Do You Want Your Possessions Identified? Let's Play NetHack

That was excellently educational!

once more with feeling!

DO IT!!!!

That was awesome, Netbrian. And don't worry, unlike nunix and ChefCthulhu I don't want you to go right into another playthrough.

Brick, you're up.

I thought the mysterious force was kinder to chaotics than lawfuls, not the other way around, to balance out the fact that lawfuls don't have to fight archons and what-have-you.

It's pretty amazingly annoying either way of course.

Lyll and Dez the Angel ascending together is just so, so perfect. Anyway, once more from the top!

Enjoy your new demigodhood!

Male Lawful Dwarf Archaeologist, if you would.

But only after you finish that FFI Solo you said you'd do.

Also: if the mysterious force knocks you down every time you try and go up a level.. how do you ever progress? Or does it only kick in when you try and leave Gehennom?

You made nethack look almost comprehensible. Congratulations.

I always assumed that Ascending was just a clever little joke, not that it was actually possible to beat the game.

It's random, and can't shunt you back more than two or three floors.

it shunts you back more if you are lawful, pushing you back at least one floor a quarter of the time, and sometimes up to three. If you are chaotic, you still have a 25% chance of not going upstairs, but it's a 1/8th chance of staying put and a 1/8th chance of getting knocked down a level. Either way, it's something I hope that devteam will fix when/if 3.5 comes around.

I would also like to see Brick ascend with an archeologist.

My secret shame: despite being a depository for useless knowledge about roguelikes, I have never ascended without savescumming.

Double secret probation-quality shame: It was actually on SLASH'EM, not Vanilla NetHack

Shoot, I got the mysterious force wrong. I just don't spend enough time with the amulet, my precious.

I've heard that Slash'em doesn't have a difficulty level very different than Nethack. About the save scumming -- I did it very early on, but honestly I've found Explore Mode to be better at improving my gameplay. It's also easier.

And I vote for a Neutral Arch. Otherwise we might end up with Grayswainder, and that wouldn't be any fun now would it?

This is actually my biggest gripe about nethack, and any RL or RL-deriv that follows its pattern (say, Diablo): named/artifact supergear. It means there's always something you can count on, equipment-wise, to get you through. Also, too much of it is irritating Tolkien shit.

Shiren the Wanderer is pretty insubstantial compared to nethack and its item and monster interactions (see: raising your previous adventurers' corpses and charming them, or using a "turn undead" spell to literally turn something INTO an undead), but I liked how there was never any weapon or shield you could count on aside from a Big Riceball when you started (and a couple of set pieces for things like Kitchen God and Scroll Cave dungeons).

Guild Wars also kept the everything-random.. at least until the release of the second set/game, when they screwed it all up. -.-

SLASH'EM is more difficult than Vanilla, but that's just because there is easily twice as much shit to deal with, it isn't extensively spoilered to the point of OCD like Vanilla, and every demon lord has his own unique level you are required to dredge through.

And Demogorgon is near the top.

But hey, you can be a werewolf Undead Slayer with a lightsaber, so there is always that.

EDIT: Also, Grayswandir, despite being lawful and a reference to a fantasy series I actually like, can be weilded by non-lawfuls. You just take a heaping helping of damage for your troubles.

Also, between all my dickheaded nitpicking I forgot to say congratulations for one of the best LPs I've had the pleasure of reading.

Bravo! That was incredibly entertaining, and very well written. Thanks man!

Congratulations on a solid LP. You got me playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (which is, uh, vastly different than the Crawl I played back in the 90s ... I've been out of the roguelike scene for a while), and I've managed to hook some friends into playing too. (I'm nowhere near good enough at the game to LP it, thankfully.)

I've always felt that Nethack was a little too "complexity breeds complexity" for my own personal roguelike tastes, but I sure did enjoy watching someone else play through the game.

So here's a thing.

I've started playing again, and my first dozen or so games were short, but generally stupid deaths. Sometimes I got pretty far down.

Sometime in the last week, however, every game I get "stuck"; I explore every nook and cranny of the level, and I find that I cannot progress beyond the first few levels (I've had this happen as early as floor 2, as late as floor 5). If I had a pickaxe, or Dig, it'd be fine, but I'm not playing roles/races that start with either of those. It's pretty frustrating!

My workaround at this point is to hope I find a leprechaun, eat the corpse, and then see if I can teleport. My last run let me get down to F7 this way after getting blocked around F5.. but then I fell through a pit trap to F9 before I was really ready. I found a ring.. and then died. The ring turned out to be an uncursed ring of teleport control. -.-

Anyway, is this "sometimes y'just can't play without digging" a bug or a feature?

"Feature." I can promise that there's a secret passage in each level that you'll need to search for using the "s" key (or however it's mapped.) It's tedious, but just keep searching the walls facing the portion of the level that looks emptiest until you find a passage.

