textfiles/games/REVIEWS/dungmr2b.rev

 DUNGEON MASTER'S ASSISTANT, VOL. II: CHARACTERS AND TREASURES

 The second in SSI's series of utility programs for the ADVANCED DUNGEONS AND
DRAGONS gamemaster, DUNGEON MASTER'S ASSISTANT, VOL. II: CHARACTERS AND
TREASURES is designed to generate detailed player or non-player characters and
treasure hoards. This review is based on the Apple II version.

 All character classes and multi-class combinations from the original PLAYERS
HANDBOOK and UNEARTHED ARCANA are available, as are all magic items from the
original DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE and UNEARTHED ARCANA. The program has no
provision for either ORIENTAL ADVENTURES or the 2ND EDITION PLAYERS HANDBOOK and
DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE.

 The program disk is not copy-protected, and SSI recommends using a commercial
copy program to make a backup. The documentation check that is used to deter
piracy is no problem, as long as the documentation is at hand. Because of SSI's
annoying practice of using a non-standard variant of DOS 3.3 for its Apple
products, data disks must be formatted from within the program, and saved
character or treasure files can only be edited with the provided screen editor;
commercial word processors will not even recognize the disk.

 Character generation is accomplished through a series of menus. The user begins
by deciding whether to generate a single or multi-class character, then selects
from menus the class or combination, race, alignment, and gender. If there is
only one possibility available for race or alignment, that menu is skipped, and
a choice of sub-races is given for Halflings and Elven Cavaliers. The program
then rolls up a set of basic statistics and displays them for the user's
approval. They can be accepted in the order displayed, entered in a n order, or
thrown out and replaced with manually entered numbers. Finally, the user is
prompted for the character's level(s) and name. After all this information is
entered, the character's hit points, secondary skills, height, weight, languages
known, spell book (for magic-users and illusionists), weapons proficiencies, and
equipment are generated, and movement base, THAC0, special class or race
abilities, saving throws, and armor class are calculated. The finished character
sheet is available for review or modification in the program's editor.

 Most of this is done quite well, but I had problems in several areas. First,
for some reason, low-level magic-users are given a few third- or fourth-level
spells to go with the first and second level spells that they're entitled to.
Second, the equipment generation is done from a fixed database without any user
interaction or reference to character level. No magical items are given to even
the highest (20th level) characters, and only a somewhat generic "standard
equipment" list is prepared. Since most players have very specific ideas about
how to outfit their characters, this limits the program's usefulness in
generating PCs. The need to go back and insert special items also limits its
utility in generating spur-of-the-moment NPCs. Finally, since any character used
for more than one playing session will need some updating, the inability to use
a word processor on saved characters is a serious deficiency.

 The treasure-generating portion of the program is a straightforward
implementation of the various treasure tables located in the MONSTER MANUALs and
DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE. The user can either enter a list of one or more treasure
types, or selectively generate items within a specific class or treasure. A list
of up to twenty treasure types can be entered at once; the program then
generates the complete hoard, summarizes currency, gems, and jewelry, and
displays complete descriptions of magical items. If the user wants to generate
items within a specific class, the choice is between magic items (subdivided
into potions, scrolls, rings, rods/staffs/wands, misc. magic, armor/shields,
swords, and misc. weapons), gemstones, and jewelry. For gems and jewelry, there
is a choice between brief, which gives only total value, and detailed, which
also gives type, size, and value for each item.

 The only qualms I had about this section were the fact the itemized lists of
gems and jewelry are not generated by the treasure-type option, and the fact
that there is no way to add items to the magic items lists. The major strength
of the first program in this series (DUNGEON MASTER'S ASSISTANT, VOL. I:
ENCOUNTERS -- also reviewed here in TEG), is the powerful database editor. DM'S
ASSISTANT, VOL. II lacks such an editor or any other similar feature. While I
can understand that developing a comparable editor for the character generation
system might be overly difficult, there is no good reason why one could not have
been provided for the treasure generator.

 Overall, I was a bit disappointed by this program: first by the lack of a
database editor, then by the difficulties involved in making use of generated
characters (I had to print out hard-copies and retype the information on my word
processor). Also, while I realize that many GMs are still using 1st Edition
rules, TSR has now almost completely halted its publishing of new material for
them. Although a program designed for 2nd Edition rules could be used fairly
easily to generate 1st Edition characters, the opposite is not true. What
DUNGEON MASTER'S ASSISTANT, VOL. II does, it does fairly well, but there are
many freeware programs floating around that do the same thing. For a GM who is
still using 1st Edition rules and doesn't have the time or aptitude to write his
own character generator, this program is probably worth buying. For anyone else,
I recommend passing on it.

 DUNGEON MASTER'S ASSISTANT, VOL. II: CHARACTERS AND TREASURES is published by
Strategic Simulations, Inc. and distributed by Electronic Arts.

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