Moria

Moria is the first, first person perspective RPG and the first multiplayer RPG. It was written by Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin after they became interested in another Plato RPG; dnd. Developed at Iowa State University and first released in 1975 (but I’ve also seen it dated to ‘76), it was seminal for it’s time introducing a host of new innovations.

Believe it or not we hadn’t even heard of D&D until after we started the project. I hadn’t read Tolkien at the time. The guys doing dnd seemed to be having a good deal of trouble getting the bugs out and I was curious what made it so tough

Kevet mentions there was no Tolkien influence yet the game is called “Moria”. Previous RPGs had very literal names such as “The Dungeon”, “The Game of Dungeons”. The word Moria is from the Hobbit

“Your grandfather Thror was killed, you remember, in the mines of Moria by Azog the Goblin .”

But the title of the game was suggested by Dirk Pellett, another Iowa student and developer on dnd, who was a Tolkien fan.

Regardless Moria is a sprawling RPG, far larger than both dnd and The Dungeon. The game isn’t directly inspired by tabletop Dungeon and Dragons which allows it to drop established systems such as classes and levels and replace them with it’s own novel inventions.

Moria, like dnd, was a popular game and was continually updated up until the mid-80s. Sustained development helps hone the game via player feedback but makes it hard to perfectly date when certain features were introduced. The features discussed here relate to the version available on cyber1.org’s PLATO system.

Gameplay Screenshots

Systems

Moria is a multiplayer first person RPG which is as unusual now as it was for the time! Players can band together in parties and fight monsters, return to the safety of the city to buy new supplies and then venture out to do it all over again.

The goal of Moria is find to a ring, which also sounds quite Tolkien-esque.

The initial game flow starts with a title screen with a nice line drawing of a castle.

When you advanced past this you arrive at the front menu.

The front menu tells you how many other users are playing right now, you can check out the help pages, see the list of total users, get information about the guilds, achievement and ring finders.

For a new player the most interesting option is going to be Create New Character, which is accessed by pressing C. You are presented with several selections of prerolled stats to choose from and then dumped back into the front menu.

Now you have created a character you can start a new game by pressing R for run. You start in the city, next to the exit to the wilderness, ready for your first adventure.

The game loops are quite simple, travel into the wilderness and from there into the dungeons. Kill monsters get gold and items. Use the gold to buy better weapons. Rinse and repeat. There are no events, no real story, no puzzles, combat is very basic and advancement is also limited. To play Moria today is not a particularly fun experience. At the time it was revolutionary especially the ability to play with other players and team up together.

Stats

The primary stats, preset at character creation, are are as follows:

• Cunning
• Piety
• Valor
• Wizardry

These are not the standard D&D stats but some are quite similar.

Cunning aids with tricking monsters and opening chests. Piety comes into play when you pray for aid. Valor helps you in combat, and determines what weapons you can use. Wizardry is used for casting spells.

CRPGAdventures Moria Playthrough

In addition to these stats the game also records:

• Vitality, starting at 100
• Age, starting at 13
• Gold, starting at 150
• Score
• Food, starting at 15 months
• Water, starting at 15 months

Vitality is equivalent to hitpoints in other games.

Exploration

You start in a city and use the arrow keys to walk around, in a way that’s surprisingly modern. There are different shops dotted around:

• Weapon shop
• Supply store
• Water store
• Magic shop
• The Thieves Guild,
• The Brotherhood
• The Union of Knights
• The Circle of Wizards
• Jail

In addition to those there is an exit to the Wilderness. When you enter the wilderness, your view remains the same - a spartan, wireframe first person view - but you can now be attacked by monsters.

If you press shift-r you’ll be prompted to enter a name to “run to help”. This is part of the multiplayer nature of the game, if someone is fighting, you can go and assist.

Like many early RPGs if you encounter a door, you cannot simple walk through it, instead there’s a special command and in Moria it’s shift-w.

The city is massive but without good reason. There’s little to see, only the same shops are repeated throughout a large maze. It’s not fun to explore and it’s frustrating to get lost in.

When you leave the city, you can find entrances to one of Moria’s five dungeons: Forest, Desert, Cave, Mountain and Ocean (which is somewhat secret and harder to access). Each dungeon has 60 levels.

