Taken from Wikipedia.org:

In Rogue, players control a character as they explore several levels of a dungeon as they seek the Amulet of Yendor located in the dungeon's lowest level. The player-character must fend off from an array of monsters that roam the dungeons. Along the way, they can collect treasures that can help them offensively or defensively, such as weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and other magical items. Rogue is turn-based taking place on a square grid represented in ASCII or other fixed character sets, allowing players to have time to determine the best move to survive. Rogue implements permadeath as a design choice to make each action by the player meaningful: should the player-character's lose all their health from combat or other means, the character is dead, and the player must restart a brand new character and cannot reload from a saved state. The dungeon levels, monster encounters, and treasures are procedurally generated on each playthrough, so that no game is the same as a previous one.

Rogue_(video_game)#Gameplay