Talk:Dnd (1975 video game)

message: Is this game still available in any form (freeware, purchase, whatever) to this day? Or was it never widely available to the general public? --69.234.208.76 02:34, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Still available?

message: "dnd would today be considered an adventure game rather than an RPG, since it had only one character." - I'm no expert, but as far as I know wether there is only one character or more is irrelevant. Else all roguelikes, CRPGs like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls Saga as well as well Single-player P&P "books" would be considered adventures, not RPGs. Unless its an IF-specific rule that I haven't been able to find so far. -- 84.191.238.76 17:01, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I would consider dnd to be an RPG rather than an adventure game, although I ***'t have a perfect definition explaining why. What I consider a "real" adventure game on PLATO was Zork, in which the character could go from room to room or place to place, getting unique descriptions and always finding the same objects in the same place each time the game was restarted, with a goal of solving the puzzle rather than building up more power. In dnd you wanted to find a sword+3 because it would make it easier to kill more powerful monsters, and it was completely unpredictable where, when, or even whether you would ever find one. In zork, you went to the 3rd room to the left in the twisty maze, to get the tin cup, so you could carry the oil from the spill, so you could oil the door hinges, so you could get it open, so you could get to the top of the dam, so you could find the rope you needed to.... Somewhere in all that rambling is the definition of what makes a game an RPG like D&D, and what makes it an adventure game like zork. -- Aumakua 18:44, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: RPG status

message: "The second game, m199h, was created in a lesson space for foreign language instruction, and it was similarly deleted as soon as its illicit purpose was discovered" - This line says that the first two games writen for PLATO, wich preceded dnd, if i'm not mistaken, were deleted because of "illicit content". I'm no expert at all in this subject, but i was very intrigued with this phrase, and found no further discussion on the article. Could anyony please elaborate a little? as it is now, the article shows an assumption that the reader knows beofre hand that this games were illicit. -- Gorgonzola, December 24, 2005.
:Well, that was "illicit purpose" not "illicit content" so it doesn't imply there was anything inherently 'illegal' or anything like that about the contents, just that it wasn't a lesson on a foreign language like it was supposed to be - and hence got deleted. dnd was the first one created for the express purpose of being a game. Admittedly, you do have to know something about the way PLATO worked both as a computer and how it was used, to completely understand the problem, but that is beyond the scope of this article. -- Aumakua 10:53, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Illicit Content

message: The article seems to have a major "stylistic" flaw. Under "gameplay" it reads "The game presents players with an overhead view of the dungeon and plays much like NetHack, but also implements many basic concepts of Dungeons & Dragons." - it seems improper that the article defines the subject via reference to a derivative work. That is, NetHack is a game published a decade following 'dnd' so how does it make sense that a historically minded description defines the gameplay of 'dnd' via reference to the gmaeplay of NetHack. It's akin to using the word 'cookie' to define 'cake', only to find out that the word 'cake' is used to define 'cookie'. 99.230.243.1 (talk) 14:28, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It was an unsourced comparison anyway, so I just removed it. 68.57.233.34 (talk) 22:34, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition and description ignores chronology. 

message: I am bothered by the reference to any games developed on the PLATO IV system as video games.  These were computer games, and they used a graphical display, but the flat panel plasma display technology used on the Magnavox PLATO IV terminal did not use a video signal to present an image on the screen.  The screen was literally a dot-addressable RAM technology where the glowing dot on the screen was in itself one bit of memory, and this bit could be set or cleared by the electronics outside the screen.  We seem stuck with the category "video games" to refer to such games, but careless use of the term video confuses things.  (Note that later, when CDC went commercial with the PLATO system, they developed a video terminal to replace the flat-panel plasma displays.  Thus, PLATO games could be played on video displays, even if they weren't developed for them.) Douglas W. Jones (talk) 03:53, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not a video game?