The premise of LORD is that a Red Dragon is wreaking havoc in a town where the player has recently arrived. Multiple players compete over a period of weeks to advance their skills and to kill the dragon. In order to achieve this goal, players must face combat to gain experience. Once they have gained enough experience, they must face their master at Turgon's Warrior Training and advance in skill level. Advancement increases the players fighting stats and gives an additional skill point in the current skill (up to 40). Advancement also presents stronger enemies and masters; a player must challenge and defeat master Turgon himself to reach level 12, the final level, before attempting to search for and slay the dragon.
These games had minimal, if any, images and were mostly just text based adventures. You had a limited number of actions you could use each day to quest and level up your character. Much like early D&D, death of a character was easy to come by, too.
These days, you can still find sites dedicated to games like this. You can still play LORD at this site: https://lord.gear.host/
And if you're looking for something other than LORD, you can visit ConstructionChaos for other BBS style games, found here: https://conchaos.synchro.net/