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Title: Clever Use of a Personal Computer in a Fantasy Role Playing Game
Date Occurred: April 1982
Date Written: December 31, 2005
Written By: Joseph T. Arendt
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John Stilwell and his friends Dan Main, Scott Bille, Alan Raichel, Richard Knowles, and others talked about fantasy role playing games, which lumped together they called by the acronym FRP. This was often their topic of discussion when I was with them during lunch and supper at Glenview Commons Cafeteria at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. The only topic for this group that rivaled FRP in popularity was personal computers.
Many people are aware of a game called Dungeons and Dragons, which is often shortened to say, "D and D." It was a major fad in the late Seventies and the early Eighties. D and D is still around to this day, but far less popular then it had been. D and D is a type of FRP game. I had played D and D the summer before I had started college. I knew nothing of the other gaming systems until I met John and his friends at college.
I forgot the name of a competing gaming system that Dan Main ran a few times, but I remember the handling of injuries to player-characters. That is, characters that a player in the game controls. In D and D as well as most competing FRP systems, there is a great deal of fighting by the characters. In the D and D system, a number used to keep track of health is known as hit points. Each injury drops the number of hit points. When the hit points reach zero, the player-character is either unconscious or dead, depending on the way the dungeon master (DM) running the game chooses to apply the rules.
Hit points come back slowly simply by resting or quickly by various magical healing methods in the game. No injury is permanent in the D and D system. If the character is beat all the way down to one hit point, but then over time recovers, he can go all the way back up to his maximum hit points that he had before getting hurt. There seemed no scars or permanent injuries.
If one were to engage in real fighting, especially with swords, recovery from injuries would unlikely always be so complete! In the system Dan ran a few times, there was more realism because a character could get a permanent injuries like losing a limb or an eye. While I found that gruesome, I have to admit when playing a character in Dan’s game, I tried much harder to have my character find an alternative to fighting by bargaining, running, threatening before attacking, or other means than I did when playing D and D.
John most often ran and clearly preferred a game called Champions. Rather than swords, wizards, and magic, it was near-future science fiction with characters with comic-book-style superpowers. It would have ray guns and normal guns, space ships and automobiles, force fields and electrified chainlink fences.
It was because John, Dan, and the others used other gaming systems that they preferred the acronym FRP rather than limiting the description to D and D. Yet, actual D and D was played by that group as well.
When we were at supper at the cafeteria, Alan whispered that I should pay attention to the reaction of strangers eavesdropping when our friends were discussing FRP games.
I observed that when the discussion was about D and D, eavesdroppers quickly grew bored and went back to their own conversations. Mentioning a magic weapon or a fantastic monster such as a dragon would tip them off as to what our group was discussing.
When the game Champions was discussed, it often took longer for eavesdroppers to figure out what was going on. If ray guns or force fields were mentioned, that would tip people off. Often, though, the conversation was about regular guns and regular automobiles. The reactions of strangers indeed could be amusing as they overheard discussions about stopping bombs, breaking into a laboratory, or something of that nature.
John and Richard were often aware of the effect they were having. A few times, they hammed it up for their audience of strangers! Alan did not seem to have the knack of entertaining the audience, somehow accidentally tipping off the listeners so they would go back to their own conversations. I certainly did not the knack either, being even worse at this than Alan.
Richard's main character in the Champions game was a hard-boiled private detective. It made for entertaining listening when Richard got talking about the Champions games. Imagine if you sat down to lunch, then overheard some men talking about a life of violent adventure of a private detective like Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer as though it had really recently happened to them. Would you not listen curiously?
John had a character he played that he called Iguana-Man, which was more like a comic-book character. Everybody has heard of characters like Batman and Spiderman, so a character like Iguana-Man would fit in well. That should have been a tip-off to this being fantasy. However, John in reality had a pet iguana that was over three feet long. He did not have his pet at college, but he did have photographs and I saw the reptile many times later at Madison. What this meant for the conversations at the cafeteria is sometimes John was referring to his real pet iguana with genuine iguana incidents and other times to the Iguana-Man character of the Champions games. It was easy to follow when one knew of the game and the real pet, but I think it perplexed strangers who overheard.
While I had a couple characters I played in the Dungeons and Dragons games, I initially stayed out of the Champions games. I watched several without playing, especially since this was the period when I had a need to stay away from my dorm room in Morrow Hall on Friday and Saturday nights because of harassment by the drunks there.
I found the Champions games very confusing, although I preferred the near-future science fiction aspect to medieval swords and sorcery aspect of D and D. I have never been that big of a fan of magic or the Middle Ages.
