Moria: Victory!

I've been re-reading the early days of The CRPG Addict lately, and it's made me realise two things. The first is that Chester had the right idea at the beginning. I suspect that he wouldn't agree, but the rules he started with meant that he was able to kick off his blog with a run of solid classics: Wizardry, Ultima, Rogue, Bard's Tale, pretty much all of the staples of the 1980s CRPG scene. All told, it seems like a pleasant way to ease into a years-long project, and I'm very envious.

I, on the other hand - using the fruits of Chester's research, I'll admit - started from the beginning, with The Dungeon from 1975. "I'll get through the 1970s quickly," I had thought. "All of the games will be really short, and I'll knock them out with no trouble." What a naive soul I was. Here I am three years later, and I've just beaten Moria, the fourth game on my list. The Game of Dungeons v5 took me about three months to complete. Orthanc took twice that. The Game of Dungeons v8 took up a whole year. Moria took me eight months, in addition to the several months I spent on it back in 2015. What I'm saying is, these games are much longer than I was expecting them to be, and have occupied me for far longer than I wanted them to.

Which brings me to my second realisation: I want to get to the 1980s really badly. As far as RPGs and adventure games go, the 80s and early 90s are my sweet spot, and if I can cover those periods with some semblance of completeness I'll be happy. I had this realisation last Thursday, and it was then that I made my resolution: I was going to play Moria at every spare moment, and get the bloody thing off my schedule. I would do no reading, no writing, no blogging, play no other video games, and watch no TV that would require more than minimal attention: Moria would be my life until I beat it or died trying. A little under a week later, I emerged victorious, though perhaps no more enriched from the experience.

Since my last post on Moria I had lost at least one character, and as of my resolution I was playing as Tarret, a member of the Union of Knights. Before Tarret I had been exclusively playing wizards, due to their ability to teleport back to the City from anywhere else in the game. I would have continued playing wizards, because the game is just too big to be going back and forth from the dungeons all the time, but my previous character had found a particular magic item that made the other guilds a viable choice: an Amulet of Home. Using the amulet worked exactly like the wizard's teleport ability, so when I found it I stashed it in my character's guild locker, ready to be passed down to my next character upon my death. Said death inevitably occurred, and Tarret inherited the amulet (along with the best weapon in the game and loads of good armour). Having failed numerous times as a member of the Guild of Wizards, it was time to try something else, and I went with the Union of Knights.

I'm convinced that this decision is the main reason that I'm able to write this victory post. Knights supposedly have two special abilities: they take less damage from enemies in combat, and they can occasionally behead their foes and score an instant kill. I say supposedly, because I never saw any messages telling me that I had beheaded a monster; it may have been happening in the background, but I have no way of knowing. Knights definitely do take less damage in combat, though; I would estimate about half of what other characters suffer. This made it a lot easier for me to survive on lower levels, and allowed me to explore a lot faster than I'd been doing previously.

In addition to the Amulet of Home, I also had a Life Ring, which might just be the most valuable item in the whole game. I've described it before, but I'll reiterate here that it effectively grants your character the ability to regenerate its Vitality. That, coupled with the Knight's ability to take less damage, made Tarret exceptionally difficult to kill.

I was still exploring the Forest dungeon, as I had been doing for eight months beforehand.  One of my characters had descended to Level 52 before, so I was pretty much done with mapping, I just needed to build a character that could survive.  My goal - the Reaper's Ring - was on Level 50 of one of the four dungeons. I knew this because it had last been discovered on Level 49, and every time that the Ring is found it teleports to the next level down. The trick is that, although you can find out what level it will be on, there's no way of knowing which dungeon it will be in. If it was in the Forest, I would only need to traverse 50 dungeon levels; if not, I might need to go through 100, or 150, or 200, depending on whether I guessed correctly. I was either very close to my goal, or nowhere near it.  (If you're wondering why said character was on Level 52 when I should have stopped on level 50, it's because I found stairs that skipped multiple levels. Then I died before I could find a way back up.)

I became Guild Master while grinding on Level 20 of the Forest, and decided that it was time to head to level 50 with reasonable haste.  I could have gone faster, but I made a point of fighting every battle along the way to get my stats as high as possible. By Friday night I had reached dungeon level 50 for the first time ever, and it was time to start searching for the Ring.

The search was a long one, as I made a point of fighting every battle and walking through every square. The map was a whopping 54x42 squares, for a total of 2,268. It was time-consuming, but it was also exciting for a while; after all, every square I searched had the potential to hold the Reaper's Ring. But as I filled in more and more of the map I started to get nervous. Not because of any danger: Tarret was a killing machine, and it was rare that he would lose more than half of his Vitality in any combat. No, I was nervous because I suspected that the Reaper's Ring was in another dungeon. It was a suspicion that grew, until I filled in the very last square of Forest level 50. No Ring. I would have to do it all over again.

Obviously it was disappointing, but it wasn't long before I got excited about starting a new dungeon. Firstly, I really liked the idea of being able to slaughter my way through some weaker monsters. Secondly, I had found an item while exploring Forest level 50 that would make my progress much quicker: the Map of Stairs. Normally, finding stairs up or down involved exploring every square of every Room in the dungeon, but the Map of Stairs made that easier. I've explained in earlier posts that Moria's dungeon levels are organised into alternating blocks of Rooms and Corridors (each comprised of 6x6 squares); the Corridors are usually empty, while in the Rooms you can find stairs and water holes. The Map of Stairs will alert you to the presence of a set of stairs as soon as you enter a Room, which is a godsend. I was freed from exploring every square, and could blast through the levels as quickly as possible.

Bless you, Map of Stairs.

Having done with the Forest, I moved on the the Desert (mostly because it was the next-closest dungeon to the City).  The division of the levels into blocks meant that I could explore them without mapping; I would head north, blasting through with Passwall spells, until I hit solid rock, then head a block west and start blasting my way south, systematically moving through the level until I found stairs down. At first I was fighting monsters, but eventually I just started running from them to save time. At most I was spending about twenty minutes on a level, and there were some that I was done with in only one minute. It probably took me about two hours to get down to level 50, whereas without the Map of Stairs it probably would have taken weeks.

The Desert had some different monsters to the Forest (Earth Elementals, Scorpions, Empresses), not that it made much difference in combat. Desert level 50 was quite a bit smaller than Forest 50 - a mere 1,296 squares. I was back to mapping for this level, but I was getting impatient, so I decided not to bother fully exploring the Corridors as I'd never found anything in them besides random encounters. Obviously it didn't take as long to search, but once again I came up empty-handed. I was less disappointed this time, as I now knew that reaching Level 50 of the next dungeon would take a few hours at most, and that the worst case scenario was that I only had two more dungeons to go. The end was in sight.

The next dungeon I chose was the Cave. This one took me longer to get to level 50, and it was around this time that I started to get frustrated. For whatever reason it felt like I was getting more random encounters in the Cave, and it also seemed like it was taking longer to find the stairs. I will admit that I lost my temper a time or two, which I find odd. I didn't get angry when I was losing, or when my characters died. I didn't even get angry when I lost a powerful character to an internet dropout. But now I was getting super-pissed, because I was close to winning. It seems to happen in games a lot; I'm fine with setbacks early in the game, but by the end I get really tense, because I just want it to be over.

