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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 3836728" data-attributes="member: 22882">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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />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.</blockquote>

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