Let's discuss gameplay issues with U4 Rando

[Gilmok]

For the few that frequent this page I was hoping to open a dialogue about how to make this a more fun Rando. It was a popular NES RPG franchise and with tweaks I think it could be as popular as Final Fantasy or even Dragon Warrior. However, the game defeats interesting randomization with a few major problems:

1. Monsters are not strong enough. Without toughened monsters, you could beat the strongest monsters in the game at your starting level. This defeats the risk portion of the risk/reward of exploration; if exploration has no risk, it isn't interesting.
2. The way levels are (not) used in this game is seriously problematic. I will list the reasons below:
   2a. Enemies are level scaled. This goes back to point 1 about monsters not being tough enough to deter exploration. Dungeons are the only place where you have any danger of dying, as forced combat rooms are not level scaled.
   2b. Only 8 levels makes for poor strength gain granularity. Few opportunities to gain strength via EXP sort of makes gaining EXP pointless. Closely related to this is:
   2c. Attack power and defense power is determined solely by your items. DEX (which is actually listed as INT) has a small effect on hit rate, and INT (listed as DEX) determines MP, but STR does nothing for you. You can actually explore dungeons and find stat-improving balls (which is a good thing) but there is really no point in using them as stats are close to meaningless.
   2d. The most useful spells are accessible right at the start. I considered Blink to be especially problematic (hence the flag to get rid of it). (Now that I think of it, I could fix Blink by attaching a high failure rate - like 70% failure - to it)
3. Gold costs are highly negotiable. Starting off with Avatarhood (which is recommended) is the main fix to this problem, but having it be the only fix is sub-optimal in my opinion.
4. The Avatar having 99mp + access to the best weapon and armor in the game is overpowered. While the Avatar needs to be somewhat overpowered to survive the Abyss (especially if you use tougher monsters - I frequently make you use all that MP), it seriously diminishes the usefulness of getting other characters to join you. It's not completely useless, as you can get gold from their items, but it is nevertheless diminished. (Solution - Avatar gets bonus MP based on level, not just max MP)
5. Exploration on larger maps can seriously drag on. Yogidamonk suggested that I start players off with the Sextant so that players could record coordinate locations for things right away. This may be a much better idea than I had originally thought. I also did take a look at speeding up walk movement (but that code is in a memory-tight area and I didn't want to play with fire just yet).

While you're here I'd also like to share my philosophy on randomization in RPGs (in general): What if you could play your favorite RPG starting at level 1 but were given the most powerful weapons and spells at the start; how much faster could you explore the map and beat the game? Answering this question is why people play and love randomizers.
Anyway, thanks for reading my thoughts. I do have solutions but my time has to be dedicated to other things for now. I'd like to use this issue to hear your thoughts. Thanks!