John put the tables, formulas, and computations for Champions into his Vic-20 computer. He also had some put into a programmable Casio calculator.
Among all the engineering students I knew, John was the only one at that time with a personal computer of any type at this time. John's roommate Alan Raichel had a personal computer called a Sinclair ZX-80, but Alan was in Computer Science. The CS students seemed more inclined to get a personal computer at that time than the engineering students.
In contrast to personal computers, programmable calculators were common among engineering students, although I did not have one myself. I had a Casio scientific calculator that served my needs, but all it had for memory was a place to temporarily store one number. It was not programmable. The programmable calculators could run what amounts to short computer programs. However, that was limited by a one-line or two-line display, using tiny keys to enter everything, and with a very small amount of free memory...called RAM for Random Access Memory.
As an example of using a programmable calculator, most engineers I knew would code in a game that they got from the manual or elsewhere called Lunar Lander. The game involved entering the correct amount of fuel to burn to land on the moon without crashing. It only had a display of numbers and letters. Enter too little fuel to burn and the lunar lander hit the ground too hard. Enter too much fuel to burn and the lander initially hops back up like a yo-yo on the rise. On the later descent but soon without fuel at all, crashing was inevitable. If one uses a calculator and makes computations, it is not too hard to solve. However, that would take a calculator to play the game on the calculator. Whenever I tried it just taking guesses, I crashed.
A similar idea in a game on the Vic-20 computer had a drawing of a lander and a moonscape, as well as vertical and horizontal movement. There was color, animation, and rocket sounds. It was much more fun there than on a calculator!
Using a programmable calculator to take some of the tedium out of playing fantasy-role-playing games made sense. However, there simply was not enough memory in the typical calculators of that era to put in the many tables used in the FRP games like Champions or D and D. For that, the Vic-20 computer with at least an 8 kilobyte memory expansion worked much better (about 11 kilobytes usable RAM then), so understandably John used his computer instead of the calculator whenever he could.
When the games were played in John and Alan's dorm room, it was easy for John to use his Vic-20 computer, which he had set up at his desk. Sometimes, the games were in the fourth floor Wilgus lounge instead. That was when he would use the programmable calculator and simply brought a book to look up the tables.
After observing several of the Champions games, I finally decided to try playing in one. John helped me set up a character. That alone took hours. Detailed knowledge of the rules, which I definitely lacked, let one develop a more powerful character. This could be done with tradeoffs. For example, a common convention in comic books is a superhero having a secret civilian identity. If a villain knows that, it handicaps the hero. The rules come up with a rough balance of granting more powers to the character if he has things like this that handicaps what he can do.
If one knew exactly where the thresholds were, one could exploit the system to get the optimal setup. Since I was having a hard time understanding what the rules meant, I certainly was not capable of optimizing anything!
After much effort, I had a character that I called Doc. As a role model, I was thinking of the pulp character Doc Savage. However, nearly every skill had to be purchased with points in this gaming system, so I had to carefully choose what the character would be good at. This was unlike the pulp character of Doc Savage who was supposed to be the world's best surgeon, civil engineer, electrical engineer, lawyer, and archeologist all at the very same time. I could only afford with the points to be good at a very few things. I did not have enough points in creating a new character to have a qualification as a medical doctor, but I was able to get the skills of an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) according to the rules of the game.
For Dungeons and Dragons games, I knew having a healer on the team was often as important as another swordsman. I suspected it might be similar for a Champions game. That is why I went with the EMT skills, like wound dressings, giving vaccinations or antidotes, and the like.
As a handicap to get traded for the benefit of more medical skill, I set it up so that my character would refuse to intentionally kill even in self defense. That fit well for me as I am not too fond of the imaginary bloodshed in the others FRP games I played, even if it makes good drama. For weapons in this game, my character had presumably nonlethal things like a tranquilizer gun and smoke grenades.
This Champions game itself turned out to be vastly different than the ones I had witnessed but not played before.
John had a new computer-mapping program he wanted to use, which he had combined with his other previous computer program to assist in running Champions games. I had heard him talking about this new program, but I had never before seen the mapping feature in use when playing an FRP game. I am not sure if this was the first time he ever used it or if it was only the first time I personally saw it used.
John ran this Champions game in the lounge in Wilgus Hall. Previously, that would mean using his programmable calculator and a book with tables. This time, since he specifically wanted to use his Commodore Vic-20 computer, he brought that in. This meant moving the keyboard, the tape player, and the small black-and-white television used as a computer monitor to the lounge. (It was certainly more of a chore than moving a modern laptop such as the one I am typing this on right now in 2005, but it was easier than moving most modern desktop computers would be.)
