Old School - Nethack

Dipping things in fountains uncurses them?

it can

i killed Juiblex and if i hadn't combat-scrolled past the illness message (or been prepared for the fact that he makes u ill) i would've just healed it. once i get down into gehennim this run i'm taking everything uber slow + carefully. i'm ready to ascend + be done w/ nethack for awhile tbh.

― Mordy, Thursday, 26 July 2012 05:49 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol fuck this game forever

― Mordy, Thursday, 26 July 2012 13:50 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

does this mean you ascended, or

I honestly find these updates fascinating and live vicariously through then since my history with nethack is just a series of brief and terribly obsessive failures, keep em coming mordy.

personally i think the thing to do would be to write a script automatically posting your deaths to this thread

some of them are really embarrassing

Mordy, do a monk run

Switching to a monk after a period of "blarrgh weapons" or "ararrgh spellbooks" was amazing. By XL 17 you've got all intrinsic resistances (except disintegration) and teleport control... there's something about staying vegetarian than confers disintegration resistance, too, iirc

i've never had to mess w/ weapons or spellbooks bc valkyrie gets artifact by L5 and can barely cast spells

just sacrificed a werejackal to my lawful god, he was pretty pissed off, sent the Angel of Death to sort me out. ah well, live and learn.

I remember valkyrie as being a good class for newbies but hard to ascend? You should diversify, seriously.
The breakthrough moment for me was a class switch. I was playing priests and then wizards pretty exclusively. Switching to a monk brought my first ascension almost immediately

bah, a soldier petrified me with a cockatrice corpse. i didn't realize i wouldn't have time to pull a lizard out of my bag. next time i'll just keep one in my inventory always. BLEH.

i did have a cool move earlier when i got into a mess - was clearing a zoo when a wand woke up all the trolls. i wasn't at a point where i could beat them, and my 2 scrolls of teleportation just bounced me around the zoo. i was going to die when i remembered i had a cursed potion of leveling... drank it, escaping up to the higher floor, recouped, then went back down and cleared it out.

i don't get upset when i die anymore. this is really good (or really lousy) at working out your patience.

update: just marked the vibrating square w/ a towel

Whoa

that was a failure - but a close one. got the amulet stolen by the wizard and then accidentally killed him over a water tile and by the time i realized what i should do (wait on that floor until he comes - automatically grabs it - then go upstairs and kill him there) i had wiped all my scrolls + potions diving for the amulet and then got eaten up by loads of monsters (tho i was so annoyed at that point that i really let them kill me - by the time you're at that point in the game the regular monsters have a really really tough time bringing you down).

i feel like all gamers should be intimately familiar w/ this game. goat imho

Yeah, exactly. I don't have the time (or the rhetoric) to properly word this statement with all considerations. The whole "videogames are art!" "videogames are not art!" debate tends to measure gaming as a medium with the wrong yardsticks. i.e. games as literature, games as cinema. Basically an Ebert or a Kojima just need sit down with Nethack (or ADOM or Tetris for Christ's sake). The parsing of an artificial reality as being entirely statistics-based, teaching your mind and hands to navigate that reality, that is the unique experience, you know? I guess it's the same as chess, really

Mordy and Owen totally otm. I hear the wailing of the banshee again... Usually happens every autumn when it starts to get cold and I feel pretty much only ok when it's dark and I'm alone inside. And in a way this game still reaches out to me when I'm in a pretty dark or severely placid place in my life?

I first played this game 28 (!) years ago, on an old xenix system at my dad's office. Then I was just learning English and was always a wizard because of the cool ascii graphics when zapping someone. It's been a questionable red thread throughout my life since then. I'll go four or five years without and then suddenly dive in deep again for a couple of weeks. I ascended twice, once as a wizard and once as a valkyrie.

The most beautiful thing about it is the ascii. As Owen said:

I can't stand a tileset. You're fighting letters and punctuation, not actual creatures. A little bitmap of a red dragon is missing the point: you are actually fighting a red D.

