Game 125: Dungeons and Dragons (1980)

Yep, that's what we get for a title screen.

Dungeons and Dragons

United States
Independently developed; published on CLOAD cassette magazine, May 1980, for TRS-80

Date Started: 1 December 2013
Date Ended: 1 December 2013

Total Hours: 3
Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 10
Ranking at Time of Posting: 5/121 (4%)
Ranking at Game #407: 17/407 (4%)

   

I have to hand it to whoever put Dungeons and Dragons (for some reason incorrectly titled "Dungeons n Dragons") on the Wikipedia list of computer role-playing games. He had to dig deep for this one. The game is the very definition of "forgettable," and its omission even on a "comprehensive" list of RPGs would be perfectly understandable.

I don't mean to insult the game; it wasn't even designed to be memorable. It was distributed via the TRS-80 cassette magazine CLOAD and probably written in just a couple of days. I reviewed another cassette game, 1979's Dungeon, back in February. Magazines-on-cassette tape were a brief fad in the late 1970s and early 1980s, superseded by magazines on floppy disk and then, of course, the Internet, and every issue would contain some articles and a few brief sample programs, none of them really intended to compete with commercial software. I don't doubt that there were occasional gems among the cassettemag and diskmag programs, but this isn't one of them.

I'm playing it because I'm stuck in Legend of Faerghail (the entrance to the derelict castle has completely disappeared, replaced by a tree), and because it's an excuse to learn a TRS-80 emulator. Dungeons and Dragons isn't the first CRPG released for the TRS-80 (that would be the Dunjonquest titles in 1979), but it does seem to be the first (and one of only three on my list) CRPGs released only for the TRS-80. The most prominent among these titles is Dungeons of Daggorath, which readers have been encouraging me to play since the beginning of my blog. I'll get to it soon. [Later edit: I guess I'm mixing up TRS models. This might, in fact, be the only RPG exclusively available for the TRS-80.]

Playing this game helped me sort out some of my own computer history. For years, I had been thinking that my first personal computer, purchased from a neighbor in 1983 with $60 I made washing cars, was a TRS-80. But when I looked at some images online while downloading the emulator, I realized that I was wrong. My first PC had no peripherals, no drives, no monitor even; it hooked up to the television. After some further searching, I've come to the conclusion that it was, in fact, the Timex Sinclair 1000 (TS1000) that I used to hook up to my TV at home and amuse myself typing:

10 PRINT "CHESTER BOLINGBROKE!";

20 GOTO 10

RUN

Never gets old.

However, I did use a TSR-80 in my sixth-grade classroom. I remember writing trivia programs on it to amuse the other students, and it spawned a brief trivia craze among them that manifested in both computer and paper games. (With embarrassment, I recall that one of my trivia questions was "What is Shakespeare's famous quote?" The answer was "TO BE OR NOT TO BE," because, you know, he had only one.) I got reasonably good at BASIC programming for a while, enough that I made some modifications to a program that my mother used for data analysis at her firm.

Dungeons and Dragons is slightly more sophisticated than anything I wrote in my heyday, but not by much. It feels like a hurried version of Eamon, combining some basic statistics and random combat with text adventure gameplay, in an attempt to create something that feels like a classic D&D module: random encounters, fixed encounters, treasures, quest items, and a final boss. If it doesn't succeed it's because the 346 lines of code don't allow for enough complexity or variety. It's not a bad approach, though, and it could have served as the basis for something more extensive.

When you start the game, you name yourself and your god (the only consequence of this is in a few bits of text). The game automatically rolls strength (hit points), dexterity, armor class (yes, this is a random roll), and starting gold pieces; you have no option to re-roll except to reload the game. You buy one or two of seven weapons, depending on what you can afford, the rest of your gold gets converted to elven healing cakes and torches, and then you're off to the catacombs of...oh, for the love of..."Khazad'Dum"...to find a "large blue-white diamond."

The game map consists of only 28 named rooms (in a fixed layout) plus a little "maze of twisty passages" whose navigation seems random. You pass through them with the N, S, E, W, U, and D commands while in "travel" mode. While in "command" mode, there's a limited selection of commands--TAKE, SAY, EAT, SCORE, FILL, LIGHT, and CLUE--and most of them work in only one or two places. There is notably no way to check inventory or current hit points.

My map of the game.

 
The room descriptions are just brief sketches, though not badly written:

• A cobbled hall: large moss-covered cobblestones cover the floor
• Parlor of the Dead: Assorted bones lie scattered over the floor
• Ante-Room: Walls are paneled with black walnut; plush furniture lies on a thick red carpet
• Chamber of Fires: the air is stifling hot, and the walls are warm to the touch. A red glow emanates from the smoke along the SE corner

One of the room descriptions, with a special encounter with a demon.

