
Enter (town, dungeon tile on overworld. Towers in Ultima 2 are upside-down dungeons, with monsters getting stronger the higher you get, with balrogs and those damned food-stealing gremlins at the toughest levels)
Fire cannon on a ship
Get chest
Hole up (camp in the overworld or in dungeons, with the ability to leave a character up to watch at the expense of not restoring him. Otherwise your characters will start off asleep if monsters attack)
Ignite torch
Jimmy (i.e. pick) lock
Klimb (stairs, ladders)
Locate (if you buy a sextant this gives your x, y coordinates on the overworld. Used to reveal the location of some key items and generally useful)
Mix reagents for spells
N
Open door
Peer in a gem (to show the current dungeon floor on an 8x8 grid. You can buy gems at tool shops)
Quit (we’ve been through this – this saves the game, the last thing you did before you powered down in the days of booting directly from disks)
Ready (equip) a weapon
Search current tile
Talk to an NPC
Use item
V
Wear (equip) armor
X-it (disembark or dismount. The opposite of Board)
Y
Ztats (i.e. stats)

Watch this space. I’ll surely update as I remember.