Owen said some ridiculously poetic and true things in this thread, but this is really otm:

First: working that hard on a single game will take over your life and change you permanently. I wouldn't recommend getting into rogue-likes unless you're bedridden sick, turn back, give up now, etc.

As you guessed, I'm about to play this again. I think... (taking heed the many warnings signs itt and from my own experience). Shame it doesn't 'work' for me on iPhone or iPad but eh, will get the old laptop out.

Mordy, and Owen, has any one of you played this after your previous posts here?

(I am investigating ADOM, but could only find a tiled, graphical version, which is unplayable for me)

(I was seven years old 28 years ago btw)

I am so terrible at this game but Mordy's liveblogging itt is one of my favorite things on ilx.

i may have continued to play a bit after my final post, but i haven't played since. still think it's one of the most amazing experiences ever.

Hi Amory, this is Owen. You can switch ADOM to graphical in the menu.

I... actually played a lot of ADOM this past year. (I was suffering from depression and it was a terrific outlet! Recommended to all saddos.) The author ran a Kickstarter to get the game finished, with new features and classes and artifacts and quests and things. The re-balancing actually made the game terrific, it is deep and balanced and just altogether wonderful. I've won two ultra endings this year, once with a beastfighter and once with a duelist.

But also I got really good at Brogue. I started cheating with it. The game is not exactly randomly generated... it responds to a seed number and generates the dungeon with that number as its mitigating variable. As a result, if you enter in the same seed twice to generate the dungeon, you can replay that same dungeon over and over again. I found a seed that had a great collection of artifacts and some super powerful pets, and ran a character over and over again until I was able to get crazy weapons and mail and could bop a dragon in a second and I descended all the way to Lv 40 with pile of Lumenstones. Cheaty but worth it, that is one cruel mid-game. And late-game.

But it's true I don't have time for any other type of game. I played Pirates! for a bit a couple years ago, and half-heartedly zapped through The Last Of Us, but that's really it.

Also Amory we are the same age and the first game I remember playing obsessively was Moria on my dad's PC at age 6 or 7

fgti have you ever tried playing the demons/dark souls games? i know that kind of thing is an entirely different experience but there is a common thread

Yeah, I never played it but I had a neighbour who was really into it and I sat and watched it for hours. Looks like a killer timesuck

for sure, they are 60-80 hour games where you can get sucked into replaying through compulsively, designed so you can't do and see everything in one play. certainly i played the first couple over and over. the most fun is at the extremes too, the first time when you don't have a clue what's around the next corner and then when you have every inch to memory and you're trying to go thru perfectly or break it early. there is definitely an overlap in mentality with those games and the hardcore rogues. altho ADOM did make me want to jump out of a window eventually, so thanks for that.

Owen, thanks so much for your reply! Please do not hold it against me that my heart skipped a beat out of glee learning you are still playing this, after having read your previous experiences. Was afraid you'd became wise and left this behind you ;-)

I'm in "that place" rn, but because of what you said, will try either Brogue or ADOM this time around. Will dive in head first at Brogue though, no seed number business first, just to get acquainted.

Oh and I played Moria! On al old unix system in the same office, after the systems had switched from xenix to unix. Think that's why it later became Umoria actually, the U added because of unix!

I honestly find these updates fascinating and live vicariously through then since my history with nethack is just a series of brief and terribly obsessive failures, keep em coming

qft

I am apparently a year younger than you, Amory and fgti, and the earliest childhood games I recall seeming to be infinitely vast worlds to explore forever were 8-bit platformer Jet Set Willy and roguelike Caverns of Larn

(actually a p. short game to blast through as these things go, at least on the easier settings - the bosses are a gamble but there's not much buffing up to do in preparation: get the one good weapon and hope to find one of about 3 decent spells, but really just go and meet them and either you die or you don't, as far as I've yet worked out - but the way I played as a kid I somehow made each char last for days; the one time as a kid I reached the potion to save my daughter I had long outlived her. I really don't know how I spun it out so long, there are only 13 levels and once you mop up nothing particularly interesting respawns)

