This is the first in a series of articles about Dungeons & Dragon's expression in a variety of digital media. Our first installment begins with Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs).
In the early days of IF development, personal computers were not yet ubiquitous. The only large group who did have access to computer mainframes was college students. The earliest computer role-playing games (CRPGs) and MUDs emerged from these systems. A cat-and-mouse game metagame ensued as students sought to hide their games from faculty who didn't want to see their considerable resources used for purely recreational purposes. Many of these early games have been lost to history as a result.
The first D&D-style interactive fiction was Pedit5 by Rusty Rutherford. It was named so obscurely to prevent its deletion, as such games were frowned upon at Rutherford's school. Pedit5 included magical spells, a dungeon filled with monsters and treasure, and continuity with the ability to save the character. Sure enough, Pedit5 was deleted months after its creation.
DND soon followed, coded in the TUTOR language for the PLATO system by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood. Created in 1974, DND was the third dungeon crawl of its kind for PLATO. It contained custom characters, experience points and leveling, a general store, and dungeon levels. Dirk Pellett later joined the first two authors to improve the game:
MUD was the first adventure game to support multiple users. The name was chosen partly as a tribute to the DUNGEN variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing.
After Bartle licensed MUD1 to CompuServe, Essex MUD was closed. This left only MIST, a MUD derivative, which would go on to become very popular until 1991 when it closed. The fascination with MUDs remained a chiefly British phenomenon until the 1980s when personal computers with modems became widespread. The popularity of Bartle's MUD1 soared, leading to the creation of MUD II. By 1989, MUD II had thousands of players.
The rising popularity of MUDs was not lost on TSR. Bruce Cordell, formerly research and designer manager at Wizards of the Coast and currently senior game designer for Monte Cook's Numenera, revealed that he was originally hired by TSR (before it was acquired by Wizards of the Coast) to create a D&D-themed MUD. As Bruce explained in an interview on ENWorld:
Don Daglow didn't forget the lessons he learned developing MUDs. Neverwinter Nights was launched on AOL by Daglow and Cathryn Mataga.
The Neverwinter brand would return in 2002 with the release of Neverwinter Nights (NWN) by BioWare. NWN was both a module creation tool and an adventure. It allowed players to download other adventures or make adventures and host them just like a "real" Dungeon Master. It was the closest thing to creating a graphical MUD -- and could conceivably create a game with a bigger simultaneous player base than some MUDs, with up to 64 players on simultaneously at one time.
The adventure content included with Neverwinter Nights was compelling and massive, utilizing Third Edition rules. The campaign adventure series dealt with adult material, involving plagues, bad choices, murdered lovers, and vengeance. The combat system worked exceptionally well and even the trade system worked smoothly. Characters were more or less likely to be helpful depending on how high or low the player character's Charisma stat is. Characters with low Intelligence even talked funny ("Me am strong!"). The monsters were beautifully rendered in three dimensional form, taking the static artwork from the Monster Manual to new levels. For the spiritual successor to Neverwinter Nights, see Morrus' impressions of Sword Coast Legends.
There would not be another official MMORPG for some time until the arrival of Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach in 2006. Created by Turbine, Inc., Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) was set on the continent of Xen’drik in the Eberron campaign setting. The game was later renamed Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited upon switching to a hybrid free to play model, and eventually rebranded Dungeons & Dragons Online, with the introduction of Forgotten Realms-related content.
DDO made several concessions to online play, including real-time combat. Real-time combat changed how feats worked, which changed how the spell system worked, which had reverberations throughout the game, including an increased amount of hit possibilities in a round, increased spell casting resources over rest periods, and a spell point system instead of spell slots. To handle the challenge of a player-based (rather than Dungeon Master-regulated) economy, magic items were underpriced by about an eighth of typical Dungeons & Dragons prices. The DDO Wiki elaborates on the many differences between the two games.
DDO featured "instanced" dungeons, dungeons that were formed exclusively for the group playing it. There was no possibility of encountering another group, ensuring there was no "farming" or other means of interacting with a party outside of a town. This meant a group’s adventure experience was exclusively unique to them; they lived and died by their own fortunes.
