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Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is one of the foundational computer role-playing games, and playing it today reveals just how much modern RPGs owe to its ideas. Players create a party of adventurers, choose classes and abilities, equip them, and descend into a dangerous dungeon filled with monsters, traps, treasure, and opportunities to make catastrophically poor decisions. Combat is turn-based and heavily focused on party composition and resource management. Death can arrive abruptly, and recovering from a disastrous expedition is part of the experience rather than an unfortunate bug. The presentation is extremely simple, but the underlying systems are remarkably deep for its age. There is something wonderfully pure about its design: create a party, enter the dungeon, fight monsters, find treasure, become stronger, repeat. Wizardry helped establish the blueprint for countless later RPGs, proving that a few statistics and a very dangerous dungeon could keep players occupied for months.