I used to be totally anti-tilesets, but I got into DCSS with tilesets this year for the first time after several previous phases of playing the ASCII version. It was kind of like a whole new game and yet also familiar. ascii is the only way for trv kvlt rogvelikeheads of course. also a little part of me dies inside every time I see a game described as roguelike which is, like, not ASCII, and not top-down, and not permadeathy, and not solo-dungeon-crawly, and etc

I KNOW

I played Spelunky and was like "not a rl" and FTL and was like "NOT A RL". Love both of them tho

this is such a good thread

i only ever played the game intensively for one term as an undergraduate, and i played with the tileset, so obv i should be tarred and feathered, but anyway, i was listening to the first marnie stern album a bunch at the time and would be entering keypresses a lot of the time in sync with her sixteenth-note power-tapping stuff and now whenever i listen to that record i can't associate it with anything but nethack, it was a good and worthwhile thing to do, i was not that good, i only ever got to the hell levels was the best i managed

The amount of time-investment I've thrown into Moria, ADOM and Brogue has made me extremely, extremely hesitant to fully embrace any other permadeath style games. I played DCSS a bit a bit, and TOME, but never felt the magic in either. I could tell that I wouldn't really feel that same magic in Demon's Souls

This might be getting personal but there is something super-appealing to my play-style about single-author games. The clarity of tone is really necessary. Sometimes with Nethack variants, and the Angband games, and def DCSS, I felt that there was too much tinkering for me to feel transported. Too much democracy or something.

Part of the joy of single-player gaming is that it feels like a proxy for prayer, and games with permadeath make it a fully ascetic pursuit. Feeling that same sense of isolation in the game itself, that it was made by a small group, it can feel really magical. I felt that way as a kid about the Ultima games, and Ico. These days I've been feeling it most with Interactive Fiction, playing through all the main contenders for the Xyzzy Awards has been a good pastime for when I'm laid up

the master system port of ultima iv was a big touchstone for me as a kid

well, not a touchstone, so much; something i spent all my time on for a period of several months and then left off abruptly. in memory the master system version was oddly beautiful and i was really disappointed when i emulated it, though i think actually it was at that level of technology that gained massively from the fuzziness of cathode ray tvs

i had gotten that there was the overall quest, and worked out that one had to gather mantras, meditate, but was lacking the resources somehow to make actual progress in this quest, or merely did not want to, and so played it as one would a JRPG, wandering around, levelling up

my mother bought it for me very reduced in a branch of debenhams or BHS (largely defunct brit department store chains) and it turned out the feelies were all in french; i remember bugging her to translate one day while she was doing the ironing and her being not so much stumped by the limitations of her french as just baffled by the mode and idiom in which the spell book and the lore book were written. this added to the feeling of something meaningfully or genuinely cultish or other about it -- that it came from a place whose rules others might not understand. plus of course it boots with the sequence where you're in the real world and go to the fortune teller and all that

so in ultima iv if you just wander around and level up around level 8 or so the wandering enemy difficulty curve (which is sorta exponential) intersects again with the strength of your party (which is more or less linear) and suddenly the world is hostile to you. the previously relaxing experience of wandering around britannia became suddenly stressful, as whenever one walked through a forest there could be balrogs or demons hanging around just outside of vision, and the party suddenly seemed hunted or persecuted, like their failure to accomplish anything meaningful was being judged by authorities other. this feeling was made much worse when one of the contacts was damaged, or the memory corrupted, on my copy of the cartridge, and so every screen started to load with hazard tiles from the dungeons scattered around, or garbage tiles one couldn't move in, which now i assume is from looking at the wrong address for the tile data. i sort of half-understood this at the time but it still seemed ontologically fraught to me: either this world was disintegrating or my interface with it was, after all. i stopped playing after that.

http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/20130606_171141.jpg

Aw, love the story of your mum translating for you.

