OD&D's impact on early computer games

[idrahil]

Ok all, a thought came to me today as I was thinking about old computer RPGs and some of the musings here on these forums. In moderns Computer RPGS (or Consol), one of the things that annoys gamers are the "fetch quests". Every game has them. You're on a quest and you need a key. NPC A has the key but will only give it to you if you go "fetch" his armor/sword/ale/boots.

While these may be annoying to gamers today, they were a staple of the genre back in the 80s. But back then, they seemed to be closer to what happened back in the original D&D games. From what I've read here, Magic-Users and Clerics could geas the players into performing some quest.

That brings me to what I was thinking about. One of the earliest RPGs I played was Temple of Apshai which my friend's dad had. I don't recall it being anything more than a dungeon crawl to gain treasure. The first RPG I owned was a game called Questron II. It's a very simple game but it was an RPG and set my imagination to flight. It had a main quest.....kill the evil wizard...no joke.

Along the way you came across a cathedral. The head priest would sell you 2 or 3 loaves of "the Bread of Life" which was basically a healing potion. The priest goes on to say he would sell you more but you had to retrieve an amulet from the tomb beneath the cathedral. You could go through the game with limited breads but it would be MUCH harder. So the priest bestows a "Fetch Quest" on you. But 11 year old me felt I HAD to do the quest. I didn't think it was stupid or not worth doing .... it was as though the priest geas'd ME.

I 'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this but it just seemed as though things that current gamers dislike were once new and exciting. These old computer games feel closer to the table top experience than RPGs of the current era (with a few exceptions) which seem to be striving more towards a movie or tool for story telling.

Anyways, just a random thought. Maybe it makes sense to someone here

[Fearghus]

I think I understand from where you are coming. Recently on DragonsFoot I read someone's signature and in it they mentioned that it was not desired or enjoyed to have a reason why creatures populated a dungeon level or room. They were simply there to play a game and it did not need to make sense. I've also read similar comments on reviews of old dungeons on Amazon where someone would mention that the ecology made absolutely no sense. Room 1 is grizzly bears, room 2 is a purple worm, etc (i am a bit facetious there, but it is to get across a point).

And yes, I am 100% guilty of trying to make games into stories instead of just getting on with it. This I try to balance with whom I am playing. One could say the story for an old school game is to hit levels 4, 8 and 9 so you can play yourself in the miniature battle. The means of getting there are just details to be overlooked.

The computer game you mention is not one I played, but I did mess around with MUDs in the mid 90's. In the 80's I was playing either cartridge games on a vic 20 (tooth invaders), or eventually SSI games on a Commodore 64 (Champions of Krynn, Bard's Tale). What was that popular one where if you didn't have a light you'd be eaten by a grue? I didn't play it a lot, but it was fun.

Sometimes I'd rather play Beer and Pretzels than worry about getting the ring to Mordor. But, not always.

[Deleted]

Story is whatever happens, including "this particular group of PCs blundered through a one way door, got surprised by a Black Pudding, and died."

Phil Barker once told me that my dungeon "made no sense. What do those monsters eat, anyway?"

So I put a McDonalds on the sixth level.

[Fearghus]

Mar 20, 2015 20:37:24 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

Story is whatever happens, including "this particular group of PCs blundered through a one way door, got surprised by a Black Pudding, and died."

Phil Barker once told me that my dungeon "made no sense. What do those monsters eat, anyway?"

So I put a McDonalds on the sixth level.

Absolutely the kind of approach I am embracing. It is difficult for a spoiled emo kid that was in highschool in the 90's to not take himself seriously.

I accidentally killed a player with a poison trap once and I felt so guilty. It was as if I betrayed them.

[idrahil]

Yes...That's basically what I mean. The encounter and quest with the priest were part of the story...not a "levelling opportunity".

[Zenopus]

Mar 20, 2015 20:22:21 GMT -6 Fearghus said:

What was that popular one where if you didn't have a light you'd be eaten by a grue? I didn't play it a lot, but it was fun.