John described his new program as doing mapping. What that meant is he wanted the players to see a map that was generated on the computer screen. His little black-and-white television that he used as a monitor was too small for all the players to see. Therefore, John and Alan carried Alan's nineteen or twenty-one inch diagonal measure color television all the way to the lounge.
John set up both televisions to display off the same computer. However, he had a switch so he could cut off the signal to the color television while keeping it to his little black-and-white television. He set up the small set so only he could see it, while the large color set was situated so all the players had a clear view.
In Dungeons and Dragons games, it was common for the person running the game...known as the DM...to set up some cardboard to block the view from the players. The DM might want not want to spoil the surprise of a dragon waiting behind a closed door. If the players could see the DM had the Monster Manual open to a page about dragons, it might tip them off!
For the Champions game, John had coded the features and rules into his Vic-20 computer so he used that instead of a book. When doing this, he used the switch to cut off the signal to the large television while the small set only he could see still functioned. This was similar to how a DM in a D and D game would do some tasks hidden behind a cardboard shield.
To explain what was going on with mapping, let me explain a technique Scott Bille and others used when running Dungeons and Dragons games first, then get back to what John was doing with the mapping feature of his computer program for the Champions game.
Scott had many figurines. These were about the size of chess pieces, but were shaped like swordsmen, archers, wizards, axe-wielders, and dwarves. These were typically made of lead. (See Fig. 1) Scott and his girlfriend Lona painted them to where they were works of art.
Figure One: A Quarter and Two Unpainted Lead Figures from Mattel Electronics Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game, Mattel, Inc., 1980, Hawthorn, CA 90250.
[Photograph by Joseph Arendt]
My hands have never been particularly steady. I am lucky I got my electrical engineering degree when most integrated circuits where in large dual-in-line packages (DIPs) rather than being surface mounts like today. I have seen electronic technicians soldering surface mount parts that would tax the ability of a fine jeweler. As for Scott’s lead figures, I could never manage the detail that he and Lona painted onto them with hands, eyes, teeth, buttons, sword hilts, and so painted different colors. Consider this was done although most figures were only about an inch high.
When running a game, it was necessary to know where characters were in relation to each other. For example, a swordsman can only slash or stab what is in his reach. Some opponents will be in range while others will not. At the start of the game, each player chose one of Scott's lead figures to represent his character. Scott would use other lead figures as the opponents.
These figures along with some wood or plastic blocks to represent buildings or walls allowed Scott to run a visually understandable battle. It allowed everybody to see what character was where. Dan used the same technique, but mostly with figures borrowed from Scott.
Instead of using lead figures and blocks, John had decided to put his map and icons for the characters onto the television screen by using his computer. For the map on the television, John had set up what looked like a checkerboard of red and black squares. The alternating red-and-black made it easy to count off how many squares things were apart from each other. Some weapons had only a certain range or reach. A karate kick might only cover what is in adjoining squares. A thrown knife might travel five squares.
Each character got assigned a letter of the alphabet. I no longer remember what letters were used, but I might get a D because I was calling my character Doc.
I had the feeling John would like to have used fancy graphics to make an iconic figure using redefined graphics for each character, but just a letter worked out fine for the game.
John had superimposed on the checkboard a schematic map. It showed a building with walls, windows, and doors. John had to explain some of the symbols, but it was easy to follow once he had. The Commodore extended ASCII set included lines, corners, double lines, and so on that worked well for making a map that looked like a blueprint of a house or something like that rather than a road map.
The Vic-20 did not use a mouse. It would be a year or so before I even heard of a computer mouse because this was still 1982. What the Vic-20 did have was a joystick port that allowed use of an Atari joystick. That is, it used joysticks identical to those in the common videogame systems of that era. Most Vic-20 users I knew including John (and later myself when I got a Vic-20) used genuine Atari joysticks, which were inexpensive but reliable. Competing brands often were not as reliable, wore out quickly, or simply did not have a good feel to them as the Atari joystick. I think Commodore had some re-labeled Atari joysticks they sold. It was cheaper just to get Atari joysticks.
John had his program set up to use the joystick like a mouse would be used today. He used the joystick to move the cursor onto a character. Say, it was a letter D on the checkerboard for my Doc characer. Wherever the cursor went, it was easy to see because the colors reversed. For example, if the cursor was not on the D, it might be a white D on a red square. With the cursor over it, it might be a white square with a red D.
By using the fire button on the joystick, John could pick up a letter. He could move the joystick, then hit the fire button to drop the D someplace else. He could then go pick up and move a letter representing another player-character.
