The only games I tend to play more than once are roguelikes/roguelites. Backlog's too big :)

Oh, well that's perfect. I think. I mean, you could make all your party members rogues.

Or is it that those other games have only one character? (I really don't know, that's a genre of sorts?) You can get the other party members killed and leave only one alive, then save, and then use a copy of that saved game as a starting point whenever you want to play again. And the sole surviving party member doesn't have to be a rogue, but it can be if that's what you want.

Lol, Roguelikes/Roguelites are procedurally generated games where maps, loot, and to some degree monsters are never the same two playthroughs in a row.

The term comes from Rogue: The Adventure Game. Nethack, Angband, Moria, Dungeons of Dredmore - these are roguelikes - tile-based turn based games, usually with permadeath.

Roguelites are games from other genres which take elements of Roguelikes. Diablo counts, as do Binding of Isaac and Rogue Legacy. Dungeon Hack is the "roguelike" built on the Eye of the Beholder engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

Wow. I still have some memories of something matching the description on the Wikipedia pages for Rogue, Hack/Nethack, and Moria. Several years after them, but I don't recall the name of what I played. I do recall the ASCII art and maybe the Z for zombies and I think the @ symbol, but less fancy than most the pics on the Wikipedia pages. Hmm, maybe there was an ogre.

I never got far in it. It was more of a novelty for me at the time because of the mixture of different types of computers, both text terminals and window managers. Everything was totally hidden in the game, revealed gradually while moving around. And different every time. I think that's what threw me at the time.

Interesting how inspiring that became. Thanks for the info, I would have never guessed.

Might have been the original Rogue? http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/rogue/screenshots/gameShotId,683078/