dnd

The Game of Dungeons, or “dnd” as it’s more commonly called, was developed by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood while they were college students at Southern Illinois University. It was developed on PLATO, the University of Illinois’ proto internet / computing platform. It’s major influence is a previous PLATO game; The Dungeon aka pedit5. The Dungeon is widely held to be the first CRPG but it was often deleted from PLATO because it wasn’t an approved use of system resources. dnd however survived because Ray Wood was a PLATO administrator. This institutional recognition gave dnd a much longer life and it was continuously developed for years after the initial release.

If the local system admin didn’t think what you were doing was appropriate or worthwhile, he would delete your program. So, Pedit5 would be deleted about once a week, and then Russ would have to figure a way around the system admin to put the game back on-line. Pedit5 would disappear for weeks at a time. […] Since we were tired of Pedit5 getting deleted all the time, Gary and I started writing the game.

Gameplay Screenshots

You can see some gameplay screenshots in the gallery below. All screenshots are from the game as it was in 1977.

Superficially dnd is similar to The Dungeon but with a lot more content and several innovations of it’s own, most notably the introduction of a “boss” monster. The term boss wasn’t used at the time but the idea was to include a powerful guardian near the end of the game. The boss in dnd was the “Golden Dragon”. To win dnd the player was invited to retrieve an orb from the bottom of the dungeon and then escape without dying.

“if the orb is worth anything, then something really neat has to defend it.” So, we put the orb into a “treasure room” and decided to stack a bunch of smaller monsters on top of a really big monster in the treasure room directly in front of “the orb”. The character had to defeat 30 smaller monsters before confronting the “Golden Dragon” – a monster with probably 1,000,000 hit points.

The reasoning here for adding a boss is quite interesting, it’s to give worth to an item by virtue of a challenging battle. The boss also ties into the general fantasy mythos; dragons guard treasure, heros slay dragons. The Dungeon also had a difficult dragon monster but it was just another encounter and could be enountered multiple times. In dnd, the Golden Dragon, is a singular entity that must be defeated to win the game.

The nature of the PLATO system meant that the code for dnd lived on a central server and was played via relatively dumb terminals. Therefore releasing a new version of dnd was simply a matter of updating the code on the server. This kind of system makes active development of a released game natural and allows the game to evolve according to player feedback. Players that enjoyed playing dnd had plenty of suggestions and they were encouraged to write down their ideas in a shared file.

we had a notefile where the users could write comments (and they wrote a lot of them) and we listened to what they told us, and we actively answered their questions and discussed their ideas too. I think the high level of feedback from the users is one of the things which really helped PLATO games get better fast.

Dirk Pellett was an enthusiastic player of dnd who became a developer, later joined by his brother Flint. What is particularly interesting about this cooperation was that the Pellett brothers never physically met with Ray or Gary. The cooperation was entirely remote and virtual.

The odd thing is, I’ve never met Gary or Ray anywhere at any time, as far as I know. I was at a different college hundreds of miles away. I just loved their game as it stood and made a ton of suggestions for things I thought it ‘needed’ – and they liked the suggestions enough to give me access (and authority) to edit the game any way I wanted and essentially take over the development on it. […] you could say the roof and walls and foundation of dnd are all theirs, and the window dressing and furniture is mostly mine and Flint’s.

dnd continued to be developed all the way up 80s when the PLATO system started to be decommissioned. As development progressed more and more features were added including expanding the win conditions from finding an orb to also finding a grail. This on-going development demonstrates one of the many strengths of the PLATO but unfortunately it makes it harder to date specific features and influences. The version of dnd as it was originally released seems lost.

Gameplay Video

This youtube shows some of gameplay itself. This is the 5.4 version from 1977 by Spillhistorie.no.

Systems

Due to the continuous development of dnd over several years, it’s hard to comment on the systems as they were in 1974. There is a version of game as of 1977 also known as the 5.4 release so this section will briefly cover the state of the game systems at that time.

The basic systems are the same as The Dungeon, you create a character and delve into a premade dungeon to fight monsters and find treasure. You can exit the dungeon to refresh your spells and continue playing another time. There’s an “online” leaderboard showing highscores. Death is permanent and the game is expected to be replayed numerous times as you learn it’s systems.

There’s interview with the creators below recorded by RPG Fanatic.

Unlike The Dungeon, the dungeon of dnd has multiple levels. Multiple levels make the game feel more immersive but bring their own problems. The first problem to address is how the player descends from one level to the next. dnd has a novel solution to this; they had “transporters” i.e. something that teleports the player to the next level. I assume this is to make descending a level a one way process, you teleport down to the lower level but then cannot go back.

The Game of Dungeons has a lot going on, there are innovations for the genre from the original realease, the 5.4 release in 1977 and the 8.0 release that was still being worked on in the 80s.

Character Creation

The basic stats are: Dexterity, Wisdom, Strength, and Intelligence. Intelligence is occasionally referred to as IQ. The character creation state allows you to reroll these stats as much as you want before starting a new adventure.

Strength is used in the combat simulation and determines how much gold you can lug around the dungeon.

Dexterity helps when fleeing from monsters, opening chests that may be trapped and dodging your own spells if they backfire.

Intelligence helps with magic spells whereas Wisdom helps with clerical ones.

In addition to these stats the game also tracks gold, experience points, levels, hitpoints, magic and cleric spell points.

Dev Tools

CRPGs are complicated beasts and have lots of content. For small games this content can be hard coded; items, events, maps, monsters and so on but tooling can make content creation far easier. The maps in dnd where unwieldy to hand-code. The map itself was repsented by an array of bytes, each one defining a location. The byte’s value would determine the walls of each side of the map location. This kind of representation means levels have to be designed on paper and manually encoded into bytes by the programmer before being copied into the source code. A byte on PLATO is 6 bits which differs to a modern byte with 8 bits.

Gary wrote a visual maze editor that did all of the work. A maze editor sounds so trivial today, but a maze editor was a quantum leap. With the maze editor, anyone could design a level of the dungeon in 10 to 15 minutes instead of two or three hours.

Balance

The Dungeon was a game with a single level, dnd added a second level and later this would increase even more. Multiple levels meant the monsters could be arranged by difficultly according to how deep they appeared in the dungeon. These kind of considerations led to a more balanced game than the The Dungeon.

We kept tweaking the combat portion of the game trying to create a system that was “fair”. A level 6 explorer should have a 50-50 chance of defeating a level 6 monster, and perhaps a 25% chance of defeating a level 8 monster and a 1% chance of beating a level 10 monster. (Interestingly, people would complain if a level 1 monster killed their level 6 character, but would never complain if their level 6 character killed a level 11 monster. So, “fair” is a relative term.

According to the manual creature encounters become more likely if you’re carrying a lot of gold. This increases the pressure to try and find an exit when you start to find a lot of loot. If manage to find the Orb, it acts in more the same way as carrying a lot of gold.

Events

The game occasionally presents the player with a special event. For instance, a monster may offer to retreat provided the player gives them all their gold. Semi-random events are a basic mechanic but they hint at a future where world building and story can be told in a non-linear way well suited to computer games. dnd predates “Choose your own adventure books” so these mechanics are quite novel for the time.

There may have been even more of these events, it would be interesting to know.

Fatigue

When they found a treasure chest with more gold in it that they could carry (“Overloaded!”), so I devised a system where they could carry double the normal amount, but get TIRED the longer they carried it, and be forced to drop a little with each step unless they stopped to rest every couple of steps (which meant more chances of monsters attacking them). I don’t think any game had fatigue in it before that, and it was certainly nothing that I got from any other game I had played.

Later the developer’s added another layer to design to the inventory / weight management system where player’s could “save” piles of coins on some level of the dungeon to come back and loot later. This stash data wasn’t persisted across different play sessions in it’s first implementation but it was implemented in later versions.

I also added the option to STASH your gold. You had to throw protective spells on it, so it wasn’t free, but you could return to the same place in the dungeon and find it back – at least if you remembered where it was, and didn’t exit the game in the meanwhile, since it didn’t save the information with your 240 bits of character info that we saved.

Shops

One of the central gameplay loops, especially in early CRPGs, was getting loot to buy better equipment to enable you to get even more loot. Before you can have this kind of gameplay loop you need the concept of a shop. dnd was the first game to add this.

We added Shops: an alchemy shop for potions and an armory that let you buy items, paying from the gold you were carrying or from your stash IF your stash was on level 1 of the dungeon.

Shops were not in the original version of dnd but a later addition during it’s development.

Combat

Combat is almost the same as The Dungeon, you choose to fight, cast a spell or flee. If you choose to fight it’s to the death and resolves instantly. There are no rounds of combat.

You can find better weapons and bits of armour while exploring. On finding an item, you get the option to pick it up and then it’s automatically equipped replacing whatever was there before.

Unlike The Dungeon which only had a magic sword, dnd has magic rings, boots, helms and so on. Armor items generally help reduce the damage you take and increase the amount you deal.

Certain monsters are immune to some spells, such as Undead being immune to charm for instance. The power of spells is determined using your level and stats.

Advancement

The advancement system uses experience points and gold separately. Gold and XP is tracked in two ways - you have a local amount the character carrys, then when you find a dungeon exit the local amount is removed and added to a global amount. In dnd version 5.4, gold cannot be spent, it is solely used to advance your character.

For every 4000 pieces of gold you take out of the dungeon your maximum hitpoints are raised by 1. For every 10k of gold you get an extra magic spell point, for every 16k of gold you get an cleric spell point.

Levels are determined by experience, not gold. Your level is your experience points divided by 10,000, rounded down. Your level is used in the combat simulation for both melee and spells. Your level is only changed on exiting the dungeon.

Gold and experience points don’t improve the characters stats. The only way to improve stats is via in-game items and many of those items may also reduce them. Books found in the dungeon can raise stats (or lower them). The books maybe stat locked, if you do have a high enough IQ stat, then the book won’t do anything. Potions last forever or for the current dungeon excursion depending on which is found. They may increase stats and spell points. They can also give experience points.

I like this system of advancement, at least in theory, there’s a sense of a delayed pay-off and risk. You might find a cache of gold deep in the dungeon. The player is excited they’ve found this gold and that excitment is a reward on it’s own but there’s also immediately a new challenge. The player must get the gold out of the dungeon and then they’ll get rewarded in game with new hitpoints. The player now feels a certain sense of tension they want to get out of the dungeon alive to get rewarded.

Influence

It’s hard to date specific features but it was particularly influential on Moria.

The games has “orange glop” and “roving sludge” which makes one wonder if this might be the origin of the “Slime” enemy so popular in JRPGs. (Dragon Warrior being inspired by Wizardry which was inspired by Oubliette which was inspired by Moria and other PLATO RPGs.). I haven’t traced it through but it’s an interesting thought.