Clicking and dropping like that on a computer using a mouse rather than a joystick would become commonplace a couple years later, but I had not seen anything remotely like it at the time.
Using this system, John ran his Champions battles on the television screen similar to how Scott or Dan would set up a Dungeons and Dragons battle using lead figures and wood blocks. Instead of looking at the lead figures to figure out where the characters were in relation to each other and the opponents, players looked instead at Alan’s color television.
I really liked how John did this for his Champions game. For Dungeons and Dragons, I felt the colorfully painted lead figures were a form of art in themselves, so were part of the ambiance of the game. I would not want to get rid of that aspect of D and D, especially the ritual of picking a figure to represent your character at the start of the game. This game was definitely not Dungeons and Dragons, though. For a near-future superhero-style game like John’s version of Champions, I thought his two computer displays with the mapping worked better than lead figures would have. The computer used this way felt to me like I had wandered into the future myself!
(As readers of this can tell, I was highly impressed by what John had done! Twenty-three years later in 2005 when computer technology has radically changed and is more powerful in ways that were unimaginable in 1982, I still remain impressed by what John did with his Commodore Vic-20 computer in that Champions game.)
As for the game itself, I found my character Doc was unable to contribute much to the fight. At one point, our party ended up in a long range gunfight with some villians. Doc’s nonlethal tranquilizer pistol could not shoot nearly far enough to hit them even if his aim was good.
When any of our group was injured, it turned out some character had a science-fiction-style gadget that did miracle healing. My character's emergency medical skills were therefore not needed when they had that gadget!
Once, my character's smoke grenades gave cover when our party moved from one location to the other. Other than that, my character's contribution to the success of the endeavor that night of playing was practically nonexistent.
Richard’s character was definitely the most effective of them all. Unlike my character, his character had no compulsion against killing the enemy as long as it was in self-defense, plus he had the long-range weapons to do it.
At some point, the game ended for the night. I felt bad that my character which John had spent so long helping me develop had contributed so little.
The next night, which was Saturday, the game was continued. Some activity was taking place in the Wilgus Hall lounge, so we could not use it. We had to crowd into Alan and John's dorm room. This did save the effort of moving the two televisions and the computer. It was crowded in the room given the number of players, but not too uncomfortable. I thought the computer-generated map shown on Alan's large color television worked even better in this close environment than when the players were spread out in a lounge.
Alan Raichel had a character that like mine had a compulsion not to kill, not even in self-defense. Alan's character also had superheroic abilities like near invisibility and spider-like climbing or something of that nature. Whatever it was, it let his character get right next to the enemy, then use karate on them. Without these abilities, my character could not do get close enough to accomplish anything like that when the bullets were flying.
However, when Alan's character was doing his karate, a roll of the dice came out badly. I was so unfamiliar with the rules of this game that I did not understand what was going on, other than that Alan seemed definitely unhappy.
Finally, it was explained to me that under the rules, a small chance existed to accidentally kill an opponent even if just hitting or kicking them with no intention of permanent harm or death. I thought the system was impressive to have that, because I certainly have seen newspaper stories about that kind of thing happening in the real world.
(For example, I think it was this year of 2005 or last year of 2004 that a police officer where I live now was investigated. He had punched somebody so hard that the man died! That was just with hitting with a hand, not with the billyclub! He was not charged, as it seems the blow was in legitimate defense. So, while rare, it seems that being hit in the head hard enough simply by a fist can be fatal. Something like that had just happened to Alan's character, although I believe it was a karate kick in the game rather than a blow with a fist.)
Meanwhile, Richard's character had a gun. He was knocking off...presumably killing...enemies, although the enemies were certainly trying to kill our characters as well so it was self-defense and not murder. Richard's character had no compulsion against killing when in self-defense. Alan's character did have such a compulsion, even for self-defense.
John decided that Alan's character would go into an emotional state of shock for a time, being useless in this fight and for a period of some hours afterward.
I asked if that would happen if my character accidentally killed an opponent, such as perhaps an allergic reaction to the drugs in his tranquilizer darts. It was something I had never considered.
It seems apparently not, as long as what my character did was definitely not intentional. However, Alan's character somehow had a much stronger compulsion against killing than mine. I found this confusing, but I did not understand much about this gaming system to begin with.
Since my character Doc had proved to be nearly useless in the fights so far, other than the one circumstance where smoke from his smoke grenades provided cover, Doc got stuck watching over and keeping Alan's shell-shocked character out of harm's way while the others fought.