A handful of the rooms have fixed encounters with treasure-bearing monsters--a demon, a troll, a stone giant, a vampire, and a gargoyle--but in most of them, you have a random chance of an encounter with something like a goblin, hobgoblin, berserker, or gnome. When you meet such enemies, you can try to flee, in which case the monster simply disappears from the dungeon.

If you attack, the game takes you to a weird real-time combat system. The enemy starts swinging at you, and you have to interrupt his swings with the "A" (regular attack), "B" (all-or-nothing attack), or "P" (pray) keys. The frequency with which you can interrupt his attacks with your own is based on dexterity, so this becomes the most important attribute in the game. (I found that any character I rolled with less than 12 dexterity was essentially walking dead.) If you're attacking, you have to specify the weapon's first three letters. Occasionally, the enemy knocks you down and you have to hit "S" to stand up.

Combat with a gnome.

The combats are quite deadly; if they weren't, the game would only take about 10 minutes. I rolled over 20 characters, some dying in the first room, before I found the optimal path through the game and was able to defeat the various fixed and random encounters.

Killing an enemy generally produces nothing but a slightly higher score, but in three places you get a special treasure: an amulet that raises your strength, a ring that lowers your AC, and a potion that increases your speed. There are also some scattered healing cakes throughout the dungeon.

Finding a treasure after defeating a gargoyle.

Your weapon can break during combat, and if you don't have a backup, you'll have to resort to your fists. But your fists can also "break," leaving you defenseless and soon dead.

Occasionally, if the monster's weapon and fists break, it will surrender. If you don't accept it, you'll get a message that you've angered your god and he'll kill you.

There are a few navigation puzzles, such as one-way exits, all culminating in the "dragon's lair." The game manual takes perverse pride in noting that there are special commands that only work in the dragon's lair, and they don't bother to tell you what they are. Through a lot of trial and error (GIVE results in a message that if the dragon really wants something, he'll take it; PRAY says that not even the FSM can help you against the dragon), I figured out the solution was to RUB a lamp that I found in another part of the dungeon. This releases a genie who, in gratitude, banishes the dragon.

Apparently, the genie is more powerful than my god. I guess I'll be switching allegiances.

Then, for some reason I don't understand, rubbing the lamp again in a particular corridor results in a whispered message to hit SHIFT-B (producing a lower-case "b") back in the dragon's lair. Doing so takes you to a secret niche where the diamond is present. Grab the diamond and head back to the surface, and you get the winning message and your score. The score is based on the number of treasures you found and monsters you've killed; since monsters spawn randomly, there's no upper limit.

Wow! Not just lucky but "damm lucky!"

You have a kind-of "time limit" in that you have a fixed number of torches, and if you run out, you fall into a pit and "break every bone in your body"--this game's equivalent of getting eaten by a grue. Other than combat, other ways to die include going (D)own when on a bridge, eating mold from the walls of the cave (except a special yellow mold in one location, which heals you), eating cursed elven cakes (this happens randomly), refusing to accept an enemy's surrender, or doing the wrong thing in the dragon's cave, which results in him turning you to ash.
 

I give the game a 10 in my GIMLET, with 0s in the "NPC" and "economy" categories, 2 in "quests" and "gameplay" and 1 in everything else. It simply doesn't have enough RPG elements (especially character development) to be a good game.

Still, it deserves some credit as perhaps the first text adventure/RPG hybrid. Eamon--a much better game--was released the same year, but I think it was in the fall. Their releases are so close that it's hard to imagine that Dungeons and Dragons influenced Eamon, but I suppose it's possible. For some reason, this is the first game cited in Wikipedia's history of RPGs under the "personal computers" section, even though 13 others demonstrably precede it. It is the first RPG for the PC to use the Dungeons & Dragons name (if unofficially), although Dungeon of Death, abbreviated DND, came out a year earlier.

Of the developer, Peter Trefonas, I can find nothing. Between 1978 and 1981, he wrote a series of games for CLOAD, including Worm (a variant of the arcade game Snake), Blockade, Hustle, and Empire. He falls out of sight after that. He apparently contributed some thoughts to a TRS-80 fan site in 1996, but the e-mail provided by the site bounced back.

I'm playing the game via the "TRS32" emulator, and I'm indebted to Dale Dobson's "Gaming After 40" blog for providing such clear, specific instructions to help me with the .bas and .inf files that I was able to download. If nothing else, this experience set me up well for future TRS-80 games. The next "retro" game on the list is Dunjonquest: Hellfire Warrior. I wasn't able to find an Apple II version a few months ago, but perhaps I can find a TRS-80 version.

****

Further Reading: The issue of CLOAD in which this game first appeared (coverage begins towards the bottom of Page 2); my coverage of Eamon, which takes a similar approach.