Or you could just play Archeologists all the time (I've seen people do this for exactly this reason.)

Archeologist is a hard class, but in some ways it's also very easy. Since they start with a pick-axe and a touchstone, money is super easy to come by early in the game. If you're lawful, this makes the Dig for Victory strategy very appealing.

Dig for Victory is a controversial strat that involves amassing as much money as you can carry while staying at experience level 1, then going to the priest in Minetown and paying him for AC. He charges 400 * your level per buff, and the first two or three buffs can be pretty sizable (4-5 points even), so if you manage to get there with a few thousand gold on hand you can walk away with a base AC of 0 or -1 easily.

They start with shit armor and the bullwhip is pretty lame, but the pick-axe makes for a workable weapon until you can get your hands on an artifact.

I just need to chime in here to say that this LP was totally awesome. I played some Nethack back in the day, but never ended up getting terribly far past minetown. (Even the one time I managed to end up with Mjolnir... I forget what stupid way I died on that playthrough.)

Congrats! Excellently played. It's been a while since I last played, so despite my own several ascensions I still re-learned quite a bit from this LP. Hooray!

Now, who's capable of an ADOM LP? That one, I've never managed to get very far in...

Most important lesson -- don't eat while satiated.

I think you just volunteered.

The problem with ADOM I thought about is the following --

1. It's quite a bit longer than Nethack. My experience is that ADOM takes at least as long, if not longer, than Angband.
2. The endgame tends to continue to include cruel ways to kill you. This is where the length comes in, since a setback in ADOM takes you back so far. Angband is of comperable length, but it's more predictable, and the deaths by the mid to end game will be clearly your own fault.
3. Randomness is a bigger factor in ADOM than in Nethack or Angband. There are several items without whch the best ending is unreachable, and certain sections in general will be much harder. While ADOM has wishes, they're more difficult to get than Nethack and there's no guaranteed wand of wishing. Unlike Angband, the levels are persistent, so you can't just play around at a certain depth and be reasonably certain you'll find what you want (yes, there is the infinite dungeon of random levels, but the item drops there are heavily nerfed.)
4. ADOM tends to encourage grinding, (literal) farming, and scumming to get what you want or need. This takes even more time, even if herb growing can actually get more interesting than the game itself.

ADOM is still a great game, but I don't think it has LP potential for a merely good player like myself. You have to be a really strong player to avoid some of these pitfalls in order to produce something successfully, at least in my view. Maybe you'll prove me wrong.

Pro tip -- Don't go in the small mountain without a very low level.

Congratulations on the ascension, Netbrian. You inspired me to play some Nethack again myself, but even with hints and spoilers, I still can't get past dungeon level 10. Oh well.

Thanks for putting together this great LP! I've been dabbling in roguelikes for the last couple of years, but Nethack's reputation for spoiler-intensiveness and tedious midgame always put me off of it. It was great to get a sense of how a full game plays out.

We should just get AV to run this.

I WA SHOCK

That is.. pretty catchy.

Seriously though, there are a TONNE of fun little roguelikes out there for.. well.. I won't say a lot of different genres, but there's a few. Slashie.net even has several video game-based RL (including Castlevania, Metroid, and Zelda). If you've got a RL itch and just want to play a few games of something, without pressure to "win", I'd say go there or skim roguetemple.

I'd actually like to see somebody play DoomRL. I don't think it runs on non-windows systems and doesn't have a tileset, but I've heard rumors that it's incredibly awesome.

I might be down for this.

Woo! another fine LP here

I've tried ADOM and various 'bands, but I'd stick with Nethack. And once you master Nethack, SLASM'EM. Why?

ADOM: unfair in an unpleasant manner. I ended up save-scumming half a dozen different characters that survived the first thirty minutes because of how many times I got utterly impossibly screwed early on. Unlike Netbrian's example here, it's not nearly so forgiving of fast restarts (and note that some of his 'best' starting equipment guys died, so it's not a random-factor as much as a harshness).

And then there's a series of new and cruel dungeons that change the rules on you, that you must go through, in a certain order you don't know beforehand.

And then there's the TIME LIMIT in game on the number of turns you have. Ugh.

'bands: a CMU professor wrote an AI to play Angband. It's fascinating to watch, I should install it again as a screensaver. The lack of time limit and infinitely regenerating dungeons means that an ultra-cautious AI programmed to know what resistances are REQUIRED at certain depths are always met. Thus preventing, I kid you not, one-shot deaths from outside the visible screen.

Nethack: reasonably fair, in that the unavoidable deaths happen early (soldier ants). Reasonable challenge, because you can choose conducts to make thing harder (no wish/skip Sokoban/vegan/pacifist/etc).

SLASH'EM: for those who've ascended Nethack and want to be surprised again.