I found it frustrating, especially how my character Doc although designed to be a healer could not heal Alan's character. There was nothing physically wrong with Alan's character, so no wounds needed dressing, no antidote or vaccine would help. Alan seemed far more frustrated, although not so much at John as to how the situation had worked out where a blow that should have been nonlethal had a chance of being accidentally lethal. Alan seemed mad at the Champions gaming system itself.
I think what happened in the game hangs together as drama. The frustration I felt playing the game would be similar to the frustration my character would have felt. Maybe keeping the temporarily shell-shocked character out of harm's way was a significant contribution. It did not fit Doc's preconceptions about his role, but the more I thought about it, the more appropriate is seemed for that character.
(In 2005 as I type this, I think of this game as perhaps the most sophisticated and subtly nuanced situation that I got into when doing fantasy-role-playing gaming.)
As for the use of the computer, I was amazed how John had incorporated the use of it. Previously, I had often seen John and others including Richard and Scott effectively use a computer to supplement or replace the use of the manuals as well as using the random number generator to replace rolling of dice, greatly speeding game play. Until then, I had never seen or imagined anything like John’s mapping program.
John had all the tables and formulas in the program in addition to the mapping feature, so was doing both features on the computer for this game.
It turned out this was the only Champions game that I ever played. The end of the semester was approaching. John and I were electrical engineering students, so had considerably less time to spend on activities like gaming as the month of May rolled in.
This was to be John's last semester at Platteville. In August, he would be attending University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since his parents lived in the city of Madison, this transfer made sense for him.
After John left, I never saw another Champions game played at Platteville. I think the system got re-worked and re-named to Heroes. By either name, I never saw it played again.
NOT QUITE THE END, BECAUSE A POSTSCRIPT FOLLOWS
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Title: John's You Are There Computer Program
Date Occurred: Perhaps Summer 1984.
Date Written: December 31, 2005
Written By: Joseph T. Arendt
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I transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in June of 1984. John had transferred there much earlier in August of 1982, but he had remained in touch with Alan and me. So far, John had not gotten rich selling his computer games as I had once thought he would, but he did make a reasonable sum on them considering he was also busy as a full-time college student in electrical engineering. How he did this takes some explanation.
John told me that when he was attending Madison and I was still at Platteville, he and some Madison friends started a software company. In addition to the programs he had written back at Platteville, John had put together several more games and utility computer programs. The company had not worked out. John said the others talked big, but then when push came to shove, they did not do much.
Since John had written his programs all by himself and owned them fully, he gave up on the company. He wrote text to accompany the programs, then submitted them as articles to computer magazines. He got article after article published, getting a modest sum of money for each. This is how he made money on them, but never got rich.
By 1984, John had reworked and written an accompanying article around the mapping program that he had used in that Champions game back at Platteville in 1982. In the 1982 Champions game that I had played in, the mapping program had only shown a top-down view, like looking at a blueprint or a map. Also back at Platteville in 1982, John had had a three-dimensional-style-perspective maze program that was a game. Students liked playing it on his computer back then. He had named that A-Maze. I believe the article with type-in code for that maze game had been one of his first articles published. Even back then at Platteville before publishing any articles, John had talked about wanting to combine his new mapping program with a three-dimensional-style-perspective walkaround viewpoint like in his maze game. He did not have it written at that time. Some time after leaving Platteville, he completed it. He called the mapping program that could switch between a top-down view and a three-dimensional-style-perspective view by the name, "You Are There."
It was very long for the type-in programs of magazines, but it was so exceptionally good that it did get purchased and published. I think he received a large sum compared to what he got for most of his articles, although this was not all that much if one factored in the time spent writing and debugging the code.
While I was very impressed by the new "You Are There" program, I had by then given up fantasy role playing games. Getting through my electrical engineering courses was just too demanding to continue playing those. As a result, I never saw "You Are There" used when playing a fantasy role playing game like I had the original mapping program in the Champions game. As technically impressive as the new program was, I had trouble imagining how it would improve the fantasy role playing game that I had played. As a comparison, I do not think it would help me to play a chess game if I could have a perspective view of the board like a knight or pawn might have.
I might be wrong. The usefulness or lack of it of the three-dimensional-perspective might be obvious if I had ever seen it in action when a fantasy role playing game was being played. Either way, the You Are There program was definitely effective for selling John’s article to the computer magazine, giving his bank balance a needed boost!
Therefore, John’s published You Are There program includes a three-dimensional-perspective feature that was not in the program that I described in my story “Clever Use of a Personal Computer in a Fantasy Role Playing Game.” If anybody knows about his You Are There, what I described the program doing in that story might be a little confusing unless you realize this.
THE END
If you want to talk to me, I can be reached at arendtj@att.net
Last Modified January 5, 2006