Another unique aspect of DDO was that it featured a party of up to six players, just like the tabletop version. Group play was supplemented by a person reading aloud, providing an overview of the game’s features that could not normally be expressed by text or graphics alone. In addition to sight and sound handled by the game engine, the game designers could express smells and feelings through a virtual Dungeon Master of sorts, with some of the dungeons even narrated by the late Gary Gygax. Until DDO, narrative voice-over structure was primarily relegated to tabletop games.
DDO even provided its treasure according to the party, dividing up the loot in such a way so that the players receive their own shares according to their level. It’s noteworthy that killing monsters was not always central to the reward, and the completion of the adventure provided experience, not the killing in itself, just like the tabletop game.
DDO shifted to DDO Unlimited, which introduced a new pricing model that allowed players to download and play for free, purchasing adventure packs, items, and account services a la carte from the DDO Store, or to subscribe to get unlimited access to all of the game’s content. This model wasn't new; MUDs (including RetroMUD) pioneered the model.
Turbine claimed Atari failed to devote the necessary resources to Stormreach by accepting payments -- including future royalty payments -- in return for extending their relationship and paving the way for the launch of Turbine's free-to-play DDO: Unlimited service, even though Atari knew it would not perform its obligations under the agreements and knew it would "pretextually seek to declare Turbine in breach of the agreements." Turbine claimed that Atari's termination strategy was conceived prior to the May 13 agreements, with the goal of either terminating "Turbine as part of a shakedown, or proceed with termination in bad faith to benefit from its own competing product at Turbine's expense."
In addition to threatening Turbine's past investment, Turbine felt Atari threatened the goodwill developed with the thousands of players who played DDO: Stormreach and were expected to use the DDO: Unlimited service, with their rival product. The MMORPG that triggered the lawsuit, Neverwinter, was a D&D free-to-play MMORPG for the Microsoft Windows platform developed by Cryptic Studios and released in 2013. As if things weren't complicated enough, Hasbro then filed suit against Atari in 2009:
Heroes of Neverwinter, created by Atari and Liquid Entertainment, was Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons' evolution of the persistent browser-based role-playing game (PBBRPG). It featured the basic Dungeons & Dragons races and classes, but unlike Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures, it went beyond the solo experience to reproduce the feel of an adventuring party. The game used tactical maps, character movement, and initiative just like its tabletop counterpart and players could recruit up to four party members to participate in the adventure with them.
The lawsuits were evidence that Wizard of the Coast, and by proxy its parent company Hasbro, took the future of online gaming very seriously. And the tabletop gaming division was taking notes.
Hasbro, envious of Marvel's success in turning its superhero properties into a lucrative transmedia juggernaut, gave each of its brands the goal of $100 million annual sales. The problem was that each of Wizards of the Coast's brands were viewed in isolation, which left Dungeons & Dragons, "a $25-30 million business" according to Dancey, in dire straits. The Dungeons & Dragons team hit on the idea of using the online Dungeons & Dragons Insider (DDI) to grow the brand to $50 million and potentially beyond:
Founded by Paizo co-owner Lisa Stevens (Pathfinder RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade, Magic: The Gathering), experienced MMO developer Mark Kalmes (Microsoft, Cryptic Studios, CCP), and Dancey, Goblinworks was an independent company that planned to work with Paizo Publishing to bring the award-winning world and adventures of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game to the online gaming market. Dancey, then Goblinworks CEO, said:
Playing With MUD
The roots of Dungeons & Dragons have long been a part of the development of text-based online games like Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and Multi-User Shared Hallucinations (MUSHes). Both MUDs and MUSHes have their roots in Interactive Fiction (IF), text-based object-oriented games. Wikipedia recognizes the lineage of MUDs from tabletop play:With Dungeons & Dragons so popular on campus and the rules ever-evolving from the relatively niche art of miniature wargaming, it was perhaps inevitable that college students would adapt computers to handle the complex rules. For players who were not statistically inclined, these rules were necessary evils. With a computer doing all the work, the players could enjoy the less math-heavy aspects of the game.
