dnd is a computer role-playing game written in the TUTOR programming language for the PLATO System by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood at Southern Illinois University in 1974 and 1975. Dirk Pellett of Iowa State University and Flint Pellett of University of Illinois made substantial enhancements to the game from 1976 to 1985. The name dnd is derived from the abbreviation "DND" (D&D) for the original role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which was first published in 1974.
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Origins
dnd was probably the third dungeon crawl game written for PLATO. The first such game, known as pedit5, was deleted just a few months after it was created. The second game, m199h, was created in a lesson unit (i.e., space on a fixed drive) reserved for foreign language instruction. It was similarly deleted as soon as the illicit program was discovered. dnd was the first PLATO lesson space created for the express purpose of being a dungeon game.
The Game
In dnd, a player would create a character and then venture into the multi-level Whisenwood Dungeon in search of treasure and the famous 'orb'. The dungeon was populated by an assortment of monsters and treasures. The game implemented many of the basic concepts of Dungeons & Dragons.
Teleporters moved characters between dungeon levels (especially the Excelsior Transporter, which first appeared in dnd on PLATO). High level monsters, similar to bosses in other games, are found at the end of each dungeon. Leaving the dungeon allows one to recuperate and regain spells and return later. Traditionally in D&D (the paper-and-pencil game), a large dungeon or campaign would end with a confrontation with a dragon or perhaps some other powerful monster, which would be guarding the largest treasure find in the game. In this game, a Dragon assumes this role, guarding an Orb. If the character defeated the Golden Dragon, retrieved the Orb and made it out of the dungeon, the character would be retired to the Elysian Fields, and the character's name recorded on the game server.
Version history
Subsequent revisions of the game added more dungeons, such as The Caverns and The Tomb, with different creatures guarding different treasures (such as the Grim Reaper guarding The Fountain), and the player had to obtain both The Orb and The Grail to win. Also, many different types of miscellaneous treasures were added over the years, with their icons added to the game's original graphical display. Later PLATO games, such as avatar, oubliette, baradur, moria, dndworld, bnd, and sorcery, were heavily influenced by dnd (and each other) while adding innovative features of their own, from 1976 to 1979. Some games on non-PLATO computers were directly derived from dnd and other PLATO games by authors who copied the PLATO versions (in particular, the non-PLATO game named "dnd" with its goal of finding "the orb"), while other games, such as Rogue, were most likely independently created several years later. The game proved enormously popular on PLATO and continues to be played to this day on the NovaNET system. Other dungeon games mentioned in this article can be played on the Cyber1 system (a restoration of a mid-1980s vintage PLATO system).
See also
References
- "Retro Playing Games", Computer Games, April, 2006, p. 36-37.