Again, the Cave had new monsters. The most notable of these was the Horta, which might be the earliest Star Trek influence in a CRPG. Level 50 of the Cave was the same size as Forest level 50, but as I was still ignoring the Corridors it didn't take as long to finish. Once again, I came up empty, and I started to have doubts about ever finding the Ring.

The last dungeon was the Mountains, which was odd and temporarily disorienting in that it didn't display whether I was in a Room or a Corridor (normally it's written just above the viewpoint window). This might have been because I was playing the colour version, but I never bothered to check if this was different in the classic PLATO black-and-orange. The levels in the Mountains seemed smaller than the rest of the dungeons, and I made a quick descent. Level 50 was a mere 900 squares; once I'd determined its size I was elated, because I knew that I'd be claiming the Ring before too long. After all, there was nowhere else it could be.

It took me little over an hour to explore Mountains level 50, by ignoring the Corridors. With every block I cleared my fears mounted, until I hit the very last square. There was no Ring. It was nowhere to be found.

I had a momentary panic, thinking that perhaps I'd misread the documentation, and that the Ring would be on a even deeper level. I wondered if the Ring existed at all, thinking that perhaps it was part of an elaborate hoax played by the developers. The one thing I didn't consider was giving up. After a short break, I came back and took the only logical next step: I had to fully explore the Corridors.

I didn't find the Ring in the Mountains, so it was time to backtrack to the dungeons I had already explored.  Luckily I had last set up camp on level 50 of the Cave, so I was able to get back there almost instantly.  I was dutifully hitting every square, getting into a zen state of rote mapping and fleeing from enemies, and then out of nowhere it happened.

Like water to a man dying of thirst.

I found the Ring in one of the Corridors, tucked away in an area only accessible by using a Passwall spell. I feel as though perhaps the developers weren't quite playing fair here; at no other point in the game will you find anything of interest in a Corridor, Then again, it's not like finding the Reaper's Ring is a necessity. It's the closest thing the game has to an end goal, but players can ignore it if they want, so I don't feel too bad about it being difficult to find.

The final battle was against 16 Reapers, 16 Wondarks, and 16 Iconoclasts. All three of these are among the toughest monsters in the game, even if Reapers are easily killed with a Holy Word prayer. I had to run from the battle once, and was surprised to find that when I returned the monsters I had killed remained dead. (This is normal for the game, but I had thought that this battle might work differently.) On the second try I was able to kill all if the monsters with little difficulty, and claim my prize.

The Final Battle!

To be honest, the Reaper's Ring is a disappointment. All it does is add 100,000 points to your Score and reduce your Age by 5 years. Then it disappears, presumably to the next lower level of one of the dungeons. Certainly I gained some satisfaction in finding it, and quite a lot of relief, but I expected more. And just think of my poor character, who spent 41 years of his life looking for the thing. Sure, it made him five years younger, but he'd have been better off retiring as the Guild Master at age 32 and living off his millions of gold pieces.

Worth every second I spent looking for it.

Before I get into the Final Rating, here are a few more things I discovered about Moria while playing:

• In addition to the four dungeons mentioned above (Forest, Desert, Cave and Mountains), there's  a secret fifth dungeon called the Ocean. To find it you need to go to the absolute upper left corner of the Wilderness map and cast a Passwall spell. The whole dungeon is underwater, and you will slowly drown in it unless you have some Magic Gills (which can only be found as a random drop after combat). I did a small amount of exploration, but other than being underwater it's not much different from the other dungeons. Even the monsters are much the same; I fought some Mermen and Stingrays, but I also fought Reapers, High Priests and a bunch of other things that didn't really belong in an aquatic setting.  (Thanks to the readers who e-mailed me to let me know about the existence of the Ocean.  I do wonder why you guys are sending me e-mails though; I'd really prefer you to drop your comments in the tumbleweed infested barrens that are my comments section.)
  

Fighting in the Ocean.

• I also descended all the way to Level 60 of the Cave, just to see how tough the battles would be. I was encountering monsters in groups of up to 25, but they weren't significantly stronger than those on Level 50. The fights were longer, but they weren't any deadlier.

An average battle on Level 60.

• When I was playing as a member of the Guild of Wizards, my number of attacks had gone up every time I increased my rank. As a Guild Master I was able to kill five enemies a round with my spells. I had thought that the other guilds might be the same, but I can say that, at least for Knights, this is not the case. I was stuck with a single melee attack every round, and I really did miss the ability to wipe out large groups quickly.
• I eventually got the 'Pray for a Miracle' ability to work. When you use it, it wipes out an entire group of monsters at once. Handy, but the manual warns that the gods "tire of helping" if it's done too often. After I found the Reaper's Ring I want around spamming Miracles in every battle just to see what would happen, but there were no ill effects. I was hoping I might get struck by lightning or something.
• I found a number of new magic items. I've already mentioned the Amulet of Home, the Magic Gills and the Map of Stairs. I also found a Water Wand, which lets you know when water is nearby. There was a Healing Wand, which instantly raised my Vitality to 100 when used; I suspect it would run out eventually, but it never did for me. I found a Teleport Rod that worked exactly like the Amulet of Home. I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting.
• In the Forest dungeon, there were magic apples that could be found randomly, that had a variety of effects when eaten. The other dungeons each have their own object that functions exactly like the apple. The Desert has mushrooms, the Cave has crystal crocuses, and the Mountains has wildflowers. I didn't explore the Ocean long enough to find out what's there.
• Monster icons in Moria are weird. Bears are depicted with swords and shields. Lions have wings. Giant Ants and Spiders use an icon that looks like a bat. Even the Hydra uses the bat icon, when there is a multi-headed lizard that would have been perfect. Some of them really are baffling.

Moria has a problem with monster icons. Also, plurals.

So, I say with much relief, that's it for Moria. Let's give this one a Final Rating and be done with it forever.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: Both are practically non-existent. Pretty much all the manual says is that the land of Moria is a "world of underground rooms and corridors". There's some mildly intriguing business about everything in Moria being comprised of the four elements, but it never factors into the game. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: There aren't any characters you can interact with in Moria, unless you count haggling with the shopkeeper. The game has a lot of monsters, but they're functionally very similar. Some of them have resistances and vulnerabilities to certain attacks, but ultimately combat is the same regardless of what you're fighting. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: I do love that orange-and-black PLATO colour scheme, but I spent the vast majority of my time with Moria playing the multi-coloured version. Even if I hadn't, this game would get docked for the teeny-tiny viewpoint window. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: Everything in this game seems to function well, but it's so good at obscuring its mechanics that it's difficult to say for sure. Combat has a lot of options, but ultimately it boils down to repetitively going over the same routines. I should probably bump this game up for its multiplayer features, but I didn't get to experience them, and ultimately I have to rate Moria on its single player experience. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: This is a difficult one. The game isn't exactly hard, it's just long. The trickiest part is learning to wait between battles so that you can heal back to maximum Vitality. It also doesn't have an end goal, really, as the Reaper's Ring is more of an optional quest you can undertake if you want. I lost a lot of characters in this game, and there were quite a few times that I couldn't explain why; suddenly I just wasn't able to run from a battle, or a monster would be inexplicably hard to kill. As I've said before, the game obscures its mechanics very well.  So while much of the game feels easy, these sudden moments of death and the sheer length of time it takes to find the Ring make it feel just a little too difficult. So I'll go with my gut here. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: It's the first 3-D first-person perspective RPG, the first RPG where you could form parties with other players, the first with hunger and thirst mechanics, the first where you could join a guild, the first with haggling, and so on and so on. It's also an influence on Oubliette, which later spawned such games as Wizardry and Bard's Tale. There's no doubt that Moria has an important place in CRPG history. Rating: 7 out of 7.