In the early days of IF development, personal computers were not yet ubiquitous. The only large group who did have access to computer mainframes was college students. The earliest computer role-playing games (CRPGs) and MUDs emerged from these systems. A cat-and-mouse game metagame ensued as students sought to hide their games from faculty who didn't want to see their considerable resources used for purely recreational purposes. Many of these early games have been lost to history as a result.
The first D&D-style interactive fiction was Pedit5 by Rusty Rutherford. It was named so obscurely to prevent its deletion, as such games were frowned upon at Rutherford's school. Pedit5 included magical spells, a dungeon filled with monsters and treasure, and continuity with the ability to save the character. Sure enough, Pedit5 was deleted months after its creation.
DND soon followed, coded in the TUTOR language for the PLATO system by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood. Created in 1974, DND was the third dungeon crawl of its kind for PLATO. It contained custom characters, experience points and leveling, a general store, and dungeon levels. Dirk Pellett later joined the first two authors to improve the game:
Similar to Pedit5, Don Daglow created DNGEON (or Dungeon) for the PDP-10 mainframe. Daglow's game allowed for parties, earning experience points, and leveling:
Daglow would later apply his experience with DNGEON to the first MMORPG, as we shall see.
TSR Notices
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle first discovered the single-player game known as Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT) in 1979. ADVENT creator William Crowther drew on his experiences caving and with Dungeons & Dragons to create the game:His interest piqued, Trubshaw craved a more participatory experience similar the Dungeons & Dragons. After college, he created the first MUD. MUD, or Essex MUD or MUD1, ran on the Essex University network.
MUD was the first adventure game to support multiple users. The name was chosen partly as a tribute to the DUNGEN variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing.
After Bartle licensed MUD1 to CompuServe, Essex MUD was closed. This left only MIST, a MUD derivative, which would go on to become very popular until 1991 when it closed. The fascination with MUDs remained a chiefly British phenomenon until the 1980s when personal computers with modems became widespread. The popularity of Bartle's MUD1 soared, leading to the creation of MUD II. By 1989, MUD II had thousands of players.
The rising popularity of MUDs was not lost on TSR. Bruce Cordell, formerly research and designer manager at Wizards of the Coast and currently senior game designer for Monte Cook's Numenera, revealed that he was originally hired by TSR (before it was acquired by Wizards of the Coast) to create a D&D-themed MUD. As Bruce explained in an interview on ENWorld:
Unfortunately, the MUD didn't come to pass, as reported by Abstruse on AICN:
Several MUDs are still around to this day, including a MUD where I've been an administrator for over 20 years, RetroMUD. RetroMUD is a fantasy MUD that consists of six different worlds, over sixty races, and a dizzying variety of skills and spells. Each world has its own theme, ranging from the steaming jungles of Sosel to the creepy undead caverns of Crypt, from the whimsical Raji to the traditional fantasy of Welstar, from the chaos of Perdow to the churning seas of Wysoom. RetroMUD, like most legacy MUDs, predates Ultima Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft.
D&D Gets Massive
It would take years before there was an officially branded D&D video game. TSR released its first video game products, including a version of the Dungeon! board game for the Apple II computer system, in 1982.Don Daglow didn't forget the lessons he learned developing MUDs. Neverwinter Nights was launched on AOL by Daglow and Cathryn Mataga.
Neverwinter Nights allowed up to 500 people to play together online. The game also saw the rise of player guilds. It was released in 1991 and ran through 1997. For a retrospective on the Gold Box series, see issue 4 of the DRAGON+ app.
The Neverwinter brand would return in 2002 with the release of Neverwinter Nights (NWN) by BioWare. NWN was both a module creation tool and an adventure. It allowed players to download other adventures or make adventures and host them just like a "real" Dungeon Master. It was the closest thing to creating a graphical MUD -- and could conceivably create a game with a bigger simultaneous player base than some MUDs, with up to 64 players on simultaneously at one time.
