Quote:
Originally Posted by towbes
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As someone who knows very little about D&D, I would like to thank you for explaining this little bit of history. Always good to know the roots of a decision.
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(*EDIT* - this is typed off the top of my head, so it's sloppy and not intended to be a complete explanation)
In the 60s, there were war games; you had an army, depicted by miniatures and rules on their abilities and stats. This slowly turned into proto d&d games where you controlled one character vs an army. Heavily influenced by tolkien and other fantasy writers, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (among others) worked on systems they had already built to design the first edition d&d in the early 70s. You advanced through your levels collecting gold (early versions and other games actually equated gold earned to experience earned) and killing enemies. With other expansions (later known as splatbooks) would contain content for different classes, dungeons, settings, etc. It eventually kept building till they made changes/advancements which became Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Im pretty sure Arneson was out of the picture at this point) and published by TSR (later D&D rights were bought out by Wizards of the Coast - when they created 3rd Ed). AD&D's reign was from the later 70s up to 2000.
The idea was that you would earn experience as you killed monsters. Certain races were classes in an of themselves in 1st ed and 2nd ed (Elf being a class for a while). Certain classes were considered more powerful (such as elves) so to off set this, they would assign xp penalties to offset their power vs other available class/race combos. If you dual classes (for instance, fighterman and a thief) you were considered at a disadvantage because you needed to learn the skills of being a fighterman and the skills of being a thief at the same time, thereby slowing your progression than if you were straight fighterman or straight thief. This also incurred an xp penalty.
This is where Everquest followed the idea (although, being level 60 in d&d is laughable, because the initial intent was by level 10 you were either a lord, or king and some classes had the ability to own a castle, recruit followers or had to retire). Some classes/races had abilities that put them at an advantage over other classes, so they assigned similar xp penalties, requiring more xp to advance.
You had stats, abilities and skills - which would either increase as you leveled or found items that would increase them. The variation here is that D&D skills didn't increase through use, you would assign them based on available points as you leveled.
Religion was used, so clerics and paladins would get their abilities from their deities.
There were good and evil races, but the system that is absent from Everquest is alignment. This ranged from being good to neutral to evil and would be the driving force of how your character behaved in certain situations.
All in all - Everquest was a graphical immersion of D&D type games, where the computer did all of your number crunching (a 30 second battle in d&d could last hours because you had to figure out attacks, spells, resists, thac0 (a contrived version of AC) by rolling dice, looking up corresponding charts and doing the math in your head.)