Play Dungeon Master's Assistant Vol 1: Encounters Online

You punch in some quick filters and bam—the game spits out a gnarly dungeon ambush or some shady NPC with a hidden dagger. That DOS screen suddenly becomes your best improv partner when the party goes off-script.

Developer: Strategic Simulations, Inc.

Genre: Role-playing

Released: 1988

File size: 187.88 KB

Game Overview

If you're running an AD&D campaign and need to spice things up fast, this old-school MS-DOS tool is like having a frantic DM whispering ideas in your ear. You get over 1,000 encounters—some are straightforward monster brawls, others have weird twists like cursed treasure or NPCs with secret agendas. The monster database alone saved me when my players suddenly decided to explore that "harmless" forest I hadn't prepped.

It's clunky by today's standards (hello, DOS prompts), but there's something satisfying about rolling up a random encounter and seeing your party's faces when three carrion crawlers drop from the ceiling mid-dungeon. Just don't blame me when they start checking every ceiling tile afterward.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".