Gameplay involves earning experience points through a variety of activities, including engaging monsters in combat and fulfilling quests. The earned experience can be invested to improve the character`s abilities by spending it on such attributes as `Strength`, `Coordination`, and `Quickness` or such skills as `Unarmed Combat`, `War Magic` and `Melee Defense`, among many others. Skills start at a base level determined by a character`s attributes--For instance, a character`s base melee defense is the sum of coordination and quickness divided by three, which then could be raised by applying points to the melee defense skill.

Each character has a limited number of skill points, which then allow one to purchase skills, which then allow that skill to be raised. For instance, if one had not purchased the melee defense skill it would always remain at the default starting level. Every few levels, more skill points would be granted, and if a character had enough skill points, they could buy a new skill. Besides experience points, questing and combat also yield equipment such as armor, weapons, health potions, and spell scrolls.

Unlike most other games of this type, Asheron`s Call rarely uses typical fantasy fiction to draw ideas from and instead creates its own, unique creatures. Instead of elves and goblins, a large majority of the monsters in Asheron`s Call are completely original. Examples include the insect-like Olthoi, the cat-like humanoid Drudges, the giant grey-skinned humanoid Lugians and the reptilian Sclavus. Many unique races and creatures from Asheron`s Call can be seen in Wikipedia`s list of species in fantasy fiction.

The Asheron`s Call franchise was unique in providing complimentary monthly content updates or "Events" that added new quests, skills, landmasses, monsters, gameplay dynamics and bug fixes to all subscribers. Epic storylines linked multiple episodes to form distinct "story arcs".

Many other elements of Asheron`s Call are radically different from most other MMORPGs. For example, Asheron`s Call does not divide its world into different level zones.