Incline PLATO RPGs, or why Wizardry and Akalabeth are posers

[Ninjerk]

You're out of touch with the times, bro. Patreon account, I'll make one update per month after you guys raised enough money for me to stop working.

On a serious note, my LP would suck. The games are incredibly random and you can die at any time. Like start game, first monster is a Lv 5 demon. The only one I've managed to make some progress is Avatar, as I'm now Lv 3 and have recruited 2 guards into my party. Since all the games have permadeath, I'm playing like a coward. :3

Don't forget the dick sucking.

 

[agris]

felipepepe

I heard a funny story from my advisor last month. His advisor apparently used to come into lab every day between 8 and 9 am and spend about an hour playing an RPG on the Plato network. My boss was confident it was a D&D RPG he was playing, likely one of the ones you've talked about. Apparently at some point the computer broke, the network fucked up or the software somehow stopped operating successfully, and his advisor stopped playing. But, his plucky students (my advisor included) somehow got into the game he was playing and found out that he had a party of PCs in his game that were all named after his students!

We were at a bar celebrating one of my lab-mates defense of his PhD and my advisor couldn't remember the name of the computer and network that his boss was using. This was at the university of illinois at urbana champaign, sometime between 1977 and 1981. I had just read this thread (great work btw, really interesting), and I chimed in "Plato!" and he was like "YES! How did you know?!" and it was pretty funny. It led to a small digression about my GM'ing a Hackmaster tabletop game that a couple people in our lab play, but that's aside from the point.

This happened not long after I had read this thread, and it's funny how life works like that.

 

[Bio Force Ape]

Why do you break my heart like this?

Spoiler

I'll go cry myself to sleep, nao.

 

[mondblut]

Also, a lot of drama and accusations against Woodhead and Telengard:

1. Steal ideas from Gygax and Arneson and think it's okay.
2. Explode in righteous indignance when somebody else does likewise.

The guy is just butthurt it didn't occur to him how to monetize the whole thing. Therein lies the difference between a crafty nerd and a genius.

PS I see the modder dramaqueen scene didn't change much since the seventies

 

[Mustawd]

Think CRPGAddict had a few posts about these games as well. Pretty good historical context.

http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2011/12/game-68-dungeonpedit5-1975.html


He covers other ones like Oubliette .

 

[norolim]

On a serious note, my LP would suck. The games are incredibly random and you can die at any time. Like start game, first monster is a Lv 5 demon. The only one I've managed to make some progress is Avatar, as I'm now Lv 3 and have recruited 2 guards into my party. Since all the games have permadeath, I'm playing like a coward. :3

I only just stumbled across this thread today. PLATO was an incredible system. I remember reading a lot about it some time ago.

I applied for my PLATO account a few years ago and tried a number of games there, but my main motivation was to finish the 1st ever (surviving) cRPG: pedit5.

As you said, the game is very random. In one of my attempts I met a fucking Dragon (the strongest enemy in the entire game) in the 1st room I visited. But with enough attempts, I finally managed to fight/wriggle my way out of the dungeon and finish the game:

I wonder if I'm still on the Hall of Fame

I should probably get back to it and try a few other RPGs.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

those were mainframe terminals that universities used for teaching in the 70's.

So the average phone'll run it now?

I will say though that those graphics are pretty fucking amazing for the 70's, actual people shaped people. :O

 

[Grauken]

Just got my access and stumbled a bit around in Moria (I'm not sure, but are the fights real-time? got attacked by some things and kept spamming (f)ight until I killed them all, because it seemed like there were no turns like I was expecting initially). The whole setup reminds me of my first computer and trying to get around with DOS and starting up some ancient games