Well, this is pretty much the reason I started coming here, so why not a topic about it?
Who here remembers Legend of the Red Dragon? I mean aside from the vague reference Bear made in March 30th's comic. Anyone? No? Well, Legend of the Red Dragon was a text-based competitive fantasy/role-playing Door Game (external application) that was played on the precursor to the Internet, BBSes (Bulletin Board Services). The story was simple: A red dragon decided it would be fun to terrorize an (as of that point) unnamed town and its people, eating children and the like, so the town put a call out for heroes to go kill it.
As you might expect, you couldn't just march up to the dragon and lop off its head. No, before you could do that, you had to go through a series of trials, killing nearby lesser threats in the forest and gaining experience points. After enough experience was earned, a player could go fight their current "master" to seek advancement. Beating the master would raise your level (and stats) and give you a new master. Beating the Level 12 master, Turgon, would allow you to go track down the Red Dragon and try and kill it. Beating the dragon would either finish the game completely, or send you back to Level 1 to do the whole thing over, depending on how the game was set to work. (The BBS SysOp (System Operator) could set the number of "Dragon Kills" it took to win the game.)
Now, the big thing about this game is that it had to be played over the course of days, weeks, and sometimes months. The was done on purpose to bring interest into BBSes. Here's how it worked:
You couldn't just blitz through the game in one day (on most BBSes, anyway). You had a set amount of "Forest Fights" you were allowed per-day. (I think 40?) While you may have been able to advance a level one day, you'd have to come back to challenge the next level, and so-on and so-forth. And this isn't taking into consideration that some of the monsters could kill you, ending your gaming session for that day prematurely, forcing you to come back tomorrow to try again.
In addition to the usual monsters and whatnot, you could also find random events in the forest, such as chatting with the magically-reanimated head of a princess, rescuing prince(sse)s from random towers, or harassing fairies for fun and profit! Some of these events could give you bonus items, such as gems (to buy stats with), a horse (to access the semi-hidden tavern in the forest), or experience and gold. There weren't really any negative events, but the "rescue the prince(ss) quest could end badly, depending on if you make the wrong choice or whatnot.
Another aspect of the game was its player-vs-player options. The basic PvP was that you could go and kill other players for whatever gold and gems they had on-hand, as well as half of their experience points (they lost 10% of their total, but you earned 50%), but there were other competitions that could be had in the realm. For example, the leaderboard shows who has the highest level and experience, but there's another leaderboard in the Dark Cloak Tavern as well, which is kept updated by an old man who likes to gamble. But enough about that.
All and all, Legend of the Red Dragon was a darn good way to kill a few minutes a day. With social and competitive aspects, wacky characters, an assortment of the more peculiar enemies and trials, and good old-fashioned ANSI graphics, it was an alluring way to get people to keep dialing in to your website on a regular basis and a darn lot of fun to play for everyone! It was... and it still is, in fact!
Many people continue the tradition of running Legend of the Red Dragon on their BBSes to this day. Yes, BBSes still exist. Some are the traditional dial-up kind while most can be reached via TelNet program. The BBS linking service of SynchroNet houses a multitude of these BBSes, most of which actually do run the game. However, I'm sure that after reading my monologue, you're more interested in just playing the game itself. Right?
Yes... Now comes the part where I ruin everything by turning my monologue into an advertisement. Sigh. T_T
It just so happens that there are a couple places on the web dedicated to hosting and playing Legend of the Red Dragon. One of the biggest and best places to do so is a place called "" (Mature Content Warning: The game contains some PG-13 content.) It's an extremely organized group with "first to five dragon kills" rotations, three realms to play on each with their own difficulty rules, a friendly and competitive community, and the same old Seth Able Robinson Legend of the Red Dragon all two of us remember so fondly!
As I type this, the "casual" rule set realm -- Blue Realm -- has already finished their game for this round while the "hardcore" rule set realm -- Red Realm -- is about a couple weeks short of finishing, give or take circumstances, so now's a good time to pop in and get familiar with how the game works! If anyone's interested, drop on by and give the game a go! There's no obligation to stick around if it's not your thing, but it's definitely worth trying, since it's free and takes roughly 15 minutes a day to play.
(Note: If any of this sounds at all familiar, then you've probably played Kingdom of Loathing, which uses a very similar "play-per-day" setup and was directly inspired by Legend of the Red Dragon, as well as other BBS Door Games.)
