In the mid 1980's, SSI Software landed one of the most lucrative computer software contracts of it's long life - the contract to produce software for and about TSR's Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games. There were other electronic products available at the time for Dungeons & Dragons - notably a pair of hack-and-slay games for the Intellivision, a small LCD game which was pretty much the old mainframe game Hunt The Wumpus dressed up as a "Dungeons & Dragons" game, and an offering from Mattel called "Electronic Dungeons & Dragons", a board-game cum-RPG that used an electronic "map".
But SSI had the jewel in the crown, the computer software license. Computer games were really starting to boom then in the post video-game crash of the early '80s, and SSI nailed themselves in to the pages of history by offering two geek hobbies in one: Dungeons & Dragons and computers.
While the vast majority of the software produced by SSI was computer RPGs (including the seminal Pools of Radiance and a host of follow-on games), two products were released that were designed to help burgeoning Dungeon Masters plan and run their campaigns:
Dungeon Masters Assistant Volume I and II. This review concerns the first of those products,
Volume I: Encounters and Treasures.
The software itself is to say the least Spartan. At the time this program was released, GUI based operating systems were beyond the ken of mere mortals, so everything in the program is accomplished via a text interface (although this is a bit puzzling considering the beautiful graphics within the other SSI AD&D products of the time).
Encounters & Treasures is exactly that - a program designed to help a dungeon master generate monster encounters, with either a fixed or random number of creatures appearing, ranging from the lowly Kobold to mighty Demons such as Orcus. Each encounter can be designated as an "easy", "medium" or "difficult" encounter, and hit dice for each monster selected (from one to the set maximum amount listed in either the Monster Manual or the Monster Manual II) are skewed accordingly.
Additionally, the encounter generator can either be "Short" or "long", the difference being the verbosity of the encounter description. The user can select to have the creature appear in it's lair (if appropriate), and the CPU will determine what treasure if any appears. Believe it or not, I've created ancient Green Dragon encounters in lair where the wyrm didn't have a single coin! unfortunately, the experience point values of the monsters given does not reflect treasure (if any) that might be within the creature's lair).
Also somewhat confusing is the single creature encounters - attempts to generate single encounters with "adventurer" NPCs (humans and demihumans who are of a player profession, e.g., Cleric) are frustrating because the program will only generate a list of various level types and numbers of those NPCs as they appear - for example, you cannot generate an encounter with a scurrilous Assassin in his bolt-hole; the program will generate a ream of them and you must hand-edit out that which you do not want or need, then
recalculate the experience value from there.
The careful reader will note that I mentioned only the Monster Manual and Monster Manual II - this is no slight on my part to the Fiend Folio. For reasons unknown, the creatures from the pages of the Fiend Folio are absent from the monster database; perhaps a finished copy of that book was not available at the time the program was being developed.
However, The Dungeon Master's Assistant Volume I includes a scripting tool that, while it takes more than a little effort to master, will allow the inclusion of virtually any creature the Dungeon Master wishes to create. The scripting language is obtuse, and requires a lot of study before you can simply plug your own monster variants in (I once thought about inputting the entirety of the Fiend Folio for the program but there's a *lot* of work involved in creating just a single monster). Once created, the monster is added to the encounter tables and can be called up along with the other creatures in the database.
The other chief feature of the application is the ability to edit and create new treasure types. Since "A" through "Z" are taken up already, the new type may be created with the letters AA through ZZ. However, one can also edit extant treasure types.
Both Monster and Treasure encounters and discoveries can be saved to disk for later recall.
The last notable feature the application has is an internal die-roller. Rolls of any number, amount and faces may be created (so one could roll a 1d64+3, for example), and the dice can be rolled multiple times. Unlike the monsters and treasures, these rolls cannot be "preserved". The die roller is
serviceable if a bit unwieldy.
Despite it's shortcomings, the Dungeon Master's Assistant Volume I: Monsters and Treasures has held up
fairly well. Although the version reviewed is a pure MS-DOS application, I personally have run it in Windows 3.11, Windows '95(OSR2), Windows 98SE, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 (all service packs) and Windows XP (both with and without service pack 1). The only shortcoming from a technical standpoint that it exhibits is print-handling; it is slow and quirky under the "older" Windows OS's and has on
occasion caused system instability under WinNT and Windows 2000. I have not had the occasion to try Printing under XP, but I would presume it handles it with the same lack of grace. The program "installs" onto a hard drive by copying the directory from the disk (or archive) onto your C: drive. By today's standards, the application barely makes a mark on the drive in terms of space useage; with associated libraries, Dungeon Master's Assistant Volume I: Encounters clocks in at 470 kilobytes (!!!) or so.
Fortunately, all applications that are run in a DOS box under 2000 and XP have copy-and-paste edit capabilities, so when one does need to have the item(s) or encounter(s) handy, it is an easy task to load them up and then copy-and-paste each block of text into whatever editor you have handy. Alternately, for the more technically inclined, the various encounters and treasure files can be edited with a program as simple as Notepad or MS-DOS Edit.com by simply forcing those files to open with those applications. If you are curious as to how this is accomplished, email me and I'll be happy to walk you through the steps.
The final remaining point of discussion with respect to this program is it's legality. SSI Software quit producing the program long ago (although not until it had been produced for virtually every computer platform up to and including the Commodore-Amiga and Apple Macintosh), and with the exception of a lucky find, this author was unable to locate it "legally" at all. It *is* however, available for download through many, many "abandonware" websites. I am not condoning piracy at all - merely mentioning that it is available. Furthermore, if you own or use an Apple emulator, the application (and it's sister, Characters and Treasures) is available through the huge
"Asimov" FTP site for 8-bit apple software. I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, so I have no idea if this makes the program "legal". I will say this: to do more than generate simple encounters, you *must* find a copy of the manual. Period. Trying to create a new monster type or a new environment table is next to impossible to reverse engineer due to the cryptic method in which the program requires data to be entered.
Ultimately, if you don't mind the legwork of learning the scripting language to use this program to it's fullest potential, then it's for you. Go forth and find a used copy on eBay or ask in a newsgroup if anyone has it for sale.
Two out of five stars.