Level Generation

When I thought up the notion of generating the dungeon on the fly as you walk around I couldn’t resist and prototyped a 2d, top down version.

The levels in Moria are the same each playthrough. The generation here probably refers to how the game stores the map in memory. Whereas a game like dnd has a block of memory, each entry describing a grid cell, Moria uses a function that given a X, Y procedurally generates the data for the grid cell in a deterministic way at runtime. Grid cell data includes data such as which of the four directions are walls or pathways and perhaps some other information such as secret passages. Alternatively Moria might also have same block of memory but it’s filled in algorithmically from a seed. This option unlikely because of storage limitations. Whichever way it was done, this is one of the first examples of machine generated content in a game.

Inventory System

The inventory system is a list on the left of the screen.

Certain items can be equipped such as weapons and armour by “using” then. This is done by pressing the u key. Items are stat locked. For instance, to use a sword requires a stat of 15 valor.

Third Person Perspective

Moria, at least the later versions, gave the player a first person view into a 3D wireframe dungeon. This makes it the grandfather of both the “blobber” genre but also the simulation genre of games such as Ultima Underworld, Deus Ex and Dishonored.

The first version used an overhead view and was written around 1975 or 1976. […] I remember it was my co-author Jim Battin who suggested the 3D view. There were other games doing 3D around then; panther, spasim, airfight. I don’t remember who was first but it wasn’t us.

PLATO displays had a generous 512 by 512 resolution but, probably due to system constraints, Moria’s 3D view is postage stamp size in the center of the screen. You can only see a tile or so ahead. The small view makes the world a little disorientating to navigate.

To assist with navigation you’re facing and X, Y location is printed to the side of the 3D display. I assume many players drew out maps as they played the game.

Shop System

Dnd had a shopsystem too and maybe that was the first but with both of the games being developed over a period years it’s hard to be sure. The shop system in Moria is interesting anyway because it allows the player to haggle.

Unlike shops in modern games the player is just asked what they’d like to buy and given a text input prompt. Then when you type something valid like “Sword” you move on to a haggling stage, the shopkeeper gives you a price and you can reply with lower prices. If you can’t come to an agreement you are booted out to the main shop menu to repeat the process. As a game mechanic this gets old really fast.

The weapon shop also sells “armor” and I imagine a few other things if you know the right keywords.

Hunger and Age

Moria tracks both how much food and how much water you are carrying. If either of these gets to 0 you start to lose vitality and eventually die. You can refill your water and food in the city by going to store and buying more.

In the dungeons you can occasionally find water holes and refill your water from there. These can be poisonous and if you have access to cleric powers the poison can be prayed away.

Food is occasionally increased after defeating monsters.

You start the game age 13 and as you play your age increases.

The game’s help file says that your character can live until at least 100, and after that there’s a chance of death every time you age a year. If you live long enough without dying, you can apparently become immortal.

CRPGAdventures Moria Playthrough

This is the first game to introduce aging as a system. Mechanically it doesn’t really serve a function. Characters die so quickly age doesn’t really matter. One could argue it prevents player spending all their time grinding and instead encourages them to make a go for a the ring before old age comes but realistically there’s so little to do in the game that the ring existing is incentive enough for a player to pursue it all on their own.

Combat

Random battles can be encountered in any area outside of the city. Unlike The Dungeon and dnd combat doesn’t auto resolve, instead you can trade blows round by round. This is the birth of what goes on to inspire Oubliette and JRPGs, so the way this combat is presented feels quite familiar.

Combat has some real time aspect, if you wait with out entering a command you will die.

• f - fight
• t - trick
• p - pray
• c - cast
• e - evade
• h - help (you should help)

Fight does an attack against the enemy and is based off your valor. Trick is based off your cunning and can insta-kill the enemy if you succeed. Bribe lets you choose an item or gold to offer the monster in the hope they decide to leave. Run lets you flee the battle to go rest up. Interesting you can return to the same fight and it will save the state regarding the number of monsters left to defeat. The evade option puts you in a state that makes you move difficult to hit. Cast and pray give you access to spells to cast.

Health regenerates over in realtime, i.e. real world minutes. This is probably a concession to it’s multiplayer nature. If you have multiple characters that can all act and move at one, you need a some kind of consistent time reference and real world times fits the bill nicely.

Monsters are mostly a combination of a sprite, name, a type, a level, and an amount of hitpoints.

