DND (Lawrence)

DND is a game that was originally developed for the PDP-11 by Daniel Lawrence in 1976. It appears to be strongly inspired by the PLATO game of same name and shares a lot of features. The heritage of the game is covered very well in this article over at CRPG addict.

Here are Lawrence’s own comments on the origin of the game:

DND as a game evolved from a simple beginning showing where your character was and grew, adding creatures, specials, better displays in response to the suggestions of the players at the ENAD (engineering administration building) at Purdue where I was a freshmen. That summer I took it home and ported it to the Decsystem-10, which is the version that ended up getting handed around so much.

Here is a gameplay video of the 1984 PC release:

The game is character based, originally using a relative of ASCII known as DEC Radix-50. The character is represented by an X which the player can move around one of three pre-authored dungeons.

The game departs from PLATO’s dnd in a few ways, starting with character stats. Lawrence’s DND adds Charisma and Constition, more closely matching it’s tabletop namesake. Character creation invites the player to choose a class from

• Fighter
• Cleric
• Magic User

This, again, more closely matches tabletop D&D that uses the same roster, although it uses the name “Fighting Man” in lieu of “Fighter”. On PLATO both dnd and The Dungeon eschewed classes in favor of a single character that both cast spells and fights.

The game presents the player with a choice of three dungeons to explore:

• Telengard
• Svhenk’s Lair
• Lamorte

This is a choice that previous games hadn’t given. It’s interesting to consider as a design choice. When a player first plays the game, they’re making a totally uninformed decision and would probably choose the first option, not knowing what the choice meant. Thematically the existance of three dungeons suggestion a wider world and the names themselves are pretty good and evocative. Later RPGs that give the player a world map and a choice of destinations are actively demonstrate there is a world here to explore. Mechanically having three dungeons isn’t that impactful but I’m sure players of the time were grateful for the content.

Combat improves on dnd by introducing a turn-by-turn system instead of resolving combat in an instant. The player chooses an action from:

• Fight
• Cast
• Evade

Then the enemy and character perform that action and loop restarts asking the player what combat action they’d like to take. This means the player can see that they’re doing poorly and attempt to flee, which is an improvement on dnd where choosing fight means you may instantly die, no matter how prepared you were.

Win Condition

The game’s goal is the same as in the PLATO dnd, delve to the bottom of a dungeon to bring back an orb. The game has three Dungeons and the orb could be in any.

Legacy

Even if Lawrence was heavily inspired by the PLATO games there are innovations here. The game was ported to a number of different systems and there was more scope to be influential than the more cloistered PLATO world. DND was used as the basis for Telengard, a game Lawrence released on the Commodore PET.

Class System - classes existed in D&D but this appears to be the first game to let the player chose a class for their character.