Roguelike

The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomisation for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, although many newer ones now offer tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Roguelikes designed to be played on desktop computers usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the game world.

The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue.

History
The roguelike genre takes its name from Rogue, a role-playing video game based on the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games, including concepts such as stats and experience points.

Gameplay
These games present a plain view. Traditionally, an "@" sign represents the player character. Letters of the alphabet represent other characters (usually opposing monsters). Some versions of Rogue only made use of capital letters, but present-day roguelikes vary capitalization to supply additional visual cues. A dog, for example, may be represented by the letter "d", and a dragon by a "D". Coloration may signal further distinction between creatures. For example, a Red Dragon might be represented by a red "D" and a Blue Dragon by a blue "D", each of differing abilities significant to player strategy. Additional dungeon features are represented by other ASCII (or ANSI) symbols.

Graphical adaptations are available for many early roguelikes, and it is not uncommon for new development projects to adopt a graphical user interface.

Players issue game commands with at most a few keystrokes, rather than with sentences interpreted by a parser or by means of a pointing device such as a mouse. For example, in NetHack one would press "r" to read a scroll, "d" to drop an item, and "q" to quaff (drink) a potion.