Fun: You would think, given that I played this game for eight months, that I had fun with it.  After all, who would be crazy enough to devote so much time to a game that they weren't enjoying? Well, you're looking at him. While I wouldn't say that I outright hated the game, I did find it fairly tedious. The act of playing it was highly repetitive, and not all that rewarding. And while I like mapping dungeons, it's not much fun if there's nothing in them to discover. In the end, it was a mindless activity to do while I was watching TV, and I was rarely looking forward to it. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Moria does not get the bonus point, because I am never laying eyes on it again as long as I live. The scores above total 18, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 36. That is perhaps a bit low, but the sheer length of time it took to find the Reaper's Ring, as well as the large, empty dungeons really hurt this one. I'm certain it would have scored higher if there had been some active players around while I was logged in, as the multiplayer options seemed intriguing, but in the end I prefer single-player games, and that's how I experienced Moria.

ADDENDUM:

Somewhat later in this blog I made the decision to overhaul my Final Rating system, so I'm going back through and fixing all of the games I've already played as of March 2020.  I've ditched the Innovation and Influence category, and replaced it for CRPGs with a category for Combat.  I've also changed the purpose of the bonus points, saving them for games that are important, innovative, influential, or have features that are otherwise not covered by my other categories.

Also, the Final Rating is a boring name.  The CRPG Addict has his GIMLET.  The Adventure Gamers have their PISSED rating.  Data Driven Gamer has his harpoons.  So I'm ditching the generic name and calling my new system the RADNESS Index: the Righteous Admirability Designation, Numerically Estimating Seven Scores. It's a pretentious mouthful, but I'm going with it.

Combat: This might have the simplest combat of any of the PLATO CRPGs.  Yes, there are four styles of attack to choose from, but they all amount to pressing the same key over and over again and waiting for your opponent to die.  You can bribe opponents, but I never got that to work. Similarly, I don't think the Divine Intervention ever did anything for me.  Combat in Moria was a rote, overlong experience. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2.  This game has so many firsts it's hard to remember them all, but the most significant would be it's first-person perspective viewpoint (as minuscule as the view is).  It also has some multiplayer functionality that I never got to experience, so it definitely deserves full marks here.

Moria's RADNESS Index is 26. That places it 13th so far, and 6th out of eight CRPGs. It's innovative, but a little boring to play solo, especially so if you decide to quest for the Reaper's Ring.

NEXT: And with that, I'm almost done with the PLATO era of CRPGs. I only have another posting or two to do for Oubliette, and then I won't encounter another mainframe CRPG until Avatar in 1979. What that means is that I can finally start making some headway through my list; I don't anticipate encountering any games that I'll be stuck on for close to a year, at least until I reach the early 1990s.  Short games, how I have missed you.

Moria: Late Night Victory Post!!!!!

I DID IT!

I DID IT!

I FOUND THE REAPER'S RING!

NOW I CAN STOP PLAYING THIS BLOODY GAME!

Aaaah, that feels good. Now I can sleep, and dream of a life beyond Moria.

Moria: Equipment and Treasure

There are moments in life where there's nothing you can do except stare vacantly, with a stunned expression on your face. These moment might be surprising, or shocking, or perhaps even traumatic, but however you got there it's so overwhelming that your body freezes, and your brain locks up, and the only sensation you feel is a slow lurching of your stomach as the reality of the situation sinks in.

I just had a moment like that while playing Moria.

For regular readers of the blog (assuming that I have any left after my long hiatus) this will be a familiar story: I'd started over with a new character, and I was slowly grinding his stats upwards until I felt confident enough to explore the deepest levels of the dungeon.  Then disaster struck, and I died once again. My previous failures, however, had come at the hands of monsters, or perhaps my own impatience. This one was inflicted on me by the game itself.

I'm playing Moria through a PLATO emulator, which means that I need to be connected to the internet. The dangers of that are obvious: the internet is an unstable beast, and drop-outs occur from time to time. For a game with perma-death that could be game-breaking, but what I've found with all of the PLATO games I've played so far is that the games take this into account. All of them so far, without fail, have saved my character's status and location during a drop-out, and I've had no trouble logging back in and picking up where I left off.

Until now, that is (or some time in January to be more accurate; this post has been a long time coming). PLATO was running particularly slowly that night, and I'd already experienced a couple of drop-outs. After about the fourth of fifth, I cracked the shits with it and rebooted my system, hoping that it might help. At which point my computer had to install some updates, because I never turn the bloody thing off. So half an hour later I load up Moria again, and cue the stunned shock because my character was gone. Dead, gone, gonzo, wrap it up, nothing to be done about it but start over from scratch.

And when I say start over from scratch, I really mean it. I've lost strong characters before, but starting over wasn't so bad then because I had built up a hefty list of powerful weapons and armour in my guild locker that could be passed down to my next character. Whenever I died I would just create another guy right away, and all of those goodies would be passed down to him. It's a good leg-up that makes the initial grinding process much more survivable. Well, this time the contents of my guild locker were gone. Your gear only gets passed down if you create a new character right away, and I must have taken too long. I was back to fighting naked with a club.

I'm not really sure how this death happened. It can't be because I took too long to log back in; I've gone days before getting back to it in similar situations. It can't be because I was in the middle of combat; I've had drop-outs in the middle of fights before, and the fight has effectively paused until I came back. Maybe it was a combination of these two factors? Maybe it was a freak occurrence? I'd like to blame the PLATO emulator, but I've been playing games on it regularly for nearly three years, and this is the first time I've had this problem. I think that's a pretty good track record.

I've got to admit, this is the closest I've come to throwing this game in. I'd be justified, I think: I've made the Hall of Fame, and I've become the master of a guild. I can't do it, though. The Reaper's Ring would haunt my dreams forever. I have to find it. So yes, once again I'm grinding away with WWE and New Japan Pro Wrestling in the background. The treadmill of life goes on.

(I wanted to put a shot of the death screen in here, but I've never captured one, and I'm not about to try.)

On that cheery note, it's time for my final special post on Moria: equipment and treasure. This might be a big one, because it covers a number of topics, and is probably the most extensively detailed part of the game.

Armour & Weapons

Buying new weapons and armour is your main path to getting stronger in combat, and there are a lot of them in this game. They come in five categories: 2-handed weapons, 1-handed weapons (including shields), Body, Head, Arms, and Miscellaneous. Each item in these categories has a rating for Attack and Defense.

