Dnd (computer game)

'dnd cprg was a computer role playing game written for the Plato Computer System by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood at Southern Illinois University in 1974. Dirk Pellett and Flint Pellett of Iowa State University made substantial enhancements to the game in 1976.

dnd was one of the first dungeon crawler games ever written. 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 orb itself was kept in a treasure room deep within the dungeon. Protecting the orb in the treasure room was a powerful Golden Dragon and a number of lesser monsters. 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. The characters name would then be inscribed for all to see when others visited dnd.

dnd had several innovations that have since become staples in modern computer games. First, the game had a Boss (video games)--a special monster with powers far beyond those of the other monsters which had to be defeated in order to finsih the game. Second, the game used a complex battle structure where different weapons inflicted different damage on different monsters, thus requiring a player to learn the best weapon to use against each monster. Third, the game used teleporters to move characters between levels, thus eliminating the need to have stairs in the dungeon.

Perhaps the most important element of dnd was that it was, in fact, the first video game that was a story with a beginning, a middle, a climax, a denoument and an end. Later games, such as Rogue, were patterned upon dnd