World of Dungeons
is a browser-based MMORPG made by Neise Games. It started in Germany in 2003, and since has spread worldwide with its English servers. There are currently three English servers with rumors of a fourth one, although two servers are essentially dead.
The game puts you in the boots of an adventurer who sought glory and wealth through adventuring, and to do so you must delve the dungeons scattered through the land of Ezantoh. The game itself plays like a MUD, but you don't get freedom to explore; You enter the dungeon, beat a certain amount of enemies in each levels until the end, and finish... then you wait for hours before you can take another dungeon. The game is pretty much designed that way so people with limited time can still play; you can do fairly well logging in once a day, but three times are recommended.
To ensure your survival, your character can join/form a party with up to 11 other characters with various abilities. There are also clans, which is an aggregation of several groups with some benefits. Last but not least is the Duel Arena, where players test their strength against other players.
For tropes specific to the classes, see the character page.
Tropes in World of Dungeons include:
- Attack Its Weak Point: Some dungeon fights can be like this. Of course, a party kitted wrong is in for a world of hurt.
- Auction: Players usually sell good items this way. Whammy Bid happens with some regularity.
- An Adventurer Is You: In a multitude of ways!
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: There are a lot of these floating around in the game, but the most glaring example is the Premium scheme, which lets players run one parallel character without further cost and unlocks a staggering 11 extra character classes. It doesn't help that most of the classes do healing, buffing, tanking, and damage-dealing better...
- The game actually presents an interesting case. Non-paying members only get to play three classes: Archer, Barbarian, and Mage... but they can enter all of the dungeons, play most traditional team roles, and equip most of the gear (provided the requirements are met). Further distancing WoD from Allegedly Free Game is that you can thrive with an all-free party; the main deciding factor for success in dungeon exploration is teamwork, not whether you have paying players or not.
- Breakable Weapons: Hope you have spares of those godly weapons! Granted, you can pay real money for it to be repaired.
- Critical Hit: Getting crits are essentially the name of the game in attacking.
- Critical Hit Class: Archers and Gladiators does it best.
- Dual Wielding: All class can do it to a degree, and sometimes it's outright suggested since off-hand weapons can bring more stat improvement.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Averted, because resistance to magic and damage is mainly intrinsic to the creatures. There are some expected straight portrayals with ice and fire, while lightning is usually slightly resisted by most.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Hinted at with the gnome's race-specific gadgets.
- Guide Damn It!: For people just starting the game, this game could be quite hard to figure out and there's barely a tutorial.
- The requirement for secret floors is this; The GMs discourage posting them in the forums, so you either luck out or ask someone via the message.
- Enchanting combos. The GMs encourage the international server players to discover them yourself rather than relying on charts translated from the German servers (which is not that accurate in the first place).
- High Fantasy
- Improbable Weapon User: There are a few not-quite-weapons equippable to the character's hands (where you normally put weapons and shields), from enchanted handwraps (boxer-style) to crystal balls to treasure chests. Brawling weapons also tend to be this, with variety from the aforementioned handwraps to a helmet specialized for Groin Attack.
- Insistent Terminology: Malus is used in place of Penalties.
- Min-Maxing:
- To excel in your particular role, you must allocate more experience to the stats used in the corresponding skill's rolls. For instance, the skill Swordsmanship is determined by the owner's Dexterity and Agility stats plus skill ranks. To make this more complicated, the min-maxed stats differ on which role you take; that is to say, a rifle-using Archer is statted differently from a bow-using archer.
- As a rule of thumb, each class has three tiers of stats: the main stats you boost as high as possible (usually Dexterity), the stats that would be nice to have, and stats you increase only for item requirements (usually Charisma).
- Money Sink: The charity options, which lets you donate in-game money for fame (required to get most medal items). Interestingly, you can beg and reverse the process (gaining money at the cost of fame).
- Point Build System:
- Killing things in the dungeons gets you money and Experience Points, which in turn gets used for Attributes and Skills.
- When you're improving your Attributes, you'll be using only EXP. This represents your raw parameters, and is used in conjunction with skills in determining success against enemy rolls. There are eight attributes: Strength, Constitution, Agility, Dexterity, Perception, Charisma, Intelligence, and Wisdom.
- Skills, on the other hand, are increased using both money and EXP as this represents training in a particular subject your character is good at. Also, Skills are divided into three tiers: Primary, Secondary, and Foreign Skills. The investment cost of attaining the same level vary between those tiers, with Primary Skills as the easiest to gains ranks in (in game terms, you expend a lot less in gold and EXP) and Foreign Skills as the hardest.
- Random Number God: Your success in pretty much anything is determined by the roll of the dice. Most players believes that this RNG is a multiplier between 0.4 to 1.6 times of your 'listed' skill calculation.
- Randomly Generated Loot: Most of the items are like this.
- Rule of Three
- Fire, Ice, Lightning: The main damage-dealing magic system, although there are other damages that can be dealt through magic.
- Fighter, Mage, Thief: The free classes.
- There are three Prestige Class options for all the classes.
- In-game, there are three elvenstones crafted by a legendary jeweler from the tears of the gods. The jeweler is believed to have perished when he sought the tears of the local war god to craft the fourth elvenstone.
- Socketed Equipment: The most sockets that you'll encounter in an equipment is five. They can be enchanted for a variety of basic effects and enchantment combos.
- Standard Fantasy Races: Also in a variety of tastes!
- Our Elves Are Different: They come in two variants, Mag-Mor (more suited to Lightning Bruiser classes) and Tiram-Ag (more suited for classes requiring heavy use of mana).
- Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The two dwarven races are pretty much the same bar one racial skill: Mountain Dwarves gets a runic variant of mass-buffing while Hill Dwarves gets a forging variant.
- Humans Are Special: No less than five variants, each with their unique skillset and ability point increase.
- With the half-pint races, Gnomes are leaning more to the Gadgeteer Genius side while Halflings has more of a hobbit-y feel with their food-based buffing.