You start off only being able to wield a 2-handed weapon, because you can't use 1-handed weapons until you have a Valor score of 15. 1-handed weapons start out about the same as 2-handed, but they range up to an Offensive rating of 30, whereas 2-handed weapons cap out at 21. You can also use a shield with a 1-handed weapon, which is a big Defensive boost. Once your Valor reaches 30 you can wield two 1-handed weapons at once, which is the best way to boost your Offensive rating; it doesn't have much of an adverse effect on Defense either, because the better weapons boost that score too. Weapons range from daggers (with an Offensive rating of 3 and a cost of about 150 gold) to Tridents (Offensive 30, Defensive 10, cost of over 1 million gold).

Body armour is purely defensive, and again caps out with a Defensive score of 30 for the Cloak of Death. There are only three types of armour for Arms, with Gauntlets being the best (as they provide an Offensive bonus to go along with the Defensive). Similarly there are only four pieces of Head armour, with the best being the Helmet of Life (Defensive rating 24). There's only one miscellanous item, and that's the purely defensive Holy Sash.

All of the various types of weapons and armour (91 in total) can be bought at the Weaponry stores in the City. As you may have noticed, they can get expensive: the best items can cost over 1 million gold. Between these and the guild fees for advancement, it takes a long time until gold becomes worthless in the game. (It happens eventually, but at that point I felt like I was pretty close to finishing the whole thing.)

All of the one-handed weapons and shields

You can also find armour and weapons after winning a battle. There's no apparent rhyme or reason to when they show up. It seems just as likely that you'll find an item on level 1 of the dungeons as on level 50, and the same goes for the strength of the items as well. Once I found a Helmet of Life within about ten minutes of starting a new character. I can't say for certain, but the sense I get is that any item could show up at any time in the game, and it's all down to luck (although apparently members of the Thieves' Guild will find them more often).

Haggling

As mentioned, some of the items cost more the 1 million gold. Now here's a quandary: your character can't carry more than 1 million at a time. (I discovered this the hard way, when I sold a gold nugget for about 800,000 gold when I already had over 900,000.) That's where haggling comes in. Whether buying or selling, you can negotiate the price with the shopkeeper, suggesting totals or refusing their offers until you hit on a total you're happy with (or the shopkeeper gives up). Generally you can sell an item for about triple the initial asking price, or buy an item for about three-quarters of the initial price. It's a fun mechanic at the beginning of the game, but when you end up doing it for every single purchase (for months and months on end) it gets really tedious. I would have preferred them just to price things lower and be done with the rigmarole.

Negotiating the price of a trident.

Treasure

Most monsters will leave a treasure chest containing gold and jewels after a battle. (Curiously, the priest-class monsters are the ones that most often leave no treasure behind.) Most of the treasure you find is in gold pieces, but there are also gems with a greater value; pearls are worth 150gp, rubies are worth 800gp, emeralds are worth 4,000gp and diamonds are worth 20,000gp. The total value of treasure found increases the deeper you delve into the dungeons. Every now and then you'll get drops that are much higher than the normal value (say, 25,000 gold in an area where I would normally get 1,000). Rarely (and I mean very rarely) you might find a Gold Nugget or a Precious Stone. I've found three of these treasures in the whole time I've been playing, and they all sold for upwards of 500,000 gold.

I should mention that the chests are sometimes trapped, and there's no way of knowing.  You just have to open the chest and hope.  The most damage I've ever seen a chest trap inflict was 49, so I make sure that my Vitality is over 50 before opening one.  There's no other way to avoid being killed.

Taking the spoils from an opened chest.

Magic Items

In addition to dropping treasure and armaments, monsters occasionally leave behind magic items. These are items that all have some sort of special effect. I'll list the ones I've found below. The effects I've listed are my best guess in some cases; it's impossible to know what they do except through trial and error, and even then it's a mystery. I've done my best.

• Torch: Simply put, it's an item that casts a Light spell. Casting Light costs a negligible amount of Vitality, and lasts practically forever, so I never found a use for these.
• Aura of Light: Again, this one casts a Light spell. I couldn't find a difference between this and the Torch (except that this one can be sold for more gold).
• Ring of Valor: I never did figure out what this ring does. My assumption is that it gives a bonus to Valor, but there's no way to tell. I keep them when I find them, but I have no idea if it's worth it.
• Treasure Ring: I could be wrong, but I think this item cast the Treasure Finding spell when used. I find that spell pointless: all it does is tell you whether or not a group of monsters has any treasure. I make it a point to kill every monster I find, so I have no need for it.
• Ring of Flight: You might think that this one gives you the power to fly, but in actual fact it increases your chance of fleeing from combat. Escaping is a necessary part of this game, so a Ring of Flight is a great item to have: I found that when I had one it never took me more than two tries to get away. (At least until I hit Level 52 of the dungeon, and a battle that I just couldn't run from no matter how many times I tried; I'm thinking that this item contributed to my death by making me overconfident.)
• Life Ring: The best magic item in the game: when I was wearing it, I found that monsters did a little bit less damage. Some blows would even restore my character's Vitality, which was a great help. I can't be sure about it, but what I noticed was that more Vitality would be restored the longer I went without being hit; if I was hit two rounds in a row, the Life Ring had no effect on the second hit, but if I went four rounds without being hit the next hit would do four fewer points of damage. This and the Ring of Flight are the two items that I most want to find again.

There's no limit to the amount of magic items that you can equip (except for the overall limit of twelve items that your character can carry, which includes weapons and armour). Unwanted magic items can be sold at the Magic Store in the City, and haggled over just like weaponry. You can't buy magic items, unfortunately, and the ones that you sell are gone forever.

Magic Apples

Magic Apples are found at random in the dungeons, and have a variety of effects if you eat them. (Now that I think of it, it's possible that the other dungeons have replaced Apples with another item. I've been exclusively exploring the Forest, so I have no idea.) These effects are:

• Casting a spell: The apple casts any one of the non-combat magic spells: Light, Protection or Locate Treasure.
• Negating a spell: If you have one of the above three spells functioning, eating the apple will negate it. It's a minor nuisance.
• Restoring Vitality: The apple restores your Vitality back to 100, which is a nice time-saver, but as you'll see that's utterly negated by the following effect.
• Reducing Vitality: These apples drain your Vitality, and are the main reason that I always wait until my health is full before I eat an apple. (That's the negation I was talking about above; the healing saves time, but I've probably just waited to heal up anyway before eating the apple.) I've had apples that reduced me from a Vitality of 100 to one of 4, so I always use extreme caution. I've never had one take me from 100 to 0, but I occasionally get anxious about the possibility.
• Reducing Stats: The apple takes away 1 or 2 points from your Valor, Piety, Cunning or Wizardry. It's irritating, especially when you're trying to grind them up.
• Raising Stats: As above, but the apple adds a point to one of the four stats. This is literally the only thing worth eating magic apples for.

I go back and forth on whether to eat the magic apples or not. Of the six different effects, two of them are actively harmful and three are pointless. I still like to take a gamble on getting a small stat boost, but it's not worth the risk of losing points, or being killed. Currently, I've stopped eating them, except on rare occasions when my health is completely full when I find one.