Beautiful post thomp

Yes, that's beautiful Thomp <3

When I started nethack when 7 I didn't know what most names of the monsters meant, because they were in English. But the name combined with the symbol (H = hobgoblin, which I didn't read right and pronounced hoboglin until I was 16 or so, same with nearly all the others) surprisingly stick with you and your imagination just creates an image of it. Based on the shape of the letter (the H having quite a 'tough', moloch-like don't-mess-with-me shape in my eyes) it'd become a real, live creature for me. I doubt I would, or could play nethack in ascii if I hadn't already done so at an early age, but feel blessed because of it.

Anyway, so yeah, started this again today... Feeling both v excited and sad because of it. There's this overwhelming feeling of giving into the temptation, as if by entering the dungeon you kind of give up on everything else in life, put the rest on hold? Don't mean to sound pathetic - while I do - but I feel like Bam from Beckett's What Where. Life comes a knocking and it's too much or too little to speak of, I've nothing to show for myself rn and that is both comforting and scary. I am in the dungeon like the secret of What Where, passed onto Bom, Bim and Bem but without the what and the where, and the what, ever coming to light. Passed around slaying creatures.

Started as a Valkyrie, and spent a good two hours puzzling my way through Sobokan just for a sodding holding bag. Was fortunate to receive my Thor hammer after just two sacrifices on the altar in the Gnomish mines, because that can take absolute ages. I forgot what good artifacts are in store going down the mines all the way? Don't really want to look up spoilers but if one of youse can fill me in that'd be nice :)

Will update this irregularly if people are interested.

If I recall the only really nice thing at the bottom of the mines is a luckstone? But I've always avoided spoilers on Nethack, so maybe there's all sorts of stuff I never knew about.

Stuck in a mine not being able to find the staircase, sigh. Fuck it. Going back up. Luck stones are overrated imho.

Sometimes you have to make your own luckstone.

(I don't know if this is possible)

Heh I don't think it's possible in the game Zach but 100% otm :)

also, i sympathize with your thoughts on the attraction of games like this when your irl is on a downswing. it's a comforting and sinking feeling. i too have been in a weird headspace lately, injecting myself with beckett doses every week or so and seeking to lose myself in something new for a while (in my case it's watching battlestar galactica for the first time). if i was better at nethack i'd probably be doing that instead!

anyway, hugs, support, <3 <3

Thanks man, know you understand and I really appreciate that <3

It is comforting and sinking, and while that feels bad as a wasted day can make you feel bad for not having done anything, there's still something worthy in there. Something of value. Something of note. In a way I think you would be an excellent nethacker, seeing your gifs and the imagination you intrinsically need to pull off those amazing pieces of work. But I can also see why you went 'nethack lol waht'. And am not too sure I'd wish diving deep into nethack for any people I have an affection for? You've got your click disaster game anyway, that should suffice ;)

thanks guys

man I am so not tempted to play nethack again, it's weird. even though I feel like my life is in a place it would make sense.

http://i.imgur.com/3giwLqE.png

Started a new game today and I just killed Lord Surtur. Done all of the Gnomish Mines and Sokoban. Now it's down through Gehennom to kill Vlad the Impaler. My stats are less than impressive though - I think - with an AC of only -12. I have the Grayswandir sword to slash my way through the ghouls and undead, but looking at my stats, is that enough? Can I make it with these numbers? I've got the basics (dragon scale mail, power gauntlets, speed boots, magic resistance cloak, telepathy helmet), how do I bring down my AC? Get a +10000 hawaian shirt?

Also I forgot to pick up seven candles needed for the Candelabrum of Invocation #fml. Will I find candles in Gehennom or should I go down to the Gnomish mines to pick them up first?

Won't be able to resume play before xmas, so any input or advice would be most welcome!

essentially this is a game about eating monsters

(yes i am playing this again)

I'm always coming back to this.

Eating monsters otm. Been playing this for more than 20 years now, and only recently learned eating a nurse (!) will get your health back up to max :)

What are you playing as?

valk but just bc i wanted something i was familiar w/ to ease back in - i'm thinking about going wiz soon. what's a good race for that?