D&D Meets the Electronic Age

[Deleted]

One summer ('85 or '86 I think), I had used my Commodore 64 to create a BASIC program that would allow me to quickly generate NPC parties, or any character really. I had been doing a lot of the solo dungeon generation from the DMG, as I was in a realm of no chums to game with at the time. I had allowed it to generate full classes, races and levels as a whole at random, or I could enter specifics if desired. It even generated common and magical items, and henchmen if needed.

At least that was the way it was supposed to work. I had rewritten the code 8 times (as I learned how to program more effectively), and was in the final process of linking the subroutines for generating magic items to the classes when the motherboard fried. One summer mostly lost.

I was determined at that point to get a 'real' computer next time, so I never pursued replacing the C64.

[krusader74]

Hunt the Wumpus is a hide-and-seek format computer game. It was a text-adventure with a simple command-line interface. It was written in BASIC by Gregory Yob around 1972. There is prior art on which it was based. But these older games used a cartesian grid as a map, whereas Hunt the Wumpus used the graph of a dodecahedron as its map, giving it an exotic topology:





There is an article on the origin of the game by Gregory Yob.

[krusader74]

The PLATO computer system was developed at the University of Illinois starting around 1960. It was way ahead of its time. While other computers still used punch cards, PLATO had plasma screens and touch screens in 1964, sound cards in 1972, emoticons in 1973, and forums and chat in 1973. It was designed as a classroom instruction aid. It used a high-level language called TUTOR in which "authors" wrote "lessons" (their jargon for programmers writing code). While these "lessons" were literally supposed to be lessons intended for classroom use, "authors" soon began producing video games.

The very first computerized dungeon crawl ever was pedit5, a PLATO "lesson" by Rusty Rutherford. Released in winter 1975, pedit5 was a roguelike game. Unfortunately, sysadmins kept on deleting it, since it wasn't truly a lesson, and so there are no existing copies today. There is a short article about the creation of pedit5 by Rusty Rutherford.

The next computerized dungeon crawl was dnd, another PLATO "lesson" by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood. The story is: this guy they knew went to a game convention in 1974 and came back with a copy of D&D. They started playing the tabletop game. Then in late 1974 they started coding it as a PLATO "lesson." Like pedit5, dnd was a roguelike game and supported "group play." Like later arcade games, it tracked high scores. Like modern FRPGs, it featured a "boss fight" at the end of a level. Gary and Ray were at Southern Illinois University, which only had one PLATO terminal. One of them was a sysadmin, so unlike pedit5, dnd never got deleted from the network. Over the years they continued to make improvements and add levels. The dungeon eventually had about 20 levels. After Gary and Ray left SIU, development of the game was taken over by the brothers Dirk and Flint Pellett. By late 1976, dnd had 100,000 logons. By the time the PLATO system was decommisioned in the late 80s, it had millions of logons.

There is an in depth interview with dnd's authors at the RPG Fanatc's website.

Here is a collage of screenshots of the game from that article and from Wikipedia:



There is also video interview with Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood on youtube:



I haven't tried it yet, but cyber1.org has working PLATO terminals and supposedly lets you play dnd.

[captainjapan]

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 I just started reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner, on your recommendation I think, but now I want to know even more about this:



I read the footnote about it, in your book. That was the most information I've ever seen about this D&D variant.

For anyone interested, this game was half the inspiration for the first text Adventure (Colossal Cave). The author was a student of one of the ARPANET guys. William Crowther, and perhaps Dave Lebling of Zork, played this version of D&D. Combat was minimized in favor of mapping and puzzle-solving, is what I understand.

I would kill to see this released, like the VanGrasstek dungeon game, but any more info would be awesome.



Is anybody here from the Boston area; who knows if there was a local variant as notorious as Warlock was, in southern California?

[Deleted]

Ahh, PLATO - weekly computer game night at Sangamon State University in Springfield, IL 1980 or so...

[increment]

Aug 13, 2020 12:16:51 GMT -6 captainjapan said:

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I would kill to see this released, like the VanGrasstek dungeon game, but any more info would be awesome.

Let me make some inquiries about that. From a rights perspective, Mirkwood Tales is extremely Tolkien-suffused, which is one of the reasons I imagine it never saw a release. The referee is supposed to think about "the unexplored paths from the Lord of the Rings" and build adventures around them.

MT is one of the things I keep in my "Forgotten Variants" pile. 67 page rulebook, about half of it (pg38 onward) is skill/spell lists basically. If there's any confusion about whether Dave Lebling was involved in the campaign, he was (he played "Luke", as I mention in PatW). The example dialog is super long (page 8-17). Much like 1st print T&T, it has a page or so overview of what the monsters might be, without actually specifying them.