Zork. And the other Infocom games. I played a bunch of those. Somewhere around here I have a "Lost Treasures of Infocom" CD with most of the games on it.

They call those games "Interactive Fiction" now, and they seem to be going strong these days since there are programs (Twine etc) that aid in writing the games.

[Deleted]

You've brought in other issues, though; modern MMOs are all about the "end game play," so "grinding levels" to get to maximum is seen as a burden to be borne, not an adventure.

[waysoftheearth]

Computers are really good at generating (pseuo-)random numbers and popping up endless rooms/maps/encounters/treasures etc. from random-number-driven algorithms, but they really suck at intuiting "meaningful" connections between these randoms events and the events that have come before. That's what humans are really good at, and it's still one of the principal ways in which pen-and-paper games are (IMHO) "better" than computer games.

If we're going to toss out one of the things a human ref is really good for, then perhaps we should just have a computer ref instead?

[Finarvyn]

Mar 20, 2015 20:37:24 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

Story is whatever happens, including "this particular group of PCs blundered through a one way door, got surprised by a Black Pudding, and died."

Phil Barker once told me that my dungeon "made no sense. What do those monsters eat, anyway?"

So I put a McDonalds on the sixth level.

When I ran my players through my really deep dungeons, I'd always place a Mos Eisley cantina type place around half way down. Total neutral ground and a safe point. Characters could rest and heal, buy and sell magic items, and so on. It also led to some interesting plot twists as they interacted with NPCs, etc.

[cadriel]

For a variety of reasons, a good chunk of my childhood was spent playing games in the Ultima series by Richard Garriott, mostly Ultima IV, V, VI and VII. Ultima grew out of a game called Akalabeth that Garriott, a D&D player in Texas, came up with. Most subsequent RPGs are basically similar to the Ultima series.

Both Akalabeth and the original Ultima game were games with an overworld and a sort of fake-3d dungeon. They actually had some of the resource management elements of D&D, where your character ate food as he roamed about the overworld; in some entries you needed a torch or a Light spell in the dungeons. You played a fighter, wizard, cleric or thief; the class variety would get widest in Ultima III, which had tons of different classes. The first three Ultima games had various demihuman races, mostly recognizable from D&D, that changed your statistics. Ultima IV onward was all human characters.

My favorite, Ultima IV, had a lot of great little subsystems in it that would probably work well in a tabletop game. For instance, magic spells had to be mixed by buying eight reagents (sulfurous ash, garlic, ginseng, black pearl, spider silk, blood moss, and then mandrake and nightshade that you had to find). You then needed to know the spell's formula, so a cure poison spell required garlic and ginseng, while a heal spell used ginseng and spider silk, and fireballs were ash and black pearls. It reminds me of Arneson's spell system in a way, and was one of those resource-management tricks in the game. (In the first game, spells were straight-up purchased.)

The Ultima games were transparently D&D, although from the fourth game onward they had more of an individual identity. Probably the biggest difference was that they only gave you experience for killing monsters, which meant that you had to spend a lot of time fighting to level up. And magic wasn't Vancian at all; Ultima was pretty strict on buying your magic, although it also implemented a "magic point" system in later installments to limit how many spells you could cast between rests. Later computer RPGs mostly got rid of the purchasing aspect, at least for individual uses of a spell.

It's amazing how many people have played games that are basically very similar to D&D over the last three and a half decades, but have all the mechanical stuff done by a computer. Of course, the ones I played when I was a kid were crude in comparison to modern games, and the stories were much less complicated. But what I loved about the Ultima games was that, like good D&D games, they were wide-open sandboxes. Particularly Ultima IV, where you had an ultimate goal (mastering the eight virtues, finding the eight runes, bringing them to the shrines and becoming an Avatar of Virtue, going down into the dungeons to liberate the eight stones, and descending into the Stygian Abyss to find the Codex of Infinite Wisdom) - but how you went about it was up to you, and you had to talk to NPCs and find hints at all the game's puzzles and quirks. Very few games were so beautifully open in their play.

Anyway, yep, it was D&D, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

[scottenkainen]

OD&D reminds me of Alternate Reality - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_%28series%29. You're walking between shops in the city and -- a dragon pops up and attacks! Classic.

~Scott "-enkainen" Casper

[dukeofchutney]

in general i'd say that DnD is has probably had a great influence on the design of video games than any other game. The basic premise of a player pretending to be a fictional character represented by stats that adventures in a game world if i am not mistaken originates in DnD.

I play quite a bit of nethack which as far as i can tell is DnD (not sure if it uses the Advanced original or basic rules) if the gm was a random number generator and you were a solo party.

[Deleted]

Both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest (by Enix, not the P&P RPG) rode on the success of the Japanese translation of OD&D, and Sword World (an early Japanase D&D clone).

Especially Dragon Quest has a look and feel particularly inspired by Western fantasy fiction, making the overall experience very similar to playing a western S&S RPG.

[Finarvyn]

I realized that my comment really didn't address the theme of the thread. :-(

I agree that early computer games were highly based on OD&D. The first one I can recall ever playing was called "Adventure" (I think) and was a text-based game where you ran around a dungeon picking up items and killing monsters.

The first graphic-based computer game I can recall was called "Rogue" and you moved your icon (a smiley face) around a dungeon exploring and fighting monsters. The monsters were letters of the alphabet and magical items (potions scrolls, wands, magic weapons, etc) were various symbols found on a QWERTY keyboard. I loved Rogue becasue it was simple. It tracked your hit points, leveled you up as you played, and your score was totally based on gold found.

Both of these games clearly had roots in OD&D.

[Deleted]

Mar 21, 2015 10:20:09 GMT -6 scottenkainen said:

OD&D reminds me of Alternate Reality - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_%28series%29. You're walking between shops in the city and -- a dragon pops up and attacks! Classic.

~Scott "-enkainen" Casper

I've never seen something that ludicrous in a D&D game, and would burst out laughing if I did. But I never played with a 14 year old as the referee.

The best experience I ever had playing a computer fantasy game is almost as good as the worst experience I've ever had at the tabletop.

[geoffrey]

Mar 21, 2015 17:25:15 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

The best experience I ever had playing a computer fantasy game is almost as good as the worst experience I've ever had at the tabletop.

This reinforces my lack of desire to play computer games. I've never played one. Decades ago I played some video games (at arcades and Intellivision on the TV).

[Fearghus]

I recently uninstalled steam and battle.net from my computer. The result is that I am now fiending on here and some other boards. Anyway, for those interested in attempting a game that is somewhat OD&D like I highly recommend "Mount and Blade: Warband". The control's require practice, and it is not high fantasy. But it is a fun novelty. An actual pencil and paper game is more fun. Another that I found to be fun was War of the Roses. Sadly development stopped so there are some silly aspects to the game, and some developer "cleverness" for which I do not care.

[rastusburne]

Mar 21, 2015 18:57:55 GMT -6 geoffrey said:

Mar 21, 2015 17:25:15 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

The best experience I ever had playing a computer fantasy game is almost as good as the worst experience I've ever had at the tabletop.

This reinforces my lack of desire to play computer games. I've never played one. Decades ago I played some video games (at arcades and Intellivision on the TV).

The good thing about computer games is you are not reliant on the schedules of others (unless you're playing a game of DOTA or something with some friends). You can jump on anytime. It's largely an escapist pursuit and great to unwind. But it's certainly not D&D. I view te two as entirely different past-times. The essentil element of D&D is people. While playing an online game with people may be fun, it's not quite the same as being in the same room as them at a table.

Regarding OP, there is a very close relationship between computer games and D&D, absolutely. I'd even go as far to say that most CRPG design was inspired by D&D.