The type trait for monsters is a little novel. The Dungeon had undead being immune to sleep and charm but Moria seems to have extended on this a little.

There are eight types

• Humanoids
• Undead
• Magic Users
• Mythical
• Animals
• Cleric
• Elemental
• Lawful

Creatures type dictates immunities and weaknesses. Undead are weak against the Holy World prayer and immune to sleep. This is similar to dnd. Magic user enemies are immune to most spells. Cleric type enemies are weak against dispel magic and so on.

Moria has a more developed equipment system.

Weapons (ed: in Moria, armor and weapons are all called weapons) are divided into categories (hand, arms, head, body, etc.) and you may only equip one weapon per category, except for hands, of which you may equip two as long as both are one-handed and as long as your stats are high enough. wide variety of different weapons and armor.

Datadriven Gamer’s Moria article

These items can be explicitly equipped where in previous games you were automatically assigned a weapon if it was better than your previous one.

Despite this added complexity combat is still dull. There’s little tactical consideration apart from knowing when to flee. Perhaps it’s more rewarding when there are multiple players but even then there what can happen during combat is very limited.

Magic System

Like The Dungeon, Moria divides it’s spell in magic and prayers. Casting spells reducing vitality, which acts as your hit points. You can cast any spell multiple times. Prayer do not drain vitality but they’re not as universally effective.

Advancement

Stats in Moria increase with the number of monster you kill. If you using the Fight option to kill the monster you improve Valor, if you use Trickery you gain cunning and so on. Though the exact mechanics of stat increases are opaque to the player.

When one of your stats reaches 20 you can join a guild which acts a little like choosing a class.

Once you’re in the guild you can advance increase your rank in that guild.

• Primary stat of 20 - Apprentice
• Primary stat of 30 - Journeyman
• Primary stat of 40 - Counselor
• Primary stat of 50 - Master
• Primary greater than other users - Guildmaster

All ranks above apprentice require a donation of 1,000,000 gold.

The higher your rank the greater your attack, tricks and spells cast per combat round. Additionally on first joining a guild you get additional abilities

According to the documentation each guild confers a special ability: members of the Brotherhood can heal; members of the Circle of Wizards can teleport back to the city; members of the Union of Knights take less damage and have a chance to behead monsters with a single blow; and members of the Thieves Guild have a better chance of finding magic items. In addition to this your character can have a guild locker, and if you die and create another character instantly, the contents of that locker will be passed to him as an heir.

CRPGAdventures Moria Playthrough

Joining a guild also gives you access to a bank to store money and items in the safety of the city. On your death, your next character can inherit these items and start with an advantage. From a guildhouse you can also teleport to other guildmembers or camps you’ve made in the wilderness.

Legacy

Moria is one of the milestones of CRPGs innovation mostly to it’s multiplayer support. But before Moria there was another game called Dungeon (Yes, the PLATO programmers weren’t super adventourous when it came to naming things). This game apparently introduced multiplayer and 3D views but it’s one of many lost PLATO games and it’s hard to verify what the differences between the two games were.

Here some of the innovations as I see them:

Round Based Combat - Moria makes combat a little more interesting by involving the player more. The player no longer tells the character “Fight until you win or die” but instead “Do a single attack”, then there’s a chance to flee if the battle seems to be going poorly.

The Guild System - Skyrim, as well as earlier Elderscrolls games, in addition to many other games, have guilds. These guilds are more advanced in providing quests and so forth but they use a similar system.

Food and Water tracking - Requiring the your character to stay fed and watered gets big plus points for accuracy of simulation but as a game mechanic it sucks. Few games implement thirst and hunger systems. Later games include food as a health item, changing eating from a punitive system to a rewards based one that still sees the characters eat regularly without the tedium.

Realtime Gameplay - RPGs of the time were strictly turned based (with the possible exception of the lost Dungeon game). Due to the multiplayer nature of Moria certain in-game activities are realtime such as regenerating vitality and if you wait for long enough in combat you die.

Locked Weapons - certain items can only be used if the character has the required stats. As far as I’m aware this is the first introduction of this mechanic.

Goals - Moria doesn’t quite have quests but with the different ranks in the guilds it does provide in-game goals for the player that previous games do not. That’s in addition to finding the ring which is much like finding the orb in dnd.