The Boston variants that were arguably as famous as Warlock are mostly out of MIT: there were eight pages of house rules for the Goree campaign in Wild Hunt #11, say.

[Deleted]

These very early computer rpgs are fascinating to me. About the oldest games I've played of this type are Ultima and Wizardry, though I fell in love with more modern roguelikes and text based games later, and of course I have a lot of love for things like Dwarf Fortress and AI Dungeon, which give us little glimpses of how computers may DM a living world in the years to come.

Out of curiosity, because I've never came across them, are any of the games mentioned in this thread available for download anywhere in the modern age?

[Zenopus]

On the Zenopus Archives, a post about my early adventures in text-based computer games, and the new book "50 Years of Text Games" by Aaron A. Reed, which I recently received and have started reading:

zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2023/07/50-years-of-text-games-by-aaron-reed.html

[DungeonDevil]

My family programmed our very early-model home computer in BASIC to run Moonlander (1980?), but I never had the brains nor patience at that age to program something like Pac-Man (which would have been far more interesting).

Out of curiosity, because I've never came across them, are any of the games mentioned in this thread available for download anywhere in the modern age?

+1

[Parzival]

Wow, I’m glad this thread got resurrected.

I first began programming on a Trash-80 at high school (we had Model IIs, and then a much time-coveted Model III with two floppy disk drives!) An upperclassman I got to know taught himself Assembler and created a text adventure game for the TRS-80 (and similar Z80 machines) which he released commercially. I can’t recall the game’s name, but his “company” was Swallow Software (the bird), because his last name was Soileau— pronounced like the bird’s name.

I wrote a much simpler text adventure game in BASIC for the TRS-80, which stored the data for the game on disk and loaded different collections of rooms based on “choke-points” I had created. When the player made it past a choke-point, the rooms in memory were dropped and the new collection was loaded (it worked both ways so you could go back and forth seamlessly.) The game play was a little too simplistic, though a few of my puzzles were quite good. Later I rewrote the whole thing in ZBASIC on my Mac Plus, revising and updating the puzzles and released it as shareware on AOL’s old pre-WWW forums. I received one check! (If you ever found or played The Crown Jewels of Yelrisia, that’s my game. And you owe me fifteen bucks. )

Not long ago I acquired a C64 “faux” Commodore 64 retro computer (actually an emulator on a Raspberry Pi board, I believe). I’ve been writing a text adventure game in CBASIC for that, though much simpler in rooms and items than other stuff— I haven’t attempted my “choke point” loading system on it. At the moment I’m fighting the horrible “garbage collection” glitch of CBASIC, faithfully reproduced by the emulator.

[krusader74]

CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Masters' Assistants

When I read about CALYPSO a few days ago, I debated whether to post about it over in the Anyone else playing with Chat GPT? thread or here in this thread. I decided to post here because I'm evaluating CALYPSO based on (what ought to be called) the Krebs' criterion:

The micro computer has its place in role playing gaming as long as its limitations are understood, and the human programmer remembers that his duty is in creativity [emphasis mine], while the computer can and should only speed up the mechanics.

—Rick Krebs, "D&D Meets the Electronic Age," Dragon (Issue 26 - Jun 1979), p. 26

On the arXiv pre-print server, there's an 11-page academic paper about using ChatGPT as a co-DM for D&D by a bunch of UPenn Ph.D.s. Here's the abstract:

The role of a Dungeon Master, or DM, in the game Dungeons & Dragons is to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. The DM must digest information about the game setting and monsters, synthesize scenes to present to other players, and respond to the players' interactions with the scene. Doing all of these tasks while maintaining consistency within the narrative and story world is no small feat of human cognition, making the task tiring and unapproachable to new players. Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have shown remarkable abilities to generate coherent natural language text. In this paper, we conduct a formative evaluation with DMs to establish the use cases of LLMs in D&D and tabletop gaming generally. We introduce CALYPSO, a system of LLM-powered interfaces that support DMs with information and inspiration specific to their own scenario. CALYPSO distills game context into bite-sized prose and helps brainstorm ideas without distracting the DM from the game. When given access to CALYPSO, DMs reported that it generated high-fidelity text suitable for direct presentation to players, and low-fidelity ideas that the DM could develop further while maintaining their creative agency. We see CALYPSO as exemplifying a paradigm of AI-augmented tools that provide synchronous creative assistance within established game worlds, and tabletop gaming more broadly.

Analysis

Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. It decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.

—Kyle, The Terminator (1984)

IMHO, the core duty of the DM is to create interesting encounters, describe these encounters to the players as imaginatively as he can, and then referee the players' interactions with them in an optimally fun way.

