Dungeons & Dragons Article at Armchair Arcade

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Armchare Arcade has posted an article titled Dungeons & Desktops and dealing with the history of video games based in the system. Here's a snip:

It is worth noting that no CRPGs or VRPGs would exist without Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax's Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) tabletop RPG (1974). It offered a social gameplay experience. One player was the Dungeon Master, responsible for creating maps, planning out scenarios, and acting out the parts of the various monsters and NPCs the players would encounter. The other players spent a long time generating player characters before starting their campaigns and combat was decided via dice-rolling and the cleverness of the players' tactics. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of dice-rolling necessary for most actions, not to mention the various statistics to keep track of, caused much of the gameplay to be bogged down in mathematical minutiae.

With all the statistics to keep track of in a D&D game, it's no wonder that dungeon masters turned to computers to help keep track of things. It's also not a surprise that game designers decided to try to create the same sort of D&D experience on the computer. Playing an RPG on a computer was more convenient than meeting up with a bunch of friends once a week with odd-shaped dice, broken pencils, greasy pizza, and spilled soda.

Sounds interesting from the very beginning and is well written. If you have the time, you definitely should read this one. The whole thing is available at Armchair Arcade.

 

You were right, a very good article. It makes a very accurate overview of the evolution, without losing itself into details, what usually happens. Very well, and good job finding it, chev.