I have been thinking about certain features in CRPGs (to be clear, this includes both WRPGs and JRPGs) and about the origins of some of them, and I am wondering if anybody knows anything I don't. In particular, I am wondering if any CRPGs have done these things before. Here are some examples:

In the original Dragon Quest:
* You can only rest at the inn in town, but doing so fully restores you and has no risk (other than the cost of the inn itself).
* During combat, accuracy isn't stat based; instead, each enemy has a low chance of evading an attack. The game is designed so that attacks will only rarely miss, in contrast to many WRPGs of the time (and for many years afterwords) where misses were common place. (This is actually a common difference between WRPGs and JRPGs, though the early Final Fantasy games were actually more like WRPGs in this respect. I note that, in AD&D (1e and 2e), a level 1 fighter with no bonuses would only have a 55% chance of hitting a creature with AC 10.)
* Similarly, armor didn't help you avoid attacks (which you actually can't in this game), but would instead reduce the damage received when you do get hit.

In Might and Magic 1:
* Resting can be done in arbitrary places, but doing so would cause you to risk being attacked. (In Wizardry, resting could only be done in town, and healing that way was slow, expensive, and could age your character, so this is a nice improvement, and Ultima 1-3 lacked any such resting mechanic.)

Ultima 1 would allow you to save anywhere on the world map. Some later CRPGs would allow you to save anywhere. (What was the first one? Permadeath games (like roguelikes) don't count. The first one I played was the original SaGa (Final Fantasy Legend on the Game Boy) but I wouldn't be surprised if it appeared on some computer games before.)

So, any one have any knowledge of when these CRPG features first appeared?

I assume most of these rules are adapted from tabletop games that predate video games. I don't actually know, it's just an assumption.

I realizes this is nowhere near the first, but Exile: Escape from the Pit is one of the first games I recall to have a competent automap.

Except for metal slimes. Until your characters reach higher levels and have better chance to hit them more often and deal normal damage.

Strictly speaking, Metal Slimes actually aren't good at evading attacks; rather, they have such high defense that it reduces the damage you deal to 0, which causes another mechanic to kick in, where your attacks have a 50% (IIRC) chance of dealing 1 damage anyway.

Incidentally, I am not aware of any Metal Slime like enemies (hard to kill, likes to run away, worth lots of XP) in any game pre-dating Dragon Quest; in fact, I am not aware of many enemies like that in WRPGs as a whole. (Some non-DQ JRPGs have them, like the Lufia series and Grandia Xtreme, but they're JRPGs that were strongly influenced by DQ, not WRPGs.) On the other hand, I have seen some early WRPGs have enemies with idiosyncratic stats, like Wizardry's Poison Giants (quite strong, with 81 HP and a nasty breath attack, and yield lots of XP, but they're only level 1), or Wizardry 2's Fuzzballs (Level 100, likes to call for help, immune to magic, but have only 1 HP, are easy to hit, and get 0 attacks per round, and yield no XP).

One other Dragon Quest mechanic that may have originated there (and actually didn't become standard even in JRPGs): When you die, instead of being treated to a game over screen, you are sent back to the king minus half your gold (and you can still opt to reset to when you last saved if you so choose, though in the original JP version that means entering a password).

Metal slimes have a high evasion rate if you use slashing type of weapons. If you use blunt type weapons, then you have a better chance to hit them (1 damage indeed or 2 if you are lucky).

I recommend contacting the CRPG Addict for specific mechanics or features. He has played and blogged about countless very early CRPGs and some of his posts include possible influences on or from other games. I think he is the probably the seminal voice for early CRPG history.

There's no such mechanic; DQ games have never had any distinction between weapon types, at least before the skill system showed up in DQ8 (which came much later, and is definitely not the first CRPG to have a skill point system).

The closest mechanic is one introduced in DQ4, in which the most powerful weapon in the (original) game has the property of dealing 1 extra point of damage to metal slime type enemies. (1 might not sound like a lot, but it is when dealing with high defense enemies with single digit HP.) DQ6 added a skill with a similar property, but again, that came later. (I'm talking about DQ1specifically in my post.)

What looks like an evasion is really just the attack hitting but doing 0 damage.

Yes there is, but not in the early games.

That's right. I should have mentioned that I was talking about later DQ games.

How much later? I don't remember such a mechanic even in DQ9.

(One nice tweak in the later games (starting with DQ8) regarding metal slimes: If the enemy would ambush you, in DQ8 there is no chance of it running away in the surprise round. Earlier in the series, including DQ1, you would actually get situations where a metal slime ambushes you and runs away before you could do anything.)

(By the way, metal slimes aren't that easy to run from; you could easily try to run away, fail, and then the metal slime escapes before you can enter another command. Does that make any sense?)

Speaking of things that don't make sense, apparently in Might and Magic 3, where any item can be made of any material, there is both the material "leather" and the item "leather armor", so you can find some things like "leather leather armor" (not to mention wooden leather armor or steel leather armor); does that make sense? *angrily slashes at the game devs with a leather axe* By the way, was MM3 the first CRPG to have a system like this?

Scratch what I said. I got confused with something else. Maybe I wanted to talk about Metal Slash hitting more often but not dealing any more dmg than a regular weapon. It's been a long long day. Time to go to bed.

I watched his DarkSpyre video and it looks like an interesting game. You have to collect a certain rune to be able to save your game. I'm not sure if it has been done in another game or not. There is also a rune that allows you to change the gender of your character, but I've seen that in Runescape.