DnD, D&D influenced Ultima

Richard Garriott played D&D as a schoolboy and wrote his first games to reproduce it on a computer. Akalabeth, the 1980 predecessor, is a dungeon crawl with hit points, armour classes and a bestiary of the game's monsters under other names. What Ultima carries over: levels and experience, class and race choice, hit dice, a top-down world with dungeons set into it, and a dungeon master's world simulated in code. MEDIUM rather than HIGH because the specific debt is to the tabletop hobby broadly, and Garriott's own account also credits Tolkien and his father's Apple II. The line from the table to the screen is not in dispute; which rulebook, slightly.