CALYPSO is a Discord bot with 3 interfaces:

1. A GPT-3 interface for generating the setup text describing an encounter
2. A ChatGPT interface in which the DM can ask questions about an encounter or refine an encounter summary
3. An interface for players to engage directly with ChatGPT acting as a fantasy creature knowledgeable about D&D

CALYPSO's author, Andrew Zhu, previously wrote Avrae, a Discord bot with the following feature set:

• Advanced Dice Roller
• Character Sheet Integration
• Initiative Tracking

In Rick Krebs' terms:

• Avrae simply speeds up game mechanics
• CALYPSO doesn't simply speed up game mechanics, it substitutes AI for the DM's creativity

In his 1981 book Simulacres et Simulation, Jean Baudrillard outlines 4 stages of simulation (or copying or making derivative works). I thought about these 4 stages as they apply to the evolution of D&D starting from the original 1974 game:

1. The faithful copy: I think Holmes Basic and Moldvay Basic neatly fall into this stage.
2. The unfaithful copy: IMHO 2E and 3E had too many rules and rule books, and they over-complicated a simple rules-lite system with too many subsystems like feats and skills.
3. The copy that pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original: 4E wasn't D&D so much as a pen-and-paper simulation of a fantasy computer roleplaying game. It was D&D by/for a new generation of people who didn't even know what D&D was!
4. Pure simulacrum with no relation to reality whatsoever: Discord+CALYPSO is an AI enhanced PBP; and AI Dungeon is a ChatGPT-3 generated/DM'd single-/multi-player RPG. LLMs are used to copy-and-paste D&D text fragments together in novel/random ways. But neither of these games are really D&D anymore. It's like having this guy ru(i)n your game:

In the 21st century, a weapon will be invented like no other. This weapon will be powerful, versatile and indestructible. It can't be reasoned with. It can't be bargained with. It will feel no pity. No remorse. No pain. No fear. It will have only one purpose: to return to the present and prevent the future. This weapon will be called...The Terminator.

Digression

BTW, "CALYPSO" is an excellent name choice for this AI. Like the "dread goddess" in Homer's Odyssey (Hom. Od. 7.240), after Zeus splinters your tabletop with his lightning bolt, and your crew of players perish, and your creativity is crushed, then this AI can provide you with counterfeit comfort and companionship, but also with a sense of alienation and exile. CALYPSO can seduce you with her charms and promises, but also delay and detain you from your true goal of playing a paper-and-pencil tabletop RPG face-to-face with a group of real flesh-and-blood human beings, a fistful of polyhedral dice, and a hefty set of old lignin-scented rule books.



In the painting "Odysseus and Calypso" (1883) by Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), shown in the article Homer's Odyssey in paintings: 2 The Sirens, Calypso and Nausicaä, homesick Odysseus stares off into the distance, plotting his escape from the barren island of Ogygia and an empty, unfulfilling relationship with Calypso.

References

AI Dungeon, a text adventure game which uses GPT-3 to generate content

Avrae, a Discord bot written by Andrew Zhu

CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Masters' Assistants (15 Aug 2023) by Andrew Zhu, et al, arXiv pre-print

CALYPSO source code, GitHub repository

Interview with Andrew Zhu about CALYPSO at the Register

Glossary of abbreviations

CALYPSO ("Collaborative Assistant for Lore and Yielding Plot Synthesis Objectives"), a Discord bot built on ChatGPT-3

LLM ("Large language model"), the use of large neural networks for language modeling

GPT ("Generative pre-trained transformer"), a type of artificial intelligence language model

[Parzival]

Today’s “AIs” (which are not actual AIs) really boil down to: “Lookit what I found on the Internet!”

Oh, and for the record, there is (and can be) no such thing as a computer random number generator. Computers function solely according to mathematical formulae. Mathematical formulae cannot produce random results (else they would not be formulae). Thus, all a computer can do is create the appearance of randomness. Even an AI can’t create a true random number generator. (Though, what you could do is build a computer-operated device to roll, scan and return the results of physical dice.)

Even computers gotta roll them bones.

“Take a chance.”— Lieutenant Vansen, to an AI. Space: Above and Beyond


EDIT: Blatantly obvious homonym error. 

[Deleted]

Aug 22, 2023 19:02:37 GMT -6 Parzival said:

Today’s “AIs” (which are not actual AIs) really boil down to: “Lookit what I found on the Internet!”

Oh, and for the record, there is (and can be) no such thing as a computer random number generator. Computers function solely according to mathematical formulae. Mathematical formulae cannot produce random results (else they would not be formulae). Thus, all a computer can do is create the appearance of randomness. Even an AI can’t create a true random number generator. (Though, what you could do is build a computer-operated device to roll, scan and return the results of physical dice.)

Even computers gotta role them bones.

“Take a chance.”— Lieutenant Vansen, to an AI. Space: Above and Beyond

And we're still interested in player agency or at least the uncomplained over illusion of such - roll the bones.