![]() In both versions, you can play a fighter, cleric, or magician. The first edition is better balanced this way. In the latter game, you hardly ever level up from killing foes, and the focus is on gaining experience points through accumulation of treasure. Finally, the original DND offers more experience for battles than Necromancer. I like the original game's dungeons a bit better they have more defined rooms and corridors the Necromancer version's dungeons are more maze-like. I admire how Knight pulled the dungeon names from the fathomless depths of his own creativity. Ironically, Bill Knight's DND might be the most faithful recreation we have of what Daniel Lawrence's DND looked like on the Purdue mainframes, and it clearly shows many elements-a main quest involving an orb "excelsior" transport between levels use of WAXD for movement magic books that increase and decrease attributes-that go all the way back to dnd on PLATO.Ĭharacter creation in the 1988 version. In any event, Lawrence died in 2010, so we can't get his clarification on any of this. I don't think the original PLATO dnd was available on Cyber1 yet, so he may very well have been counting on the fact that no one could really compare the two games. (While Lawrence may not have threatened legal action against Knight, there's evidence that he did against many earlier DND derivatives.) In a 2007 interview with Barton, Lawrence claims he wasn't aware of the PLATO game and feebly offers that "some of my play testers may have well been giving me suggestions from their experiences elsewhere." Given the similarities between the Game of Dungeons and DND derivatives like Telengard and Bill Knight's game-let alone Lawrence's original-I believe that Lawrence was lying or at least significantly mis-remembering. On the other hand, it was disingenuous of Lawrence to try to stifle other versions, given that he himself had copied DND from Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood's PLATO original. I don't have Lawerence's DND to compare against Knight's, but it's clearly similar enough that it was a bit unethical for Knight to sell it, no matter how much code-cleaning he'd done. Whatever the case, no one's hands are perfectly clean here. ![]() It's thus possible that the change to Dungeons of the Necromancer's Domain had nothing to do with Lawrence. In an e-mail to me, sent about a month after this post was originally published, Knight said that the legal threats came from "the folks that market the DND board game," by which he might mean TSR itself. Slightly contrasting Barton's account is an account from this site (which is otherwise absolutely riddled with errors) in which the author claims to have corresponded with Bill Knight and that Knight didn't even know the name of DND's author until the time of the correspondence (which seems to have been in the mid-1990s). ![]() While I have no reason to doubt Barton, I haven't been able to find any primary sources to corroborate this history. In any case, Bill updated the game and rereleased it asĭungeon of the Necromancer's Domain in 1988, which he claimed was a "ground-up rewrite" in an effort to avoid future conflict with Lawrence. He had done enough work cleaning up the "spaghetti code" of the original game that he had inįact created a new product. Unfair competition and did what he could to prevent its distribution. ![]() The game was successful enough to attract Lawrence's attention he saw it as In Dungeons & Desktops (relevant chapter offered online here), Matt Barton says of the dispute: The source of the threats is a bit cloudy. In 1988, he re-released it as Dungeons of the Necromancer's Domain after some legal threats. This version was developed by Bill Knight of R O Software in Plano, Texas, in 1984, after he found some variant of Lawrence's DND kicking around on a DEC computer at work. Inspired (of course) by Dungeons & Dragons, the games all feature limited mechanics, rapid random encounters with both enemies and special objects, and death that is quick, frequent, and usually permanent.Īll of them feature thrones that you can sit in or pry jewels from, but I'm not sure where this started. Gordon Walton's Dungeons of Death (1979), Daniel Lawrence's Telengard (1982), Bill Knight's DND (1984), Thomas Hanlin's Caverns of Zoarre (1984), and another DND from 1985 sometimes called "Heathkit DND." What we're notably missing is Lawrence's pre- Telengard versions most were discarded as potential copyright violations when Telengard was published by Avalon Hill. It was adapted (or plagiarized, as some have it) to a variety of other systems by Purdue University student Daniel Lawrence in the late 1970s, and many of the people exposed to it decided to try a hand at their own versions, including C. Briefly, DND goes back to The Dungeon ("pedit5") and The Game of Dungeons ("dnd"), two of the earliest known RPGs, created by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975.
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