The Many Ways To Die in Nethack 132
The GameSetWatch column '@Play' deals with the storied history of Rogue-like text adventures. This week, author John Harris discusses the many ways to die in Nethack. From the article: "The lowly cockatrice is perhaps the most dangerous monster in the game. There are plenty of monsters with more hit points, who do more damage, who have special attacks, and are just bigger, but cockatrices instantly kill anyone who touches them with their bare skin, and are thus very likely to kill players unwise in their dealings with them. Even Death up on Astral Plane has to succeed in an attack against a player to deliver an instakill, but a cockatrice can kill by being attacked. If the player attempts to fight a cockatrice without a weapon or wearing gloves and hits, he turns to stone. If he attempts to pick up a dead one with his bare hands, that will also turn him to stone. (It can also be wielded, however. Applications for a wielded cockatrice corpse are left for you to imagine, but I will say that it can be, hm, useful.)"
Nethack is a great game (Score:1)
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Then again Nethack is kinda nice because it is relatively simple (and you get a free pet!).
-matthew
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I've been playing NetHack since the late 80's (1988 to be exact) and still have it installed on several computers (including the PocketPC version for my phone). It is a great time waster that has had me hooked for almost 20 years.
Layne
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Jaysyn
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By "state of the art" I mean gameplay and variety of experience... not graphics. I've tried the isometric frontends to Nethack and they are awful. They are difficult to play because you can't see very much of the map on the screen at any given time. Very hard to plan moves or make escapes. Also, ascii letters are a great way to visually identify/classify monsters. ToME is actually still ASCII.. the way any self respecting Rogu
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Dude, have you ever even played a roguelike before? They are ALL ABOUT player versus m
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I maintain that figuring out what objects are is a more interesting challenge than killing monsters, and that the monsters exist in order to force players to find out what the items do and how to use them properly, not the other way around. When you turn it around, you get just about every other fantasy combat game the world has known -- and most of those, in case you haven't noticed, suck.
All those things like skill trees, specia
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One of the things I worked on was splitting the UI into a separate module, with a simple protocol in between. So you could run the main game as a server and connect with curse
noeGNUd (Score:1)
I could not find any.
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That reminds me (vaguely) of EQ's Dungeons of Norrath expansion. One idea that would've been very decent was if the EQ team had managed to construct a "building block" style dungeon engine. As you moved from level to level you could get an entirely randomly generated dung
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Actually, there is already a multiplayer version of ToME: http://www.t-o-m-e.net/main.php?tome_current=1 [t-o-m-e.net] Unfortunately Rogue-like games don't really work well in multiplayer mode because the game style is strategy, not action. In other words, you don't play in real time. You
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While you do raise some valid points, I think you're jumping the gun in saying it "wouldn't work well", especially if you haven't checked out Dwarf Fortress, which does run in a pretty much "real time" during Fortress Mode. Of course, since your job is to plan out and design a fortress, you go through the usual pause/plan/unpause cycle you mentioned, but I think that's
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Maybe Dwarf Fortress would work in multiplayer mode, but it doesn't sounds very "rogue-like" at all other than being ASCII graphics based.
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http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2006/10/_play_toejam_
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-matthew
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But those are things that I emphasize the importance of in prior columns. I try not to repeat myself there, since it's easy to do in a column with a fairly narrow focus.
DeathRobin (Score:2)
Late-breaking news... (Score:2, Funny)
Even more ways to die (Score:1)
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My favorite (Score:1)
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My usual room clearance mode was teleport in, teleport the dragons in with the whistle, teleport out. I didn't do the last bit, the dragons attacked some nearby demons with fire, I got caught in the crossfire and the several tonnes of potions a
What I want to know... (Score:2)
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I tried this, on Earth, Air, and Fire, but all I got was "killed by kicking a wall"
Rumor is it's not possible in vanilla 3.4.3.
-- EidolosCan also get Doom as a roguelike (Score:2)
Nethack was good fun, but I don't play it so often now for fear of losing months of my life. DoomRL [chaosforge.org] (Wiki [wikipedia.org]) is fun to play for a short while - a "coffee break" game, as they call it.
rec.games.roguelike.nethack (Score:2, Informative)
Also, check out the Top Deaths List [alt.org] at alt.org.
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For added geekiness, check the rec.games.roguelike.nethack posts by "Raisse the Thaumaturge" (a.k.a Irina Rempt).
She ends her posts by a pseudo-sig "Raisse, killed by
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Google Groups is an okay way to read and post there if you don't have an account with an ISP that provides USENET.
My best character meets her demise (Score:3, Funny)
But this time was different; I was lucky. My Valkyrie found Excalibur, Mjollnir, Grey Dragon Scale Mail, was easily destroying everything in her path, and I finally got to go on my quest for the first time.