So, that's it for Moria, at least as far as special posts go. I've covered the game in about as much depth as I'm capable of, and I doubt that I'll do another post until my eventual victory. (Yes, eventual. Shut it, you.)  In the meantime, it's back to my list, which will hopefully make things around here a bit more interesting. Here are the upcoming games:

1. Oubliette (1977) - Another PLATO RPG (boooo). I understand that this one is heavily reliant on multiplayer, though, so I might be able to knock it out in a single post and move on. Here's hoping.
2. A3 (1978) - The second text adventure created using Wander. It's a sci-fi number that at first glance comes across as quite sophisticated for the time.
3. House of Seven Gables (1978) - Another text adventure joint from Greg Hassett, the 12-year-old prodigy.
4. Acheton (1978) - A British text adventure that I've seen described as "enormous". Joy.
5. King Tut's Tomb Adventure (1978) - Yet another game by Greg Hassett! Did that kid even go to school?
6. Library (1978) - The third game created using Wander.
7. Stuga (1978) - A swedish text adventure, which translates to "The Cottage". Sounds riveting!
8. MUD1 (1978) - The first ever text-based "multi-user dungeon". I'm probably going to ignore multi-player games, but I'd like to take a look at this one out of historical curiosity.
9. Treasure Hunt (1978) - Sounds like a variant of Hunt the Wumpus.
10. Mystery Mansion (1978) - A murder mystery text adventure

That takes me to the end of 1978. That's a long run of adventure games in a row, which is the unfortunate side-effect of not really planning ahead. To be honest, it will be a welcome relief from the unrelenting slog of PLATO RPGs. And many of them will probably be short. Hopefully I can start making some headway, and actually get to some games that sane, living people have played.

Moria: Monsters

This game.

This goddamn game.

Okay, so I'm irritated with Moria, but really what I really should be typing is "my goddamn self", because I need to quit.  I need to quit, put this game behind me, move on to other games and never think of Moria again.  I could be playing something good.  Better yet, I could be playing something short.  But no, I'm still trying to beat the goals I set for myself in Moria, and could be doing so for months to come.

As you might have guessed, my character Robilar died.  Worse, he died when I was super-close to my goal.  I wanted to reach Level 50 of the Forest so that I could search for the Reaper's Ring, but I was killed by a Fire Elemental on Level 52.  (I was on a lower level than my target because I found stairs on Level 47 that went down multiple levels, and I was trying to make my way back up.)  I don't feel as though I made a mistake.  I was following my usual routine, cycling through the various attack forms, and when my Vitality dropped below 40 I tried to run away as usual.  And I failed.  And I failed again.  I failed over and over, while this group of Fire Elementals burned me to death.  It had been literally weeks since it took more than two attempts to run from a battle, so I don't know what the hell happened here.  Perhaps the difficulty level of the monsters ramps up after Level 50.

To my credit, I didn't miss a beat in creating another character and starting over.  My new character inherited a load of great items from my previous guy's guild locker, which has made surviving the early stages of the game really easy.  For the last week I've been grinding to get my stats back to a respectable level, and soon I'll head back into the Forest and try to make it to Level 50.  The good news is that I have the maps, so getting there won't take nearly as long.  Unless I die again.  Without the enforced patience that map-making provides, it's going to be hard not to descend too quickly.

To end this update on a more positive note, I completed my second goal and became the guild master of the Circle of Wizards.

There was nothing to it: once my Wizardry was higher than that of the previous guild master, I went to the guild and got the above message.  The only benefit of being the guild master seems to be getting another attack with your primary stat.  When casting spells, I could kill up to five monsters per round.  Other than that, nothing, which is a shame.  Still, it was nice to check off goal #2.  Now all I need to do is find that Reaper's Ring, and I'm done.  I may just throw an actual real-life party when that happens.

Now let's turn our attention from the fact of my death to the monsters that have been inflicting said death.  As I've mentioned in previous posts, the monsters encountered are different depending on which dungeon you're in; because I've spent the vast majority of my time in the Forest there are a decent number of monsters that I've never encountered.  At first they're encountered solo, but gradually their numbers increase the deeper you explore the dungeons.  They also start appearing in multiple groups, up to a maximum of three types at once.  I don't know if there's a cap on the number of monsters that can appear in each group.  I got to level 52, and was encountering groups with up to 15 monsters in them.  The dungeons have 60 levels each, so I can't imagine that the group sizes would get much larger.  The monsters definitely get stronger as well, but it's difficult to say by how much, because all of the number are invisible.  All I had to gauge it on was the damage dealt by my magic missile spells; by level 52, I was casting spells that dealt over 100 points of damage that monsters were surviving.  At the beginning that number was much lower (around 15-20), and it gradually increased as I descended dungeon levels.

There are eight categories of monster in Moria.  I'm just going to show the lists for each type, and write a bit about my experiences with them.  You'll see below that each monster has a Level, ranging from 5 to 80.  I don't know exactly what this number represents, other than a rough guide to which monsters are the most powerful.

There's not much to the humanoids in this game; they're all bags of hit points with no particular strengths or weaknesses that I've been able to discern.  There are a bunch on this list that I've never encountered: Seekers, Fritzes (?), and Sun Warriors being the strongest.  Killer Elites are deadly to lower level characters, but even though all monsters get stronger on the deeper dungeon levels, they eventually become a negligible threat.

Of the list above, Reapers are the deadliest, and with a Level of 90 they are theoretically the deadliest monster in the game.  I can confirm that: they hit often, and do a lot of damage.  Undead, however, are all super-weak against the Holy Word prayer.  It almost always kills them instantly, which turns the most dangerous monster in the game into a pushover.  I'm not complaining.

None of the Mythical monsters are particularly dangerous.  I've had low-level characters killed by Manticores, but it's not long before they can be easily dispatched.

Again, the Animal group has some monsters that are dangerous early in the game (Slasher Worms, Nematoads) but easy to kill later on.  A lot of the monsters on this list are susceptible to the Sleep spell.  There are also a few that give you food when you kill them, Lizards and Bears in particular.

The Priest class isn't all that deadly, but it does have one monster that is the enemy of starting characters everywhere: the Iconoclast.  With a Level of 75, it's by far the strongest monster that can be encountered in the Wilderness, which is the area that beginning characters will be doing most of their grinding.  Most of my characters that didn't make it past that stage were killed by Iconoclasts, which are hard to kill and (because your Cunning score is still low at that stage) hard to run away from.  Priests are weak against Dispell Magic, but that's not helpful early on because spellcasting drains a lot of Vitality.

All of these monsters are tough, with no obvious weaknesses, and remain so for the entire game.  Nothingnesses in particular are difficult to kill, and can deal a lot of damage at once.  Battles against large groups of Elementals can last a long time, with multiple instances of running away to heal before returning.

Magic Users are almost completely immune to spells.  With one exception they're not all that hard to kill, though.  That one exception is the Wondark, which is one of the monsters I hate most in the game.  When fighting large groups of monsters, I rely on spells to clear them out quickly (using the multiple attacks gained through advancement in my guild), but that can't be done with Magic Users.  They have to be killed one by one using the other attack forms, and with Wondarks that can take a while. 

High Priests can be dangerous, but other than that the Lawful monsters aren't all that tough.  I'm not sure what makes them Lawful, in the D&D alignment sense of the word: they're just as hostile as every other monster in the game, and they pal around quite readily with them as well.  I sometimes wonder if there's a non-violent way around these fights, but then I remember how much fun it is to carve through a pack of 15 Hobbits.

