Characters
Players create characters who possess skills that describe abilities on a 100-point scale. Cunning affects a character's life expectancy and the odds of evading an attack, tricking or surprising monsters, and opening boxes and chests. Piety affects the success of prayers and some non-battle spells. Wizardry determines which spells can be used and their odds of success. Valor affects what weapons can be used, as well as reducing damage received in combat and affecting success in attacking monsters.
In Moria, character generation is automatic. A player chooses from among four possible skill combinations, each totaling to the same amount. The game does not enforce a rigid notion of character class; characters may use any weapon or spell as their individual skill levels permit.
A character's Vitality level combines the concepts of character level, hit points, and endurance. A character's vitality level determines chances of success or cost of actions such as fighting or fleeing a monster and spell-casting. Performing actions, sustaining damage, or depleting food and water supplies consumes Vitality. Each turn a character rests while stocked with food and water restores Vitality. Should Vitality drop to zero, the character dies.
Score points are given for defeating monsters.
Read more about this topic: Moria (PLATO), Gameplay
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Thus we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)