I entered the quest level, and ran straight into the lava.
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If you prayed enough at the right times and sacrificed enough monsters, Mjollnir was pretty much guaranteed. ANd I didn't have trouble finding the GoP either.
-matthew
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And why can't it mean "I'm trying to learn the game, but I don't want to start over every time I make a mistake?"
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Attention demands 27096 gold pieces. Pay? (yn) (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't ascended yet. I've come close twice: I once made it to the VS without the candles [:(] and once had a very promising character blow up Lord Surtur's drawbridge while trying to clear a boulder out the way. Neither of these were my own bad luck, well, not much; the problem was my own stupidity and not paying attention.
Is there a lot to learn? Not really, no. It might take you a few plays of random characters to get to know all the items or monsters, and (if you're not spoiled) some time to get acquainted with them, but from that you can deduce most deaths. Once you've learned that touching or handling a cockatrice (or its corpse) in any way stones you, you know not to take its corpse, feel it while blind, kick one, help one out of a pit, or all those other things. The game still needs to know all these, which is why the list of footrice-related deaths is so long.
The best way to die is to not pay attention. Playing late at night or while tired, playing when you have better things to worry about, or playing too fast are all ways to get you killed quickly. Thought that purple h was a dwarf king? Too bad, you should have checked. Wielding a c corpse while burdened? Should have looked at the status line. I've often died, surrounded by monsters, with (identified!) wands and scrolls of teleportation in my inventory. Woe is me.
On the nethack.alt.org server, the record for ascension streak is IIRC 23 straight ascensions, some with conducts. So although luck plays a part in all games, it's not as big as you think, and ascending with 95% certainty can be done, just as long as you keep paying attention.
Attention demands 27096 gold pieces. Pay? (yn)
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NetHack isn't that hard. [...] I haven't ascended yet. I've come close twice
Err, right..
On the nethack.alt.org server, the record for ascension streak is IIRC 23 straight ascensions, some with conducts. So although luck plays a part in all games, it's not as big as you think, and ascending with 95% certainty can be done, just as long as you keep paying attention.
Marvin is really in a class of his own. http://alt.org/nethack/ascstreak.html [alt.org] lists ascension streaks. Note that it drops off very quickl
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Re:Attention demands 27096 gold pieces. Pay? (yn) (Score:5, Interesting)
I've ascended a couple times, and I still think the game is hard. Once you've got a bag of holding full of wands, scrolls, and potions for every occasion and are sporting a good number of pieces of your Ascension Kit(tm), then sure it's not terribly hard and mostly a matter of paying attention -- because even fully decked out, one slip up can mean YASD.
Before that, though, the game is very difficult and the random number generator can be very cruel to you. For example, if you haven't found some form of magic resistance (I prefer the grey dragon mail) before reaching roughly the castle level, then you're in danger of being on the reciving end of a Touch of Death that ends your game instantly. Or just because you know not to handle a cockatrice corpse doesn't keep you from getting blinded, confused, and then stumbling into a pit which contains a cockatrice corpse. Or you could encounter my nemesis before finding sufficient armor to stave them off: the soldier ant.
On the other hand, there are so many ways to deal with problems that many things that seem bad are survivable. If you're surrounded by monsters, and don't actually have any scrolls of teleportation, you might have a wand of digging to dig yourself an escape hole down to the next level.
In the end, I'd say nethack is hard, but not cheap. Games like Diablo II achieve "hard" by being "cheap" (Multiple shot - fire - lightning enchant anyone?), where you can be killed instantly by random chance, or games where the RoF/damage/hit-points of enemies scales ridiculously until you can't possibly evade them. I think this is part of what sets nethack apart.
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Oh, that isn't close. Close is dying while wading through hordes of summoned monsters on the astral plane trying to find the right altar. Been there once. That was enough for me. I c
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For those just starting, play a Valkryie. Most easy class by far to ascend as Odin likes to hang out Mjollnir like it wa
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I'm going for a weaponless, illiterate, wishless, genocideless, vegan monk. If I can do that, I figure I can give the game up permanently.
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That's not that hard... ascend a weaponless, illiterate, wishless, genocideless, vegan tourist and I'd say you've 'won' the game completely.
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Also, Potions of Fruit Juice raise nutrition, but don't count as food, so you can compensate for missed turns and the Amulet of Yendor.
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PYEC and blessed horn of plenty I hear are handy also, for the unlimited fruit juice.
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WHY IN THE HELL would an ATHEIST care to ASCEND?
Because immortality is far preferable to nothingness?