Well, that's it for monsters.  I have one more post for Moria lined up, on equipment, and there's a lot to discuss on that topic.  After that, I think I'm tapped out on this game.  If I haven't found the Reaper's Ring by then, it's probably time to shift Moria into the background.  I'll keep playing it, but I won't be blogging about it.  Instead I'll move on to the next game on my list, which is Oubliette, another PLATO CRPG that may or may not eat up the better part of a year.  Huzzah?

Moria: Magic and Guilds

Before I settle in to discuss how magic and guilds work in Moria, I feel like I should give a progress report on where I am with this game, because it has ground this damn blog to standstill.  Rest assured, eventually I'll play something else.  In the meantime, this is how I'm doing:

One point away from cutting my wrists.

So yeah, I had a close shave there.  It's not the only one if I'm being honest, and any one of those moments of carelessness could have had me back at square one.  Other than those few slip-ups I've been exploring the Forest dungeon slowly but surely, and have just started mapping Level 38.

When I started this game, I set myself three goals.  The first was to make it onto the Hall of Fame's Lifetime Achievement section.  I can check this one off, because there's my character Robilar sitting 16th from the top.

I've moved up a spot since I took this screenshot.  Eat it, Genesis!

My second goal is to become the Guildmaster of my chosen guild, the Circle of Wizards.  This is done by increasing the relevant stat, in this case Wizardry.  Once that stat reaches 20 you can join your chosen guild, beginning at the rank of Apprentice.  At 30, you reach the rank of Journeyman, at 40 you reach the rank of Counselor, and at 50 you reach the rank of Master.  My score is currently a healthy 64, which makes me a Master Wizard.  (These ranks may be different based on the other three guilds - knights, thieves and clerics.  I haven't explored those options far enough to know.) In addition to gaining the necessary Wizardry, all three ranks above Apprentice required a donation of 1,000,000 gold each.  I'd initially been concerned about finding enough cash, but I needn't have worried about it: Combat is frequent, and on the deeper dungeon levels each battle reliably nets 5,000 to 10,000 gold.  It adds up.

So I've reached the rank of Master, but I'm not the Guildmaster yet.  To do that, I need to become the guild member with the highest Wizardry score.  The current Guildmaster has a Wizardry of 74, which seems difficult to get to, though not insurmountable.  My main worry here is whether this character is still active.  If it is, I'll struggle to get there.  If not, I should make it.  I've been using my spells a lot more lately, and my Wizardry is steadily climbing.

As for my third goal, that is to find the Reaper's Ring.  According to the help files, the Ring moves down a dungeon level every time it is found.  There's a list of 'Finders of the Ring' that can be viewed, which states that the ring was last located on Level 49, so if I'm interpreting it correctly I should find it somewhere on level 50.  The important question to ask here is, will it be found on level 50 of the Forest?  Or will I have to explore all of the other dungeons as well?  Christ, I hope not.  This game could be over after 12 more dungeon levels, or it could take another 50 to 150 on top of that.  I'm dreading the prospect.

One goal that I've set for myself in previous games is to map the whole thing completely.  That's one that I'm skipping for Moria.  With 240+ dungeon levels (and very large ones at that), it's just too big.  I might reconsider if the dungeons had anything to find in them, but their vast emptiness only reinforces my decision to forgo making complete maps.  I've fully mapped out the City, and the single level Wilderness, as well as the first eleven levels of the Forest dungeon; it was a good way to enforce patience while I explored, and to ensure that I did enough grinding before descending to more difficult areas.  Eventually I got to the point where it felt like my character was strong enough to survive just about anything, so I stopped making complete maps.  Now I descend as soon as I find stairs leading down, and I'm progressing a lot faster than I was before.  Occasionally I find stairs that descend multiple levels at a time, which is always a cause for a minor celebration. 

In the last few days, though, since I hit roughly level 35, I'm finding that my progress has slowed again.  The battles are getting more difficult (and the enemies more numerous), and quite often I find myself running away to heal before returning to finish the battle.  If a battle is large enough I might find myself fleeing two or three times before I win.  Healing in Moria happens in real time, so I have to literally wait for minutes while my character regains Vitality.  That's why this game is perfect to play while watching TV (wrestling in particular is great for this, because it rarely requires my full attention), or browsing the web, or reading comics.  So I get some other things done while I'm playing Moria, but that time adds up, and it means I'll be stuck on this game for a while longer.  I don't know if it will get to Game of Dungeons v8 territory (a game which took me a solid year to complete) but I doubt it.  I'm progressing steadily, and my only real concern is getting killed and going back to the beginning.  That won't happen unless I do something really stupid; this is a long game, and it punishes impatience, but it's also predictable.  If I do die, the fault will be 100% my own.

MAGIC

And now, on to one of the topics I want to dissect today: magic. Magic in Moria is rudimentary at best: there are five combat spells, five non-combat spells, and five prayers that can be used in combat.  All of the spells (though not the prayers) drain your Vitality when cast.  This drain has lessened as my Wizardry increased: when I started the game, I was losing 10-15 Vitality per spell cast; now I lose 2 or 3 points.

That decrease in the loss of Vitality has meant that using spells in combat has become a lot more viable, and I often find myself spamming magic at my foes now rather than alternating between attacks.  What's made this even more effective is the way that spellcasting is affected by gaining ranks in the Circle of Wizards (as I detailed above).  As a Journeyman, I occasionally found that my character would cast two spells in a single attack.  As a Counselor this increased to three, and as a Master it increased again to four.  Most of my spell attacks now affect multiple foes, and there's little more satisfying than killing four enemies at once with a single spell.

And now, a bit more on the spells themselves, and what I've discovered about them during play:

Combat Spells:

Paralyze: This spell freezes the foe in place, killing it instantly.  To be honest I don't use this one much, and I haven't figured out which monsters are especially vulnerable to it.  I probably ought to spam this one more often to find out.

Charm: The Charm spell makes the target lower its guard, allowing you to slip in and kill it.  It seems to be more effective against humanoid types, although I don't feel like I've established that definitively.  Again, this is a spell I should try more often.

Dispell Magic: This spell turns the target's magic against it, killing it instantly.  I would have thought it would be most effective against spellcasting monsters, and that's the case against priests and the like.  Against wizard-types, it's almost completely ineffective.  I'd previously written that it was good against elementals, but now I'm not so sure about that.  What it works really well against (really well indeed) is undead.  Undead just aren't a threat in Moria, because they're so easily mowed down by this spell (or the prayer Holy Word).

(Note the distinctive misspelling.  That's exactly the way that it was written in the original Dungeons & Dragons booklets.)

Magic Missile: A damage dealing spell that hits pretty much everything with equal effectiveness.  On dungeon level 38 I'm finding that it kills enemies about half the time, and when it doesn't it deals up to 60 to 70 points of damage.

Sleep: Puts the target to sleep, allowing for an instant kill.  This is the spell that I use the most.  It's really effective against animals and mythical beasts like Chimera, but it works on just about everything else except for undead and spellcasters.

As I mentioned above, the number of spells cast in a round increases depending on your guild rank, so long as you're a member of the Circle of Wizards.  (I wonder if the same holds true for the other guilds, and the stat most relevant to their members?  I doubt that I'm ever going to find out.)

