How much are computer fantasy games based on D&D?

[Bullgrit]

When players of World of Warcraft refer to creating a new character, they call it "rolling" a new character.
"I rolled a troll mage last night."
"I hate playing the priest. I guess it's time to reroll."
This is obviously a reference to rolling the dice to create a character in D&D or other table-top RPG, because there is no randomness to creating a WoW character's stats.


WoW players use the term "tank" for any character who gets up in melee with a monster and holds its attention away from the mages and priests. I've used and heard the term "tank" in D&D to describe most any heavily armored fighter, for almost 30 years.


Priests in WoW (and other computer fantasy games?) heal, and mages blast, and rogues are sneaky. Paladins, the holy warriors were, until the most recent expansion, only available to the "side of good" as shining followers of Light. To my knowledge, there's not much literary or cinematic basis for these concept niches outside of or before D&D and its related table-top RPGs.


I don't know a whole lot about other computer fantasy games, but what I've seen and heard supports the concept that most computer fantasy games build on the tropes of D&D. What other D&D term and/or concept has made its way, lately or in the far past, into computer fantasy games?

Elementals as walking creatures?

Spellcasters can't wear armor or use "martial" weapons?

How would computer fantasy games be different if not for D&D? Would they even exist at all without D&D laying the fantasy game groundwork 30+ years ago?

Bullgrit
Total Bullgrit

 

[Doug McCrae]

Without D&D, crpgs wouldn't exist. And nor would tabletop rpgs.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Considering that CRPGs, while influenced in their gameplay by D&D, actually seem to be direct descendants of text adventure games that had more in common with Choose Your Own Adventure books, I'm not sure D&D was a necessary prerequisite for them.

On the other hand, the style of computer adventure games closer to the original text adventures, exemplified by games like The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, essentially died as a genre when RTS, TBS and Baldur's Gate style RTS-with-pause-function RPGs wiped out the rest of PC gaming; they never seemed to catch on on consoles (or rather, the console descendants, dating sims and "love adventures," were never released outside Japan).

Something like World of Warcraft is basically the dungeon crawling style of D&D distilled into electronic form, with better art direction. You would never get anything like that without a D&D groundwork. WoW pretty much polished and improved upon the same style of gameplay that filled MMORPGs from the outset. This entire genre is HUGELY similar to D&D, as was Diablo.

Might and Magic and The Bard's Tale were very similar to D&D in their day. Ultima was a bit further afield, but there are enough D&Disms, starting with the VERY D&Dish setting and, IIRC, both levels and hit points, that I can't help but assume you'd never have seen anything like it without D&D. Obviously, the D&D licensed games wouldn't have existed without D&D.

Early Final Fantasies were also very D&Dish, probably less so than Bard's Tale but more than Ultima. Dragon Quest was a bit further afield in both world design and gameplay choices, and Final Fantasy has since moved much, much further away from D&D in both respects. Still, concepts like HP, levels, etc. are pretty much direct ports; FF1 even had Vancian casting.

Now, with that said, a lot of the concepts that came to CRPGs from D&D *could* have come, in modified forms, from other video games, probably at a later date. The concept of a 'life bar' or 'extra hearts' that kept you in the game after taking hits was a pretty obvious one, and there's no reason this couldn't have been appended to an adventure game. Levels are a bit more iffy; the MegaMan and Zelda games handled permanent powerups in a very different, and I suspect more likely, way.

I'm also not sure how popular the 'fantasy supers in a sword and sorcery/epic mashup with monsters and concepts taken from every myth, legend, novel, game and movie slow enough to kill and take stuff from' genre would have been without D&D to invent and promulgate it.

 

[Bullgrit]

Still, concepts like HP, levels, etc. are pretty much direct ports

Oh, yeah, another term from D&D: I've seen many people refer to "hit points" or "hp" in WoW, even though the actual term/label is "health".

Bullgrit
Total Bullgrit

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Without D&D, crpgs wouldn't exist.

They would. They'd just resemble Cops & Robbers or those terrible HR exercises instead.

 

[Reynard]

Considering that CRPGs, while influenced in their gameplay by D&D, actually seem to be direct descendants of text adventure games that had more in common with Choose Your Own Adventure books, I'm not sure D&D was a necessary prerequisite for them.

Actually, D&D is pretty much solely responsible for the rise of the CRPG. Two books provide a lot of interesting background on the subject: Dungeons and Dreamers, and The Masters of Doom. The first explores in great detail how it was that D&D-addicted computer science majors in the late 1970s invented computer games and the internet as a method by which to play D&D (or some close approximation to it). The latter book is about the guys at id who invented Doom and how it was created between the marathon D&D sessions that inspired it.

 

[hong]

CRPGs are so videogamey.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Actually, D&D is pretty much solely responsible for the rise of the CRPG. Two books provide a lot of interesting background on the subject: Dungeons and Dreamers, and The Masters of Doom. The first explores in great detail how it was that D&D-addicted computer science majors in the late 1970s invented computer games and the internet as a method by which to play D&D (or some close approximation to it). The latter book is about the guys at id who invented Doom and how it was created between the marathon D&D sessions that inspired it.

I've read The Masters of Doom; the fact that id Software's creators played D&D and were inspired by it when they created their iconic first-person shooter doesn't exactly reflect on the creation of a genre that predated Doom by over a decade.

Haven't read Dungeons and Dreamers, though. Sounds interesting.

 

[WayneLigon]

How would computer fantasy games be different if not for D&D? Would they even exist at all without D&D laying the fantasy game groundwork 30+ years ago?

I think eventually someone would have come up with the idea of the RPG, but I don't think we'd see the predominance of fantasy. Most of your computer science people at that time who were reading speculative fiction were reading science fiction instead of fantasy so it seems much more likely that if tabletop RPG's ever came about, they'd follow their early computer ancestors and be science-fiction- based.

Fantasy might well be a small little niche under space-based and psionics-based games. Certainly a lot of 'D&D'-isms would not have come about but I'm certain that there would have been other '-isms' to replace them. We'd have questions like 'Why are all the lasers in Starships and Spacemen colored green?' and answers like 'When Paul Layten invented the original S&S computer game, he only had a limited color pallete to work with and that has stayed in force for 30 years'. And we'd have thread titles like 'S&S 4E changes lasers to blue?! I'm burning down ID Software and canceling my digital subscription right now'.

 

[TerraDave]

Without D&D, crpgs wouldn't exist. And nor would tabletop rpgs.

Right, and we shouldn't get hung up on the details. D&D has spawned a whole genre were certain kinds of semi-medieval fantasy charecters get together to fight things and look for treasure, often in a dungeonesque settings. You can of course point to different details and say this came from greek mythology, that came from Tolkien, this from wargamming, but it was D&D that put them all together, and included charecter advancement, fighting lots of monsters, and taking their stuff.

Reynard has the references, they shouldn't be dissmissed. Though of course we know that Al Gore invented the internet.