A Critical Hit

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Harvey Smith felt like he was slowly freezing to death. It was his eleventh birthday, and he was at Winter Camp, sitting with his friends at a picnic table around the flickering light of an old liquid fuel lantern. Harvey watched dice bounce across the wooden table. His friends were playing a game. It was Dungeons & Dragons.

It wasn't a completely unknown quantity. He was an urbane boy. He knew about D&D and its peers: Boot Hill, Top Secret, Gamma World... but he'd never played any of them. His friends asked him: did he want to? Well, why not. One friend took on the role of the 'dungeon master', describing the setting, the world, everyone the players met.

Everyone else took the role of an adventurer, their personality and abilities inscribed in pencil on a character sheet. They said what they wanted to do. The dungeon master decided - by the baroque rules, the roll of dice and judicious storytelling - what happened. As words filled the crisp night air, a world filled Harvey's mind. It was like nothing else.

"I was amazed that we were free within limits to push the story in whatever direction we wanted," Harvey recalls. "It was empowering for me to try to come up with clever solutions to problems, and to assume a role, not in terms of character class so much, but in terms of identity and archetype."

A hero, a traitor or a coward, it was up to Harvey to decide. He was amazed. Around midnight, the last member of the group returned from his job at a local restaurant with a crate full of steaks smothered in gravy. "I've been a vegetarian for six years, but back then I wasn't, and that might have been the greatest meal of my life," Harvey says. "Starving, playing my first RPG in the chilly night air, and tearing apart steaming T-bones with my filthy little fingers."

The experience of that night, as he crossed over into the land of the teenager, helped set Harvey on the path that, two decades later, would find him the feted designer of games such as Deus Ex. He wasn't alone. Dungeons & Dragons was a formative influence on a whole generation of gamers, its marks plain to see for those who know where to look.

Without D&D, videogames would be a different place. If you're reciting the traditional history of videogames you begin with MIT's Space War. If you're trying to be clever, you'll cite the Pong-esque predecessor created with an oscilloscope, but that's just quibbling.

The central idea remains constant: videogames began with two-player games, experienced through the proxy of a machine. Two or more humans matching their abilities, with victory and failure adjudicated by hard rules, has remained true, from chess to Pong to Battlefield.

There's another way of looking at videogames: how the vast majority are able to entertain when there's no other human being there at all, just you and a machine. The machine just exists to interpret your actions and turn them into a world for you to experience. It exists to entertain you, to take you somewhere else, to give you a place to explore. It is a storyteller. This is a different approach to the idea of 'game', and - interestingly - its core emerged at a similar time to MIT's Space War, as if culture was suddenly ready to reconsider what a 'game' could be.

D&D began its life as a mad extrapolation from tabletop wargames written by two boardgame obsessives: Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Both were heavily into fantasy fiction, stories in which small bands of roving heroes took on epic quests. Small parties, rather than armies, enabled players to invest more personality and backstory into their characters. In time, battlefields gave way to dungeons, temples and tombs, with much of the real action now taking place inside players' heads.

The first edition of their game was released as a box-set in 1974, with extra scenarios and campaigns appearing articles in fan-magazines. By 1977, the game was popular enough for two editions to exist: the basic system and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Its rise mirrored that of early home computers: dice would sit alongside Apple II in teenage boys' bedrooms. It was inevitable that the two would eventually merge. Could you teach a computer to run a D&D campaign?

"At the time it was kind of the 'killer app' of games-for-teenagers," explains Brian Reynolds, the strategic mastermind of Alpha Centauri, Rise Nations and Rise of Legends. "Back in those days I'd say the holy grail of teenager boys learning how to program was to figure out how to 'make the computer play D&D'. Because if we could do that, what else would we ever need?

Few ever made much progress on getting the computer to actually play the game - there were so many mountains to climb in terms of gameplay, interface, and the limitations of the computers of the day. But trying to climb those mountains formed the foundation of a lot of careers in programming, and for a very few, game design." Some managed it, and were measured accordingly, such as early DOS games Ultima and Wizardry. "The early hit games were, I think, very much judged by how close they came to creating the experience we were longing for," Brian notes. "Maybe in some ways we still judge games that way."

Since the task was so monumental, the original games concentrated on the aspects which could be computerised. Early Ultimas were all about survival, travelling across the wilderness, improving your characters' statistics, and exploring dungeons.

Yet D&D continued to develop, and so did its players. Some of them demanded deeper, more intricate campaigns, with less two-dimensional characterisation, complex moral dilemmas and more meaningful choices. The game was a means to an end: a way to introduce jeopardy into their own stories. Other players just wanted to hit stuff - and to see their stats gradually improve.