Combat Prayers:

Much like the combat spells, these can only be cast during battle. Their effectiveness is based on Piety rather than Wizardry, and they don't drain Vitality like spells do.

Holy Word: The prayer that I use the most.  When successful it instantly kills a single opponent, and it almost always works against the undead.  My Piety stat is my second-highest, because I spend so many combats with undead enemies just using Holy Word over and over again.  It's so good against them that it's pointless to use any other attacks (although the Dispell Magic spell is almost as good).

Escape: This prayer allows you to escape from battle, but to be honest it doesn't seem any more effective than using the Run command.  I suppose that it might be a better choice if your Piety is higher than your Cunning, but my scores are within a reasonable distance of each other.  As such, this isn't a prayer that I ever find myself using.

Miracle: Apparently this prayer summons divine aid to destroy every enemy on the battlefield.  I wouldn't know, because it's never once worked for me.  Every few battles or so I try it out, but so far nothing has resulted.  I suspect that I need either a higher Piety or to be a member of the Brotherhood (the priest's guild) for this prayer to be consistently useful.

Unction: This one gives you some healing when your Vitality drops below 50.  It's not worth using.  It works so rarely and heals so little - around 5 to 10 points of Vitality - that it's a better tactic to either keep attacking, or just run away and heal naturally.

Non-Combat Spells:

Finally, there are five spells that can be cast outside of battle.  Most of these are very good, and I use them quite often.

Light:  I have this spell on all the time, because it reveals secret doors.  It also lasts basically forever, as it only disappears when you return to the city.  It's indispensable for mapping purposes.

Passwall: This spell allows you to pass through walls.  You can't beat the game without it, because there are dungeon areas that are completely blocked off and inaccessible via regular or secret doors.  There are even some stairs in these areas, so the importance of this spell can't be overstated.  It can be a problem in the early stages of the game, though, because it works so infrequently, and every casting drains around 10 points of Vitality.  It's easy to get impatient and keep exploring after using most of your Vitality on Passwall spells, and I lost more than a few characters that way.  On the flip side, this spell is a great way to grind your Wizardry stat, especially if you're prepared to spend a while casting it on walls in the City, where there are no random encounters.

Precognition: This is the only non-combat spell that I don't use.  It tells you whether a particular group of monsters has any treasure, which I suppose is useful in gauging whether that group is worth fighting.  Personally I consider every group worth fighting, if only to grind up my stats.  Treasure is a secondary concern.

Protection: This spell protects you from attacks, but it's hard to say just how effective it is.  My gut feeling is that I get hit less when it's on, but it's not a large enough difference that I can be certain about it.  Still, I have it on all the time, just in case it is aiding my survival.  It has the same effectively infinite duration as Light, so it's not a chore to have on at all times.

Teleport to City: This spell is only available to members of the Circle of Wizards, and is the main reason that I chose that guild in the first place.  Without it, getting back to the city would require slogging back through the entire dungeon, and now that I'm on level 38 that does not sound at all enticing.  With it, I can get back there with the press of a few buttons.  As soon as I read about this ability I knew which guild I'd go for, and I can't imagine playing the game without this spell.

Overall, the magic system of this game is a solid one, but it lacks the clear definition of the other PLATO RPGs, such as The Game of Dungeons.  The other games had less spells, but their effects where tangible.  In Moria too many of the spells feel interchangeable, or ineffective.  It's not as obvious how the spells affect the game, and that hurts it a lot.

GUILDS

As I've mentioned before, there are four guilds that you can join in this game: the Thieves Guild, the Brotherhood, the Union of Knights and the Circle of Wizards.  Each of the guilds is located in the city, and they're really the only reason to explore much of the city at all.  The vast majority of the info I have to impart here is about the Circle of Wizards.  I've tried characters in all four guilds, but the Circle is the one guild I've progressed far enough in to notice any benefits.

Each of the guilds is tied to one of the four stats: Cunning for the Thieves Guild, Piety for the Brotherhood, Valor for the Union of Knights and Wizardry for the Circle of Wizards.  You need a score of 20 in the relevant stat to join the chosen guild.

(This is where I'd normally detail the process of gaining ranks, but I've covered that above already.  As I've also mentioned, the main benefit of advancing in rank seems to be getting extra attacks with your chosen stat.  The only other thing I have to add is a confirmation that the ranks of Journeyman, Counselor and Master are used by all four guilds.)

Each of the guilds confers a special ability.  Thieves  have a greater chance of finding magic items; knights take less damage, and have a chance of beheading their foes; members of the Brotherhood can raise the Vitality of their group (when teamed up with other players); and as I've already mentioned Wizards get the spell "Teleport to City".  I'll say it again: that last ability, at least on paper, trumps anything the other classes have to offer.  I'm not even sure if the special ability of the Brotherhood can be used in single player games at all.

Chillin' at the guild.

The guilds grant more than just abilities, however.  There's a bank where you can store and retrieve gold (in bags of 200,000 coins each).  There's a bond fund you can contribute to, which goes towards getting fellow guild members out of prison (more on that later).  There's an item locker, where you can store your surplus weapons and items.  It's always handy to have some powerful items in there, because if you die then your stored stuff gets handed down to your next character (who is presumably some sort of heir).  It's a nice way of ensuring that new characters don't start completely from scratch.  Finally, there are the transport options, which let you teleport to either another player in the dungeon, or to your own camp.  You can set a camp anywhere in the dungeon, and always use your guild to return to it; this, in combination with the Wizard's teleportation ability, has saved me a ton of time going back and forth.

You can attempt to rob a guild that you're not a member of, but I'm loathe to try it.  I've had a go with newly made characters, but never succeeded.  Failure results in arrest, and a primitive screen shot of some prison bars.  Apparently you can be bailed out by fellow guildmembers, but I've never attempted it with a character who was advanced enough to have a guild.  I'd love to capture the screenshot, but I don't want to risk losing my character forever.  Alas, in games with perma-death there is no room for experimentation.

So far, I haven't burned out on Moria yet.  I wouldn't say I'm exactly enjoying it, but it's the sort of game I can play on autopilot while doing other stuff.  It's almost a zen, calming experience, interspersed with occasional bursts of panic for the moments when I get a little too close to dying.   The real test of my resolve is going to come if I discover that I need to explore a different dungeon.  I don't know if I can bear going through the whole process again, but I'll deal with that when the time comes.  (Who am I kidding, I'm going to hack away at this game until I'm done, because I'm insane.)

Moria: Combat

As I've mentioned in previous posts, beating Moria is going to take me a long time.  The game is big, death is permanent, and there's no way to make the experience shorter.  What that means is that the blog will be tied up with this game for some time, and I've decided (perhaps unwisely) not to have any other games running in the background.  I want to just get Moria out of the way, and indeed to get the whole PLATO era of CRPGs over and done with, so I'm proceeding as quickly as I can.

What that means is that I have to make this game last as far as blog posts go, so I'm going to do a series of posts discussing every facet of the game in exhaustive detail.  I'm not sure how interesting it will be to read.  I'm not even sure how interesting it will be to write.  Perhaps I'm just trying to make you all as sick of this game as I'm getting.  Nevertheless, let's crack on with my next post in the series: Combat.

