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Overview

DragonRealms is a medieval fantasy MUD set in the world of Elanthia. It was developed from 1992-1995 and released in February of 1996. It was originally intended for the Ziff-Davis online service. When Ziff-Davis failed to create said service, DragonRealms was offered instead on GEnie and later AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. When AOL and other services went to a flat rate fee instead of hourly fees, Dragonrealms was offered on the web on its own site and through Microsoft Gaming Zone.

Design

Initial design

The game was built from a design put forth by Simutronics founder David Whatley and his partner John Donham. While in development, the DR team called its as yet unnamed game many things. The most popular of these names was "Project Bob". It was implemented by a team of off-site and on-site employees who included Eric Slick, Tina Hill, Elonka Dunin, Stephanie Shaver, David Dean, Barbara Halberg, Jim Penrose, Claire Murphy and now GemStone IV producer Melissa Meyer. Like its sister product, GemStone IV, DragonRealms is one of the longest-running and most popular online text games in existence. It is currently produced by Eric Latham.

Main Features

• Skill and class based system
• Eleven races
• Naval system involving travel, ship to ship combat, pirates and player owned ships.
• Several creation systems that surpass store and special merchant quality
• Ten classes including primarily non-combat Traders, Moon Mages and Empaths.
• Four provinces, each with several cities and wilderness areas.
• Combat system with almost two dozen different physical attacks.
• Mana Based Magic system with 2-6 themed spellbooks per magic using class.

Dragonrealms 2

During the first half of 2004, the staff of Simutronics and DragonRealms engaged in a major overhaul of the system to make it work with the newer game engine (IFE2). This project was dubbed "DR2" but, unlike GemStone IV, the actual name of the game was not changed.

Dragonrealms 2 removed some programming limitations which made it hard to come up with some kinds of new content and new mechanics. DR 2 did not in itself come with major new gameplay systems or content visible to the player, it was a behind the scenes move nonethless talked about by the Gamemasters.

Servers and upgrades

Dragonrealms, like Gemstone IV actually has more than one server, unusual for a MUD. The servers are not intended to reduce load and are actually hosted on the same physical server. They are perhaps better called instances. They each have different rules and guidelines.

Prime

Prime is the main server that contains the vast majority of players for Dragonrealms as a whole. Prime enforces rules against AFK scripting and Player Killings. Although killing, strictly speaking, is allowed by mechanics, it is banned via GM punishment against those who have done it. This is a simplistic assesement of the rules against killing in DR, which in reality are almost as complex as real life laws against murder.

The Fallen

For players who want to AFK Script and/or kill other characters and in general desire an unrestricted environment, The Fallen server was created. Today the highest level characters are in The Fallen.

Premium

Premium is not a server, but an upgrade in status on the main server that gives the player additional benefits of several kinds, the biggest being long term rewards and houses.

Platinum

Platinum is a server for people who feel the main server is falling away from its original vision and desire a realm where roleplay is the main motivation of most players. The Platinum server is also seen as an upgrade beyond Premium Status giving people on that server exclusive benefits at extra cost.

Advancement system

One of the most compelling features of Dragonrealms is the skill system. While many games employ a generic system wherein skills are increased via experience gained by slaying creatures and leveling up by reaching a certain amount of experience, increasing by level, Dragonrealms takes a vastly different approach.

Skills

To advance in level in a guild, you must improve an entire basket of skills to specified levels. To improve some specific skill, you must do tasks associated with that skill. Skills can be categorized by skillset, a grouping of skills which are similar in their purpose.

The skillsets are:

• Weapons: All kinds of weapons, generally split into skills based on size. Also includes Parrying and Multiple Opponents skill, both defensive in nature.
• Armor: Several types of armor are represented as skills in this set as well as the shield skill.
• Magic: Various skills needed for magical proficiency are in this set. Non-magical guilds generally can't train any of these except Magical Devices.
• Lore: These are a wide variety of skills representing crafts, arts, scholarly techniques and miscellany.
• Survival: Composed of skills related to survival, either in combat or outdoors survivalism, as well as skills related to stealth.

Skillset learning types are:

• Primary: This is a skillset central to what the guild does. Skills in this set can be learned rather quickly by members of the guild.
• Secondary: This is a skillset moderately important to what the guild does. These skills can be learned at an average rate.
• Tertiary: A set of skills that is a distraction from the main focus of the guild and will be learned with a great deal of effort.

The Dragonrealms experience system for gaining ranks in skills has many details related to learning type and statistic levels for a character.

Leveling

Every guild has a set of skills that must be raised a certain amount each level to go to the next one. Sometimes the requirement is that the sum of a group of skills is increased by a certain amount, irrespective of the specific ones so long as they allowed. Another type of leveling requirement is to say that your N best skills in a skillset must meet certain goals.

As an example, a level 7 thief may inquire what areas of his skill set he must enhance in order to progress in the guild, to be told by the guild leader that he must advance his skills in the areas of hiding, stalking, backstabbing, lock picking, trap disarming, mechanical lore and overall lore.

Stats

Once our thief has met the demands of the guild leader, he then levels up. Where levels in most games directly lead to gains in things like skill caps and stat increases (HP, strength, agility, etc.), levels in Dragonrealms grant Time Development Points (TDPs), which may be spent at the player's discretion to increase any of the player's stats. TDPs are spent at the stat trainers available in most major cities. There is a coin fee for training as well.

The official discussion of the role of stats may be found at the DragonRealms stats page. However for many Dragonrealms stats, the webpage is out of date with respect to practical reasons to train them.

Your initial stats are generated randomly, but you can reroll them as often as you want before accepting the character. General advice is to train your stats relatively evenly, not all to one stat as they are all important.

Roleplay, races and mythos

Dragonrealms has a great deal of in character history as well as religious and race systems which give flexibility in a characters background. There are 11 races and 13 primary immortals with 2 extra aspects for each main immortal. Races have unique verbs for emoting and in some cases, advantages in some systems beyond stat training penalties and advantages. Characters are not currently identified with respect to which god(s) they are devoted to.

As for mythos, in the backstory there is the Elven-Human War, a sort of world war of Elanthia, as well as the Dragon Priest saga, which was a case where a religious cult took control of society for many years. Many of the song scrolls bards can sing from are about these mythic topics, and library books in game cover the big wars as well. Most of the guilds have backstories too, if not always covered by a library book.

External links

• DragonRealms homepage
• Ranik's Maps for Dragonrealms This site has the most complete set of maps for Dragonrealms on the web.
• DRSecrets Exp System Mathematics This article goes into detail on what players have determined about the mathematics of the experience system.

• 1996 computer and video games
• MU* games