Eventually, this split appeared in computer RPGs, its first shoots visible in the introduction of ethics to Ultima IV, later growing into the more complex moral dilemmas of Planescape Torment and Deus Ex. At the same time, PCs were making the life of the mindless, monster-bashing RPGer easier than ever before. While there's an undeniable psychological attraction to the slow increase of your character's abilities by triumphing in combat, the actual dice-rolling mental arithmetic is relatively joyless.

Computers can handle that easily. A human-run game of Rogue would be unfeasibly slow-paced, but on a computer, winding passages can be randomly generated in an instant. From here, we see a direct line to Diablo and its clones.

For some gamers who experienced both pen-and-paper play, and the videogames it inspired, the new star outshone the former completely. While pen-and-paper could offer levels of improvisation a machine could never achieve, the actual attentiveness of a machine, unrelated to the moods and ability of fellow players, proved more attractive.

Consider Raphael Colantonio of Arkane - creators of the fantasy-influenced Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. He played his first RPG at eight, but ultimately grew tired of the prima-donna tendencies of some of his fellow players. "One day, I suddenly decided that pen-and-paper RPGs were, for me, not fun any more. I realised that the quality of the experience could vary greatly based on things that I couldn't control: who's the GM, where we were playing, was there beer in the fridge? Most of all, it came down to the quality of the other players."

"This was when I switched 100% to computer RPGs. The sense of immersion was actually much stronger for me and my ability to socialise still existed: I played Ultima with groups of two or three friends, each of us staring at the screen commenting on what to do. One of us would draw a map, one would play, etc. So this was also a strong social experience."

If, for some people, PC RPGs have replaced the game that inspired them, it doesn't mean that the two have nothing to teach each other. The best example of how the two cross-pollinate comes from Chris Avellone, Creative Director and co-owner of Obsidian (who've just finished their D&D game Neverwinter Nights 2), veteran of PC RPGs at Black Isle and Sainted Hero Of All for his part in the sublime Planescape Torment. Chris uses D&D to plan his videogames, well in advance of actually making them.

"We've used pen-and-paper role-playing to test out new computer game systems, as well as characters and area designs," says Chris. "Here at Obsidian, we role-played through the opening stages of Neverwinter Nights 2 to test the flow of the game.
"It's like instant sounding-board feedback from players before you even build the area in the engine," Chris continues.

"You can immediately tell what they like, what interests them, what their first goal is once they reach an area, what NPCs they hate and which ones they don't, and then you can edit it in your area design for the computer game. Even better, you often can use something that arose out of the gaming session to make the area design even better.

In Interplay's Fallout 3, for example (A project that was sadly never completed - Ed), about a quarter of the areas and quests ended up being sparked by character actions and 'wouldn't it be neat if...' moments that arose during pen and paper playtests." Chris also believes that his time as a games master taught him fundamental lessons about how to entertain an audience. "I think that pen-and-paper games are one of the best methods to get this direct feedback, especially if you're a game master," he says.

"You can't ignore the expressions on the player's face when you suddenly notice that your plot twist of 'stripping them of their gear and then throwing them into the arena' is immediately met with anger and resentment as the players start threatening you with horrible deaths if they can't get all their hard-won items back. And if you're a player, pen-and-paper gaming sessions also help you identify what you like and don't like to experience in a game ('man, that stupid plot twist that took all our items permanently really sucked') and then use that in future design docs and area designs."

Nothing teaches quite like your best mate threatening you with a Fist in the Kisser +3. But tomorrow's RPG designers aren't playing pen-and-paper D&D. They're playing the videogames that it inspired. Consider the Adams Brothers, creators of indie-sensation Dwarf Fortress. "We were playing arcade, PC, Atari and Vic20 games well before we started role-playing. Since some of the PC games we were playing were already based on D&D principles, before we knew what pen-and-paper D&D was, our own experience with it really didn't have any effect on our design outlook. D&D didn't offer anything conceptually new."

For the Adams brothers, the core ideas of D&D had already been well and truly metabolised by videogames. In fact, if you played World of Warcraft or Knights of the Old Republic or Deus Ex and then sat down to play your first Dungeons & Dragons campaign, you'd find much that was reassuringly familiar. Since D&D lies deep in gaming's genetic structure, the connections are always going to be there.

Perhaps a future Harvey Smith is sitting out there right now, at a Neverwinter Nights LAN party, eating warm steak on a freezing night.

PC Gamer