Ah combat, the central part of most classic CRPGs.  Combat in Moria is frequent, but it's also quite quick.  In any 6x6 section of the map you might get about five battles, but most of them are over in under a minute.

The PLATO games that precede Moria (The Dungeon, The Game of Dungeons v5, and Orthanc) had rudimentary combat systems, in which most of the tactical options stemmed from spells, and the immunities of the various monsters.  Moria probably has a similar level of tactical play (i.e. not much), but it has a good number of options to choose from in battle:

(F)ight: Your standard melee attack, which is what I mostly default to.  The success of this attack is based on your character's Valor score.  Damage is also based on Valor, versus the Defense of the monster you're attacking.  Up to level 16 of the Forest dungeon, I found that my character's damage would display from 1 to 7 points, and anything higher than that would kill the monsters outright.  Earlier today I started exploring level 19, and now monsters are surviving blows that deal up to 10 points of damage.

Attacking a Zombie, and being attacked in return.

(T)rick: This attack is based on your character's Cunning score.  The idea here is that you use your guile to get the monster to let its guard down before striking a surprise blow.  If it works it kills the enemy instantly.  I'm not sure how this is determined.  My character's current Cunning score is 38, and I find that using Trick works about half the time.  Perhaps it's just a straight percentage chance of success?

(P)ray:  Praying is based on your character's Piety score, and gives a whole bunch of options.  The one that I use the most is Holy Word, which instantly kills a single monster (I find that's it's super-effective against the undead).  You can pray for escape, which is not an option that I've ever used.  I didn't even realise that it was a thing until doing some reading for this post.  When I need to flee, I use the Escape command detailed below.  The third Pray option is to pray for a miracle, which calls for divine intervention from your gods and kills every single enemy on the field.  I haven't tried this one much, because it's noted in the instructions that the gods tire of this if its done too much.  I'd rather not deal with the repercussions of angering the gods, especially in a game with perma-death in effect.  Besides, on the occasions when I have tried it it's never worked.  The final Pray option is healing, which only works when your character's Vitality has dropped under 50.  This is another one that I don't use much, because once I drop below 50 Vitality I start trying to escape.

(B)ribe: This is another option that I didn't remember was in the game.  I was loathe to test it out, as I wasn't sure whether the choice of item to bribe with was mine, or a random one.  I ended up stripping my character completely of gear, taking an old Hood that I had stored in my guild locker, and hunting for a battle in the wilderness, where the monsters are the weakest.  I found a leprechaun, and was pleased to discover that the game let me decide what items to offer.  Alas, nothing I tried worked.  The leprechaun took my Hood and about 1,000 gold, and still wouldn't accept my bribe.  I killed him with my bare hands, and - predictably - the stuff I had given him wasn't included in the treasure I found after the battle.  I doubt I'll be going back to this option.

Mythologically speaking, I probably chose the worst 
possible monster to attempt to bribe.

(R)un: This is the most vital option in the game.  Seriously, knowing when to run is the single most important tool for survival that the player has in Moria.  Success is based on your Cunning score, and you can attempt it over and over again until you escape.  You don't lose anything as far as I can tell, and you're still in the same square you were in before the battle commenced.  The monsters are still there as well, which was the source of a few of my early deaths: if you return to that square, or refresh while standing on it, you'll be attacked again.

  The instructions mention that you lose a share of treasure when you run from a battle, but I'm pretty sure that's a multi-player thing.

Running from some Werelions.  I could totally beat them, this 
is just for the blog.

(E)vade: This option keeps you in the battle, but makes you more difficult to hit.  It's probably quite useful in multi-player games, for when you're wounded but want to stay in a battle to claim your treasure. In single player mode it's pointless.

(C)ast a Spell: The effectiveness of spells is based on your Wizardry score.  There are five different combat spells in the game, most of them quite similar on the surface.  Paralyze freezes the target monster, killing it instantly.  Charm makes the monster think you're it's friend, allowing you to kill it instantly.  Sleep puts the target to sleep, permanently.  Dispell Magic turns a monster's magic against it, killing it instantly.  (Sensing a pattern?)  The outlier is Magic Missile, which simply deals damage.

  In theory the various spells are more or less effective against certain monsters, but I haven't noticed it much during play.  Sleep seems to work well against normal animals like lizards and spiders, while Dispell Magic seems to be effective when facing undead and elementals.  Magic-Users are immune to spells, as far as I can tell.  I probably need to figure these vulnerabilities out, because I get the feeling that I'll be encountering deadlier monsters in the near future.

  This is the option that I use the least in combat, because each spell you cast drains your Vitality.  The spells seem to be no more or less effective than any other option, so choosing the one that brings you closer to death with every round seems a bit foolish.

Yell for (H)elp: This command puts out a general cry for help to any other players that are in the same section of the dungeon with you.  It's yet another multi-player option that I haven't been able to explore.  (I'm tempted to try to set up a second account, and run another character on my wife's laptop just to check these options out.)

(m)essage everyone or (M)essage an individual: More options for multiplayer.  I'm not sure why you'd be sending messages to people in the middle of battle, but it must have had some uses.

In the earliest stages of the game you only ever encounter monsters that are by themselves.  As you descend dungeon levels the number of monsters grows, and you will also be attacked by multiple groups (though never more than three groups).  I'm currently on the 19th level of the Forest, and most of my battles are with three monster groups with up to 8 creatures in each group.

(Some of the groupings can start to look ridiculous.  5 Hobbits, 7 Zombies and 4 Bears?  Sure, okay.)

It sounds overwhelming, but I've noticed that I never take more damage in a single exchange than I would from a single monster.  (The toughest monsters can deal up to 12 points of damage.)  An arrow next to the names of the monster groups determines which one you will attack that round, and which one attacks you.  So while you're not really in control of which monsters you're attacking, and you can't target anything in particular, the monsters can't gang up on you either.  It's not at all realistic, but it helps a lot with survivability.

In most combats I have a set routine.  I open with a spell (unless my Vitality is already low).  Then I alternate as follows: Fight, Trick, Fight, Pray, Fight, Trick, Fight, Pray, and so on.  The idea here is to keep all of my stats going up at an even level, with a greater focus on Valor.  The only problem is that Wizardry doesn't get used as much (a problem compounded by the fact that my character is a member of the Wizard's Guild), but that's offset by frequent use of spells outside of battle.

I'll shake the routine up if I encounter some really strong undead, particularly Reapers. In that case, I target those with Holy Word prayers, spamming them until they're all dead.

Other than that, my only tactic is to run away once my Vitality dips below 50.  I might stick it out if there are only a few enemies left, but I don't like to risk it.  This game eats up a lot of my time, and I really don't need to go back to the beginning.

About to flee from some Reapers due to low Vitality.  
The risks I take for you people.

Overall, I think that this is a pretty good combat system for the time.  It's more complex than anything found on the other PLATO RPGs,  but despite all of the options on offer it still boils down to mashing the attack button over and over again.  Perhaps it's more interesting when multiple players are involved, but I'm not sure if I'll ever get to test that out.  For me, the most admirable thing about combat in Moria is that it's fast-paced, easy to navigate, and over quickly.  Brevity in a combat system goes a long way.