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Eternity is a very long time if you are not perfect.
You might start to feel like you're in one of those Twilight Zone episodes...
Or in Hell.
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Re:Attention demands 27096 gold pieces. Pay? (yn) (Score:5, Funny)
I consider it more of an accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.
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A game with a lot of buzz around it lately is Dungeon Crawl. I've not looked at it yet though.
My favorite death of all time... (Score:3, Funny)
Remember -- Int'l Nethack Tournament starts 10/31 (Score:2)
If you click over there you can volunteer to run a game server, which is kind of fun. Nethack probably has the highest ratio of player brain resources to server CPU resources of any current computer game -- I ran a game server a few years in a row and was always bemused to find that 20 people were playing nethack on my [ra
NetHack isn't that cruel (Score:3, Informative)
--
Ascensions: ABKPSVW
Death by famine. (Score:1)
Playable on anything! (Score:3, Interesting)
Nethack is one interesting in that they don't provide a config file that presumably would make compiling simple (and less of a challenge), so when building it on anything, you have to figure out what features your flavor of Unix has and set the #defines in the
In the 18 years, I've compiled it on an original NeXT cube, a Playstation2 running Linux, a Vax running Ultrix (didn't like the BSD flavor, nor the SYS V..was weird blend), a Cray2 and a Convex something-or-other.
The only problem was that the Convex used an accounting system to track usage, and between compiling and playing, I ended up being "charged" around $1000 in cpu time.
Good times.
beyond ASCII? (Score:2)
Online servers.. anyone know a newbie friendly one with a nice IRC channel?
Finally! Is there any way to use said interface with an online nethack server?
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You mean Falcons Eye http://falconseye.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Raist
Ascending (Score:2)
[John]
Pet Names (Score:1)
Meanwhile, has anybody else set default pet names in their
wow, (Score:2)
One of my main problems with it is that I can't be bothered to play a really long game, so I often play for about 20mins running right through down to about level 7 or 8, usually past the gnomish mines, and then get killed because I hold down "h" and r
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I've got a good one (Score:2)
Luckily, I decided to do the taboo thing and savescum some time before, just this once, just in case something catastrophically bad happened outside of the game, like this.
I wasn't going to use it if I died legit. Honest. Maybe I'd keep it for posterity. I mean, it was the first time I made it past the Big Room (cone of cold FTW)! I wanted a keepsake, damnit!
And then I was able to get the save off my laptop's hard drive before it died in
God I love Nethack (Score:2)
I just telnetted into that nethack.alt.org server... you can WATCH OTHER PLAYERS! I spent ten minutes watching someone, and it's actually kind of fun. I'll be sucked back in tonight, looks like.
Obvious answer (Score:1)
y
How I died.... (Score:4, Informative)
As I ascended the dungeon on my way out, I picked up all the jewels I could find, leaving heavy things like weapons and armor behind. I'd heard that you could turn lowly gems into diamonds with a wand of transformation (or polymorph, or whatever they are called). On level three, I dropped all my gems into a pile and zapped them with the wand.
But I mis-typed.
The wand of death ricocheted around the room, striking all four walls before finding me again.
I never played it seriously again.
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I hate to tell you this, but if you then died to a wand of death, you didn't win.
And if you died to a wand of death after getting the Amulet, you probably would have died later anyway because you didn't have magic resistance, which is all but essential for the endgame.
(The endgame is what happens after you escape the dungeon with the amulet....)
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Many of the things that people have mentioned in this thread make no sense to me, because the game has change/evolved hugely. At this time, once you killed the dragon, and found the amulet, you were basically done -- unless you left behind a nasty creature that was waiting for you on a higher level, or left a dead cockatrice on the floor somewhere. Or you zapped yourself with a wand of death.
Another silly way to die: killing a ghost and th
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From one perspective, Nethack is a game that has changed relatively little relative to the amount of time it's been around. It is very interesting to read about the History of the game over on the Nethack Wiki (http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Game_history), which goes through all the major versions and explicates the features that appeared, or vanished, along with them.
Nethack's big changes came in version 3.0, with many more in 3.1. If you win t
A list of examples... (Score:1)
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Please hand in your geek license. You have no use for it now.
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Host: What's your costume suposed to be?
Me: I'm a Grue.
Host: What's that?
Me: We eat people in the pitch dark.
Host: What's it look like?
Me: No one knows, they only attack in the dark.
-Rick
PS: The worse part is, one of the party hosts knew what a Grue was.
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I never quite understood which of these two was supposed to eat you in the famous Zork quote.
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Although, being killed after eating a green slime wasn't fun, especially after getting down to the ghost-town level with all the shades and skeletons.
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And I was doing so well....
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