How many of you have found yourself in a rogue-like game or dungeon crawler, permadeath hanging over your head like an ominous storm cloud, hours invested, continuing to grind away, when suddenly you meet an untimely death? It can be almost paralyzing. The sudden realization that all of the time and the hours that you’ve put into the game have been thrown to the curb like the weekly trash.
I had been on Level 21 of the Forest Dungeon in Moria, thinking to myself that things were going incredibly well, when things suddenly began to spiral out of control and I ended up starving to death from lack of food. Moria was the first game, to my knowledge, that has you keep track of your food and water in order to survive.
I had just increased my status in the Brotherhood of Knights to Journeyman as well. This is the part of the game mechanic that I am going to try a different approach with. Rather than join the Brotherhood of Knights, I created the new character known as Temar. I slowly built Temar up until he was able to join the Wizards Guild. Why the Wizards Guild? An extremely interesting benefit of belonging to the Wizards Guild is that you now possess a spell which allows you to instantly teleport to the city from anywhere within the dungeon. In my mind this a tremendous boon and it will prevent me from ever dying of hunger or thirst again.
One of the most tedious facets of the Moria game is being forced to leave a Dungeon, from say Level 21, and make your way back up to the surface level by level. Once you’ve arrived at the surface you then have to trek to the nearest city. I have now removed this tedium by obtaining the ability to teleport to the city whenever I like. Once in the city, another guild benefit, is that from within your guild you can teleport or transport yourself back to your camp within the dungeon. So if you take the time to establish a camp on whatever level you want to resume at, you can easily teleport from that particular spot to the city and then back again.
This does not simply erase all of the previous hours I’ve put into the game already, nor does it make things completely right; as I still have a lot of grinding to do before Temar is as strong as my previous character was, but it does go a long way in aiding me to continue to strive and grind to make further progress in this game. I will keep you updated on my exploits.