The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [89]
Bard’s Tale also featured unique music for each song, and these were key to solving some of the challenges in the game. Finally, CRPGs gave bards the respect they deserved. Bard’s Tale was noteworthy for its spell casting system, which required a combination of letters determined by the rulebook; it also happened to be a software anti-piracy measure. Like tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, Bard’s Tale provided few maps, so the player was on his own.
Bard’s Tale was the first CRPG to use animation on its monster pictures. It also graphically portrayed what spells were in effect on party members. Bard’s Tale introduced the ability to summon monsters to add them to the party. They could range from offensive beasts who breathed fire to living targets that absorbed damage. Bard’s Tale was one of the first games to use spells to solve puzzles.
1985 brought Phantasie, by Winston Douglas Wood and released by Strategic Simulations, Inc. It featured six characters with a choice of classes: fighter, monk, priest, ranger, thief, and wizard. The races included dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling, human, and “other,” which included non-human races. Phantasie combined a series of different styles of play; the town window handled the shop aspect of the game, there was a top-down style view for dungeons and world maps, and a separate window represented party position in a twodimensional view for combat (Barton 2008:103).
Phantasie’s plot revolved around an evil sorcerer and his black knights. Twenty scrolls were required to destroy their powerful soul-stealing rings. I remember Phantasie well. This was the origin of my character Blast, an elf wizard who specialized in blowing things to bits. I later transitioned the character to tabletop role-playing in the Role-Playing Game Association’s Living Greyhawk campaign as an evoker.
Gauntlet debuted in arcades in 1985. This fantasy-themed dungeon crawl from Atari featured four iconic characters: Questor the Elf, Merlin the Wizard, Thor the Warrior and Thyra the Valkyrie. Using a top-down perspective, Gauntlet threw an endless stream of monsters at player characters, which were in turn cut down by weapon or magic, at range or in melee. Gauntlet distilled the most violent, fast-paced elements of Dungeons & Dragons into a format that wouldn’t be replicated on desktop computers until Diablo.
Also in 1985, Wizard’s Crown featured a point-buy system for attributes. Up to eight characters could choose from classes: fighter, priest, ranger, and sorcerer. The game was also noteworthy for its multiclassing. Wizard’s Crown featured a quick combat feature, allowing fights of up to 99 combatants to be handled abstractly without a detailed breakdown of every turn. Wizard’s Crown also used the notion of “reach”—non-ranged weapons like polearms could strike at a distance, a feature introduced in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and formalized in the third edition of the game (Barton 2008:105).
The year 1986 brought The Shard of Spring for the Apple II by Craigh Roth and David Stark. It had a party of five characters consisting of up to five races: dwarf, elf, gnome, human, and troll—but only two classes (wizard and warrior).
Also in 1986, Realms of Darkness featured four races: dwarf, elf, gnome, human—and eight classes: fighter, sorcerer, priest, thief and four prestige classes. It also featured a text parser similar to interactive fiction. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the game was the ability to split up the party, useful for handling different encounters or scouting ahead (Barton 2008:112).
In 1986, Magic and Magic: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum, established a sophisticated universe that would go on for another nine installments as well as a real-time strategy game, Heroes of Might and Magic. Characters could choose from archer, cleric, knight, paladin, robber, and sorcerer as classes. Races included dwarf, elf, gnome, half-orc, and human.
Might and Magic was one of the first games to feature a rest command, which restored all hit points and spell points. Wandering monsters were always