1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF DECEMBER 17 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART FOUR

The Essential 100, No. 2: Dungeons & Dragons

Cover Story: How a tabletop adventure system defined video games.

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erhaps no single work has shaped the video game medium quite like Dungeons & Dragons. Though not a video game in itself, this pen-and-paper role-playing game has done more to define the inner workings of the medium than any other single work or concept. Official D&D-licensed; video games crop up every now and then, ranging in quality from wretched (those terrible NES ports of '80s computer games) to brilliant (BioWare's Baldur's Gate series). When they do, they don't have to stretch far in order to reflect the essence of D&D; they feel instantly familiar to anyone who has spent any amount of time video gaming, because video games carry D&D;'s heritage at the genetic level.

The medium's reliance on D&D;'s design makes a lot of sense from a simple perspective of timing. Right as the pen-and-paper game was exploding across America, video games began to pupate from Pong clones into something more substantial. Naturally, the same young men who took interest in tabletop adventure sessions with their college friends were the ones who spent long, late nights in campus computer labs trying to alchemize streams of digital data into recreation. Of course they would look to D&D; for inspiration.

Of course, D&D; didn't come into popularity in a vacuum. The '70s saw a general obsession with fantasy tropes in general. Conan comics sat right beside Spider-man on the nation's magazine racks. Led Zeppelin sang about journeying into Mordor, giving something for stoned college students to zone out about as they smoked pot and stared at the Lord of the Rings posters adorning their dorm room walls. Gary Gygax and his collaborators mined the zeitgeist of the '60s and '70s -- the collective conscious before Star Wars relegated heroic barbarian fantasy to the sidelines for a couple of decades -- and the men responsible for the revolutionary video games of the medium's formative years were happy to be swept along.

D&D;'s influence on video games resulted from other, equally practical considerations as well. Its underlying premise -- presenting a consistent set of rules by which gamers could go adventuring -- lent itself perfectly to the binary nature of video games. D&D; had grown out of the need to define parameters for small tabletop wargaming sessions. After a few rounds of refinement, it evolved to focus on small adventures in which groups of gamers assumed the identity of a warrior or magician in search of treasure in dungeons. Eventually, it grew into something much larger -- a loosely defined world in which questers around the world turned to consistent skills and tools to battle a common bestiary through their own tales that evolved as the session's Dungeon Master planned and extemporized in response to the player's choices.

The concept that complex interactions and attributes could be reduced to a set of numbers influenced by a randomized variable made D&D; a perfect fit for video games

At its most basic level, Dungeons & Dragons existed as a framework, a set of rules for gamers. It provided the parameters by which warriors could face off against a dozen goblins -- his chances for success and the foes' likelihood of overcoming him with sheer numbers -- or by which wizards could weave their spells. Physical strength, the ability to dodge incoming blows or shrug off the ones that couldn't be evaded, the mental power required to cast powerful offensive magic, the relative advantages and weaknesses of different races, the amount of time required to recover from casting spells or taking damage: D&D; had a rule for those things. And in almost every case, those rules were influenced by a roll of the dice.

The concept that complex interactions and attributes could be reduced to a set of numbers influenced by a randomized variable made D&D; a perfect fit for video games, in which everything ultimately boiled down to hard rules... and those instructions, in turn, reduced down to numbers at their atomic level. Computer games couldn't provide the lively, dynamic intelligence of a real Dungeon Master, but it could certainly chug along according to a set of rules and numbers.

Like D&D;, the games it inspired gradually evolved in complexity. Gygax's earliest modules generally revolved around rudimentary dungeon-spelunking in search of treasure, often against impossible odds that all but guaranteed failure. Likewise, early computer RPGs and adventures focused on treasure-hunting (Wizardry, Zork), while others emphasized raw survival (Rogue). Just as D&D;'s universe slowly expanded in complexity as new revisions added new rules and add-on modules defined the worlds in which D&D; "canon" transpired, so too did video games begin to expand and elaborate on the elements they borrowed from D&D.; For every Pools of Radiance, which faithfully preserved the laws and concepts of D&D;, you had a Dragon Quest or Tales of Phantasia, which took the by-the-numbers principles of D&D; into fascinating territory Gygax and his collaborators could never have predicted.

While D&D;'s video game influence primarily manifested in computer RPGs, over time its philosophy and aesthetics began to spread to other genres. Action games began to grow in sophistication, transcending maze chases and simple run-and-jump races to a flagpole to become increasingly RPG-like. The '80s saw the invention of arcade "action RPGs" like Wonder Boy II and Black Tiger, which incorporated simple shop, gear, and currency mechanics to mundane hack-and-slash titles. These evolved over time to influence everything from pure first-person shooters like Call of Duty (which rewards players with experience that can be redeemed to improve their standard gear loadout) to free-roaming action games like Sleeping Dogs (where players choose to unlock new skills).

Crimson Shroud

The convergence of modern genres caused Grand Theft Auto to mutate from a wacky crime spree sim into a de facto role-playing game by the time GTA San Andreas rolled around. It's given us shooters that operate on role-playing fundamentals, such as Deus Ex, where players can potentially talk their way out of a number of potential gun fights by making deft use of their charisma stat. And that's to say nothing of all the games that have taken their bestiaries straight from D&D;'s Monstrous Compendium. Sure, dragons and goblins have always been fantasy mainstays, but when you play something like Final Fantasy -- where the top dragon is specifically a tiamat, and you battle blatant Mind Flayer and Beholder Clones -- D&D;'s fingerprints seem particularly obvious. And then you have the likes of Crimson Shroud, which forego all pretense of video game illusions and try to simulate a tabletop experience with stunning accuracy.

Perhaps no single example better demonstrates D&D;'s relationship with games than BioWare's evolution over the past decade and a half. The company made its name developing products wholly based on the Dungeons & Dragons property; when that license dried up, they tweaked the details without substantially changing their workings. The result? A Star Wars-based game that effectively played like D&D.; Their own original property, Mass Effect, strayed even further from pure D&D; but still bore the earmarks. Most recently, the third Mass Effect game drifted entirely toward a pure shooter experience... but underneath it all, players still made use of skill trees and statistics derived directly from that '70s tabletop experience.

What's truly remarkable is the fact that even as games evolve and expand, the medium's reliance on D&D;'s concepts has only increased. Blockbuster game publishers look toward Hollywood with longing and envy, but in the end movies will never have the impact on the medium that this classic tabletop adventure framework has. Without D&D;, the fundamental nature of video game would be radically different... and a lot less fun.

Jeremy Parish

Jeremy Parish failed his roll for initiative, so he's just gonna sit on the couch the rest of the day and eat Pringles.