The adventure content included with Neverwinter Nights was compelling and massive, utilizing Third Edition rules. The campaign adventure series dealt with adult material, involving plagues, bad choices, murdered lovers, and vengeance. The combat system worked exceptionally well and even the trade system worked smoothly. Characters were more or less likely to be helpful depending on how high or low the player character's Charisma stat is. Characters with low Intelligence even talked funny ("Me am strong!"). The monsters were beautifully rendered in three dimensional form, taking the static artwork from the Monster Manual to new levels. For the spiritual successor to Neverwinter Nights, see Morrus' impressions of Sword Coast Legends.
There would not be another official MMORPG for some time until the arrival of Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach in 2006. Created by Turbine, Inc., Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) was set on the continent of Xen’drik in the Eberron campaign setting. The game was later renamed Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited upon switching to a hybrid free to play model, and eventually rebranded Dungeons & Dragons Online, with the introduction of Forgotten Realms-related content.
DDO made several concessions to online play, including real-time combat. Real-time combat changed how feats worked, which changed how the spell system worked, which had reverberations throughout the game, including an increased amount of hit possibilities in a round, increased spell casting resources over rest periods, and a spell point system instead of spell slots. To handle the challenge of a player-based (rather than Dungeon Master-regulated) economy, magic items were underpriced by about an eighth of typical Dungeons & Dragons prices. The DDO Wiki elaborates on the many differences between the two games.
DDO featured "instanced" dungeons, dungeons that were formed exclusively for the group playing it. There was no possibility of encountering another group, ensuring there was no "farming" or other means of interacting with a party outside of a town. This meant a group’s adventure experience was exclusively unique to them; they lived and died by their own fortunes.
Another unique aspect of DDO was that it featured a party of up to six players, just like the tabletop version. Group play was supplemented by a person reading aloud, providing an overview of the game’s features that could not normally be expressed by text or graphics alone. In addition to sight and sound handled by the game engine, the game designers could express smells and feelings through a virtual Dungeon Master of sorts, with some of the dungeons even narrated by the late Gary Gygax. Until DDO, narrative voice-over structure was primarily relegated to tabletop games.
DDO even provided its treasure according to the party, dividing up the loot in such a way so that the players receive their own shares according to their level. It’s noteworthy that killing monsters was not always central to the reward, and the completion of the adventure provided experience, not the killing in itself, just like the tabletop game.
DDO shifted to DDO Unlimited, which introduced a new pricing model that allowed players to download and play for free, purchasing adventure packs, items, and account services a la carte from the DDO Store, or to subscribe to get unlimited access to all of the game’s content. This model wasn't new; MUDs (including RetroMUD) pioneered the model.
Trouble in D&D Paradise
The transition from DDO to the free-to-play DDO Unlimited model was not without some bumps. Turbine filed a lawsuit against Atari with a complaint alleging that, though Atari granted Turbine a sublicense to produce the Dungeons & Dragons MMORPG Stormreach, Atari didn't hold up its end of the bargain.Turbine claimed Atari failed to devote the necessary resources to Stormreach by accepting payments -- including future royalty payments -- in return for extending their relationship and paving the way for the launch of Turbine's free-to-play DDO: Unlimited service, even though Atari knew it would not perform its obligations under the agreements and knew it would "pretextually seek to declare Turbine in breach of the agreements." Turbine claimed that Atari's termination strategy was conceived prior to the May 13 agreements, with the goal of either terminating "Turbine as part of a shakedown, or proceed with termination in bad faith to benefit from its own competing product at Turbine's expense."
In addition to threatening Turbine's past investment, Turbine felt Atari threatened the goodwill developed with the thousands of players who played DDO: Stormreach and were expected to use the DDO: Unlimited service, with their rival product. The MMORPG that triggered the lawsuit, Neverwinter, was a D&D free-to-play MMORPG for the Microsoft Windows platform developed by Cryptic Studios and released in 2013. As if things weren't complicated enough, Hasbro then filed suit against Atari in 2009:
The Neverwinter brand contracted and grew in different mediums across a variety of media when Wizards of the Coast settled its lawsuit with Atari over the Dungeons & Dragons brand on the same day that Heroes of Neverwinter launched in beta on Facebook. The Neverwinter launch included R.A. Salvatore's fiction, comics, tabletop role-playing, a cooperative online role-playing game (CORPG) and social media.
