How D&D Shaped the Modern Videogame

PC Gamer UK, via the CVG site, has a feature up on the influence Dungeons and Dragons had on the development of videogaming. The role D&D has had in inspiring gamers is fairly well known; Masters of Doom chronicles the inspiration the Johns' campaign had on the creation of Doom and Quake. The article discusses more recent confluences of the tabletop game and videogame development, such as Obsidian's use of pen-and-paper to develop the early areas of Neverwinter Nights 2. Ideas for the late, lamented, Fallout 3 were sparked by a number of tabletop roleplaying moments from developer campaigns.

Re:Imagine that..

[ToxikFetus]

They helped me in school early on learning Math, giving me a solid foundation to build on.

Solid foundation? I swear you need a freaking PhD in Mathematics to figure out what the hell THAC0 means!

Nerd: My armor class just went negative, w00t!
Bystander: Huh?

AC -10 award

[tepples]

Nerd: My armor class just went negative, w00t!
Bystander: Huh?

"AC -10" means you're playing GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 and camping the body armor.

Re:Imagine that..

[Lithdren]

Yeah, Thac0 is rather complicated.

For those of you who dont know, Thac0 is the number your character must roll in a 20 sided dice to hit an Armor Class (AC) of 0.

If your AC is 5, and my Thaco is 15, I need to roll a 10 or better (15-5). If your AC is -5, I need to roll a 20 (15-(-5)). 20 always hits, 1 always misses.

Personally, yeah, i'd consider that a good foundation. :P

Re:HP

[Feanturi]

you say "Ow." and you might go woozy or you might get emotional or some part of your body might not work right

Call of Cthulhu the PC game handles this very well. While you do have a form of hitpoints on your character sheet (an EKG), your real indicators of your state are the blurred vision that gets worse with additional damage, blood spatter in your view, vision slowly going white from blood-loss, controls that stop working quite correctly, labored breathing, and the slow shuffle of walking on a broken leg with that horrible little crunching noise with each step. Insanity-inducing events or locations pull in some of these elements as well, such as the vision problems, breathing, and loss of movement control. All in all, the game is downright heart-pounding at various points throughout.

Re:HP

[Qzukk]

and he sketched out a system (in the context of a true medieval RPG) where each limb would have its own status: broken, different levels of bleeding, etc.

Phantasie III on the C64 (I think there was a PC version as well, amongst others) had that kind of a system. In addition to hit points, your limbs, chest, and head could be "injured" "broken" or "gone", with obvious implications for losing your head or body. It led to interesting battles, where I'd have characters with two broken arms continuing to fight because they still had most of their hitpoints and I needed to conserve the appropriate level of potion (IIRC, Potion 3 would heal 60hp and either 2 broken limbs or one lost limb). As far as actual gameplay went, it didn't really add or detract anything significant, it just made it different.

Re:What if TSR had patented "hit points?"

[Jimmy_B]

What if TSR had patented "hit points?" Or, "the idea that one hit doesn't kill the player"?

Fortunately, such things are not patentable. They would have if they could, and in fact, they pissed a lot of people off by trying to enforce a trademark on hit points. (They asked people to use "hits to kill" instead, which never caught on). They also sent takedown notices to various fan sites for fan-created but D&D-related content, and claimed copyright over some things that they'd obviously copied from mythology. TSR was everything that Slashdot loves to hate, and the hate contributed to their eventual demise.

Re:D&D Was great back in the day...not so much

[CrashPoint]

Before it was a simple game now theres like 75 books you have to buy if you want to understand the rules.

If by "75" you mean "between one and three", sure. The Player's Handbook is the only "required" book. The DM's Guide and Monster Manual make things easier but are not strictly necessary - you can run a perfectly good game without them. Everything else is purely optional. This, by the way, is exactly how it was in the older editions, so nothing has changed in that respect.

Also, the rules in 3rd Edition are actually a lot simpler, saner, and more streamlined than in 1st or 2nd.

Full Sail

[Anonymous Coward]

All you need to know about this: There is a class at Full Sail, the world's top video game design school, called Rules of the Game. It talks about how all games - from card games to D&D to video games, are all based on the same principles. Best game design class I've ever had.

The instructor? Dave Arneson, co-creator, Dungeons and Dragons.

Re:HP

[Thangodin]

Hit points allows for gradual damage, allowing you to change strategy, withdraw, etc. Limb damage takes you out of the fight, instant kills make for an unplayable game, and auto-recovery unless you take a lot of damage quickly is just too unrealistic--particularly when the damage is done by bullets. What the hit point system does is give you reaction time.

In any case, the hit point system did not reflect actual damage, but exhaustion, bruising, blood loss from superficial wounds, disorientation, etc. The final blow or two did the actual damage. This works better when the combat is swords and sorcery. But as a friend pointed out to me, bullets do one of three things: kill you, maim you, or almost nothing. Yes, there are soldiers who've been shot six times and still kept fighting. This friend was a military historian told me about a Canadian soldier in a peace-keeping mission who got hit five times (once in the mouth--he spit the bullet out with a couple of teeth.) It all depends on where you're hit--the first hit could kill. Melee is different, since most wounds tend to be superficial until you're too tired to dodge or fend off the killing blow.

WOW

[mshurpik]

The fact that I played pen-and-paper D&D (and Ultima for PC) as a kid explains why I can't get anywhere near a game of World of Warcraft. I actually had a 19-year-old try to explain to me that in WOW, mage armor is weak and thiefs are stealthy. I was like...this is new to you?

Not only is WOW a carbon copy of the "generic D&D-based RPG", but it owes its success, apparently, to the fact that most of its users are unfamiliar with the source material. What WOW adds to D&D, is the group dynamics of a 30-member campaign party, and if you want to see how that works, the South Park WOW episode is pretty accurate. (In short, the illusion of teamwork gradually gives way to a system that is pretty mechanical.)

Re:HP

[XxtraLarGe]

Deus Ex also had such a system. The body parts were each arm, leg, trunk & head. If your arms were injured, you'd be less effective with melee weapons, and finally you couldn't even wield a weapon. If your legs were seriously injured, you could only crawl. Take too much head damage, you're dead no matter what.