Game 497: Dragons (1978)

 

At least there are no dungeons this time.

        

Dragons

United States

Software Industries (developer and publisher)

Released 1978 for TRS-80

Date Started: 12 November 2023

Date Ended: 13 November 2023
Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5) if you're willing to do some of your own coding

Final Rating: 10

Ranking at Time of Posting: 29/508 (6%)

      

Any game we can recover from the earliest era of commercial CRPGs is interesting, even when it's featureless and flawed. The period from 1978 to 1982 is full of interesting oddities--games with no precedent, with a couple dozen authors struggling with the best ways to adapt tabletop RPGs to the computer. Ultima and Wizardry won that contest like the Wright Brothers won the skies, but it's fascinating to look at some of the other contestants. They are the zeppelins, ornithopters, and winged bicycles of the RPG genre.

     

Dragons was created by John McCalpin and sold through his company, Software Industries, of Richardson, Texas. (There's a fun coincidence here in that I was living in Richardson, Texas in 1978, about two miles from where McCalpin was doing his coding.) "Sold" may be a slight exaggeration: we only know about the game because El Explorador de RPG found it in an archive of thousands of TRS-80 games. It is uncertain how, where, or if it was ever marketed and played.

      

I love how specific the date is.

          

The framing story sets the game in the year 828 in Denmark. You play an adventurer "drawn by tales of a great treasure of over 5,000 gold pieces, said to be in a castle inhabited by monsters of every sort." In fact, there are 10 types of monsters: orcs, trolls, slithers, green slimes, giant ants, shadows, giants, purple worms, hydras, and dragons. The dungeon is three "levels," with the treasure found in a large room on Level 3. You have to get there and back with this haul. 

    

You set out with a dagger, a two-edged sword, a bow with 5 arrows, a 10-foot lance, and 5 points of "magic dust." The lance, arrows, and dust are consumed when you use them, but the dagger and sword remain with you until you replace them with magic versions of the weapons that you sometimes find.

       

I'm not going to be charming any dragons with that charisma.

      

As the game begins, it rolls values from 3 to 18 in strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, and charisma. Unusually for the era, all attributes play a role in the character's success, as discussed below.

   

So far, so good, but the game falls apart when you actually descend into the dungeon. You don't actually get to navigate its levels. Instead, the game tells you that you're walking along a corridor and there's a room to your right or left. Do you want to check it out? There's no actual map, just a series of subroutines that lead you left, right, and forward by the hand, and your only navigational choices are whether to enter rooms, which almost always contain enemies, or not. Everything else is handled automatically: hiding when you hear a noise, searching for traps, picking up gold pieces, turning right or left at the end of a corridor. Dragons' philosophy seems to be that when there's only one sensible thing to do, or when the choice is arbitrary, why not just automate it?

     

The game resolves most things on its own, only occasionally giving you a choice.

         

Rooms and corridors have slightly different encounters, but each can produce a combat with one of  the game's many monsters. In a room, you have initial options to retreat, attack, or check your statistics. This is the only time in the game that you get to check your statistics.

   

If you choose to attack in a room, or if you're attacked in a hallway ambush, your only option is what weapon you want to use to fight it. The game then runs through a series of "crunch" and "smash" text messages until it finally says either "You got him!" or "Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgh," the latter indicating you've just died. You don't see any specific statistics during this exchange of blows, so there's no way to tell how much damage you're taking (nor any way to back out if you did).

        

Well, that's grim.

     

Combats deliver gold, which does nothing but add to your final attributes. In rooms, you occasionally find (post-combat) magic swords, magic arrows, or magic daggers, which despite their names might actually be worse than regular versions of the same weapons. A regular sword's attack value is 2 and a regular dagger's attack value is 1. The only way to see the attack values of the magic versions of these weapons is to spend 2 units of your magic dust while inspecting the character statistics. You only start with 5 units and you rarely find any more, so you won't be inspecting that often. Any new magic item you find replaces the old one if you decide to pick it up.

        

Finding a magic dagger.

      

Combat success depends on strength, dexterity, and experience. Your long-term success in the dungeon depends on the number of "wounds" you take, which is capped by your constitution. Wisdom governs the success of magic dust, if you decide to use it as a weapon.

 

The game's one major "innovation" is that if you encounter a dragon, you get a chance to tame it, dependent on your charisma. If you successfully tame the dragon, you can use it as a weapon in combat, "D" for "Dragon" replacing what was previously D)agger, and the attack value going from 1 to between 3 and 18. It's still your health that takes a beating in combat, however.

      

I will name him "Puff."

      

Shadows are another unique encounter. They cannot be fought. Whether you encounter them at all depends on your dexterity; dexterous characters can sneak past them. If you do meet them, intelligence and wisdom govern whether you can successfully expend your remaining magic to protect yourself. If not, you may die or flee the dungeon, dropping gold along the way.

   

Modern players emulating the game can't get anywhere with it because they actually lose experience with every battle. El Explorador explains the problem in his entry. Essentially, the programming uses evaluations of IF statements to determine how much experience you gain per monster slain. My reading of the code is that you're supposed to get 1 point of experience plus another 1 point if the monster's level is greater than 5, plus another 1 point if the monster's level is 10, plus two more points if your intelligence and wisdom are greater than 15, minus two points if your intelligence and wisdom are less than 6. The problem is that the program assumes that the results of "true" evaluations will be 1, which I guess maybe it was in the 1978 version of TRS-80 BASIC. But the disk on which the program is found requires a Model III version of BASIC, by which time "true" was represented as -1, so you're actually losing experience instead of gaining it. I think the only way you can gain experience from combat is to roll very low intelligence and wisdom statistics and then only fight orcs, trolls, slithers, and green slimes.

       

After a few combats, I have -4 experience.

     

This is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, you have to achieve 10 experience before the game may present you with an opportunity to go down to Level 2. (I'm not sure what the value is for Level 3.) Second, combat depends heavily on experience, and when you get into the negative values, you're likely to die instantly even if you have plenty of wounds available. 

I tried to fix the code but I couldn't get anything to work right, so I finally saw the endgame by inserting a line that set my experience to 50 the moment I entered the dungeon. Even though I then lost some with every victory, it was enough to present me with opportunities to go down to Level 2 and then to Level 3, where the game instantly let me collect the 5,000 gold piece treasure hoard.

        

I just want to know how I carried it.

      

I then had to dither around for a few rooms and corridors on Level 3 before the game offered me an opportunity to climb back up to Level 2. I then had to repeat the process on Levels 2 and 1 before I finally got out of the game and to the winning message.

      

Well, one tale to tell.

      

This is 1978, so of course we can't judge the game too harshly, particularly since there's no sign it was actually marketed as a commercial title. What it served to drive home to me is that no matter how basic your game is, you have to give the player some agency, if only the mundane experience of walking down a corridor. There's no sense of place in Dragons, and too much of what happens seems arbitrary.

   

At the same time, among all the 1978 titles, Dragons is the one that most anticipates what a full RPG will look like. It has a full set of attributes, a variety of monsters, equipment, combat based on those attributes and equipment, and character growth through accumulation of experience. It even has a framing story. It is the barest sketch of an RPG, but it doesn't miss any major elements. You could easily imagine someone building on this core, adding subroutines with more complex encounters, NPCs, more combat variables, and an actual map. I don't want to oversell the achievement of Dragons because it would only be another year that Dunjonquest would offer all those things, plus graphics, but it's still fun to watch another rickety glider struggle to take off and soar into the future of our beloved genre.