Heroes of Neverwinter, created by Atari and Liquid Entertainment, was Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons' evolution of the persistent browser-based role-playing game (PBBRPG). It featured the basic Dungeons & Dragons races and classes, but unlike Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures, it went beyond the solo experience to reproduce the feel of an adventuring party. The game used tactical maps, character movement, and initiative just like its tabletop counterpart and players could recruit up to four party members to participate in the adventure with them.
The lawsuits were evidence that Wizard of the Coast, and by proxy its parent company Hasbro, took the future of online gaming very seriously. And the tabletop gaming division was taking notes.
The Child Becomes the Parent
The Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons has been criticized before for sharing many traits with the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) industry. Greg Tito's article at The Escapist quoted Andy Collins, a member of the Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons design team:As a follow-up to that article, Ryan Dancey, formerly brand manager of Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast and former CEO of the Pathfinder MMORPG development company Goblinworks, explained on ENWorld:
I've chatted with Dancey about MMORPGs for years. It was the only topic we discussed, actually, whenever I bumped into him at Gen Con (I think that's probably a whole two times) and his article is entirely consistent with our forecasts back then. In discussions on ENWorld Dancey gave some very interesting background to the development of Dungeons & Dragons.
Hasbro, envious of Marvel's success in turning its superhero properties into a lucrative transmedia juggernaut, gave each of its brands the goal of $100 million annual sales. The problem was that each of Wizards of the Coast's brands were viewed in isolation, which left Dungeons & Dragons, "a $25-30 million business" according to Dancey, in dire straits. The Dungeons & Dragons team hit on the idea of using the online Dungeons & Dragons Insider (DDI) to grow the brand to $50 million and potentially beyond:
In retrospect, Dancey's comments would be prophetic, but it would be years before his vision for a D&D-style MMORPG would come to fruition, and it wouldn't be at WOTC.
A Goblin in the Works
Paizo Publishing, LLC licensed the MMORPG electronic gaming rights to its Pathfinder Roleplaying Game intellectual property to Goblinworks, a Redmond, Washington game developer. The plan was to create Pathfinder Online, a next-generation fantasy sandbox MMORPG.Founded by Paizo co-owner Lisa Stevens (Pathfinder RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade, Magic: The Gathering), experienced MMO developer Mark Kalmes (Microsoft, Cryptic Studios, CCP), and Dancey, Goblinworks was an independent company that planned to work with Paizo Publishing to bring the award-winning world and adventures of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game to the online gaming market. Dancey, then Goblinworks CEO, said:
Soon after, Goblinwworks announed its first Kickstarter project for the Pathfinder Online MMORPG. The Pathfinder Online Technology Demo Kickstarter helped Goblinworks finance the creation of a Technology Demo that they could use to show investors what Pathfinder Online would look like. Successful funding of this Kickstarter also demonstrated the community's desire and excitement for Pathfinder Online. The Goblinworks team explained on their web site the "chicken and egg" problem of launching a MMO:
Dancey explained the reason for going to Kickstarter:
It wasn't enough. Stevens explained in a post on the company's blog:
As a result of these issues, the company had to lay off the majority of the Goblinworks staff. Dancey left the company for personal reasons. But there's still hope for Pathfinder Online:
Why is making a MMORPG so hard? There's plenty of obvious reasons addressed in the Pathfinder Online blog post, but it may simply be that the appetite for massive games has shifted:
For a discussion of Minecraft, see the previous article, "Minecraft: The Gateway to D&D." In the next installment we'll look at WOTC's struggle to digitize the tabletop experience through virtual platforms. For more in the D&D Does Digital series, please see:
