Bigby's Helping Hand was born. While driving to town one day it occurred to me that a computer could easily do the donkey work. Leaving the DM to play with the important stuff, the details! Bigby's Helping Hand version 1 could handle 6 players and 12 monsters. All it did was sort out who went when, and rolled hit and damage for the monsters.
It was immediately obvious that Bigby's Helping Hand could not cope! First time out and one of my players brought two attack dogs, as I already had 5 members in the party I only had one spare slot! Rewrite time.
Bigby's Helping Hand version 2 was in use. 12 players and 16 monsters. Essentially this is all that differs. The players and monsters had limited armor types, that is to say, basic AC ranging from 10 to -10. Weapons were stored as files and could handle magic bonuses but players were limited to one attack per round.
Problems already, soon I realized my players would be getting more than one attack per round
Starting to make improvements. Late 1992 brings version 2.1 Improvements include:
Multiple attacks (for monsters as well. One of the underlying philosophies is 'all things should be equal').
Added a bonus button allowing players bonus attacks. Though I thought this was a good idea it was in practice difficult to use.
Later I included the weapons modifiers, so that different attack types had different bonuses to armor types (This is an optional rule in AD&D, though many people don't use it because of the added complexity. Yet another reason for a computer do to the donkey work. With the computer adding this automatically it is transparent to the players and DM, yet more realistic as well)
Next, the swap function. I added this as I needed a way to show a marching order on screen. What better than to read from left to right.
Area effects. I even set it up so that the weapons automatically set the area mode.
Finally I added the alignment tracking system. This was in-line with the new alignment system for Dragonlance adventures. At the time I thought I might run a Dragonlance adventure, but I never did and it was dropped for version 3.1
Version 3.0 was a short lived bug fix for version 2.5. I had just upgraded to an A4000 and the benefits of AGA. Unfortunately something funny was happening with the fonts. All text was shifted (either up or down, I can't recall) by one point making the whole display appear ugly. All 3.0 did was move all text one point.
Effectively 3.0 renamed.
After a few days of useing 3.0 I decided to do a re-write. Thinking carefully I renamed 3.0 as 2.9 (Having seen Imagine bumped up to a similar revision, it seemed ok).
So, decisions made, I went all out on the real version 3.0
Finished in October of 1994. For some reason I still have a copy of this floating around, designed to run of a floppy. It is very primitive, the players have to do all thier calculations and then tell the DM if they scored a hit... Not a very good method. Also only supported group initiative.
Some more tidying up. By now it's mid 1994! Fixed a couple of bugs and disabled some features for an 'Unregistered' version. Though I never sent this out, I later renamed it a free demo to promote interest in version 3.1 which I was planning.
Sent all over the place
Well, there I was. Finally getting it all togeather. And finally realising the folly of my way!
The problem as I came to see it was that an all in one package was to limited. Buy having every thing as a part of the main programme I could not update a small part with out altering the whole package. What I was looking for was a modular approach.
I decided that I need to begin again. This was quite depresing, after all these years (I did do some other things with my life, ok?) I was going about it the wrong way.
So I began again in early 1996 with version 4, or as we now know it. Bigby's Helping Hand - IV and it's revisions.