[Crawl] ["a"] a the Human Fighter -- The Midgame Pendulum ..

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The last thing a weak character that, moreover, is almost entirely
limited to melee only should do is rush into the Elven Halls immediately
upon finding the entrance.

Elf:1
-----

?oAcquirement

Well well well. I'll be getting lots of weapons from Trog, I don't need
books or food, I've eschewed rods, miscellaneous acquirements are
usually bad, I've had bad luck with money acquirements... that leaves
jewellery or armour. There are a lot of bad jewellery types left to
discover, and undiscovered types get first priority when determining
what acquirement will give you. I choose armour. It's some kind of ring
mail. Oh well.

!oStrongPoison

I try to wait it out, but no luck -- I have to spend a !oH after all.
While I'm healing up, my rest is interrupted, I pray, and get my first
good Trog gift - a +9,+0 randart vorpal falchion. Better than the
scimitar, at least...

....and soon after I get a cursed long sword to match my armour. Whew. ;-)

Lair:1
------

That acquired ring mail was +2-of-poison-resistance, so I take it -- I'm
switching back to the Lair anyway, and getting into poison-heavy depths.

Lair:4
------

Back to the yak pack. It all goes a lot more smoothly now. I find the
entrance to the Slime Pits, but that's something for the very far future.

Lair:5
------

My first major post-slowing battle -- survivable due to a little
fortress on the edge of the level, or at least of this part of the level.

I discover (yes, only now!) that snails can be danced with well using
hack, hack, hack, back, hack, hack, hack, back. 'Course I usually simply
don't have to worry about such things -- this guy is unusually weak. :-(

Trog gifts me a randart vorpal great sword. I decide to keep it even
though it's not shield-compatible -- there are times when I need to do a
lot of damage in a hurry.

I find the Swamp entrance. I don't feel ready for the Swamp yet.

Lair:4
------

Ascending into the remaining part of this level that a stair check
revealed nets me one very small section with one very angry hydra
adjacent to the stairs. Fortunately...

#........
..Fr..#
#....#
##r@..#
#.rrr.#
#...Dl#
##.b.r.#

....some grey rats with their high speed come to the rescue. But I
*still* get that damn hydra on top of me after some maneuvering. Arrrggh!

I'm hungry, so I use a potion of might rather than the might invocation.
Damn! I'm cornered, so I can't afford to fight anyway. OK,
teleporting... still in this section! Arrrrgh! Teleporting again...

I am *really* low on reserve supplies. I'm just plain not doing too well.

After a stash trip, it's...

D:11
----

Part of the problem in this game is that the branches have come so
shallow, and I chose to dive them. The main dungeon is probably much
easier than them by this point -- barring things like the beehive on D:10.

Ooh, a troll! I always like to line things up when I'm about to use a
beam attack.

##.#####.# ##.#####.#
#...@....# #....@...#
#........# #........#
.....T....# .....T...#
#........# #........#
#....o...# #....o...#
....<.....# ...<.....#
##.##.#..# ##.##.#..#

Here it's not really necessary -- the orc will go down well enough on
its own -- but it's an instinct that I've found useful. I use the wand
of draining on it; in general, my order for consuming the "big attack
wands" is draining, lightning, cold, fire(ball), because this gradually
takes me from the most frequent to least frequent immunity of the four.

An uneventful D:11; some interesting finds but I'm holding out to get
the most out of an upcoming ?oDC usage.

D:12
----

## ###@..........#
#[#####.#####
#o# #.#
#o# #.#
#p# #.#
#.# #.#
#C# #.#
#.# #.#
#.# #.#

The apparition of Bevoker the Cutter, a powerful Kobold Assassin.

Heh. Never have the words "you can't take it with you" been so
important. (Bevoker was carrying a variety of powerful rods when he died.)

He did get to keep his weapon of draining, though. :-( Weapons of
draining are MURDER for characters with an AC-based defense. I escape
melee range without using my most precious potions or scrolls, or piety,
by berserking just before reaching the stairs.

After redescending by another staircase, I carefully check to see the
relation of my new position to where the ghost was last seen. I don't
head straight for him, though, because I don't know what's between me
and him. Plus, I'm hungry. Plus, he, too, is moving.

Randart cloak. OK, just finish this level and it's time for a curse
detection.

I find Bevoker's ghost, but at a three-square distance, and I don't have
any ID'd wand to take him down. (I do have 2 I forgot to ID...). Another
"stair'port" follows. The wands are slowing and enslavement. Oh well.

!oGainStrength.

The guardian naga I just killed turns out to have been out on a stroll
from its home. But I have one other task to take care of first. I ascend
to D:11 and berserk *not* in order to fight monsters, but rather to
generate hunger so I can eat the guardian naga's mutagenic chunk before
it rots. Oops, it lowers my dexterity. Not so bad though, really -- stat
loss mutations are the most harmless of the bad mutations.

A scroll shop. No unknown bad scrolls to buy for cheap "free ID", and
nothing I want to have immediately, though I'll come back (using the
..lst file that Darshan's patch generates when you do a character dump)
for the weapon enchantment scrolls once I have a nice ego weapon of a
nice base type.

!oMutation.

Takes off another point of dexterity and gives me regeneration. The
extra food cost won't be so bad as long as I'm wearing this ring of
sustenance, but I have some new rings on the horizon. The main problem
is that I now have enough mutations that there's no guarantee that if I
gain a new one and it demands removal, a single !oCM isn't guaranteed to
zap it. Still... I love risk.

And here's another one, right away. Should I? Should I?

I just *have* to know.

You feel extremely strange.
You mutate.
You hunger for flesh.
You mutate.
You feel jumpy.

Yeah, that should work. Well, *this* game has just changed
directions pretty fundamentally...

Trog gifts me a randart long sword with no special properties. Whatever,
Trog. The guardian naga's lair nets... well, it's hard to say until I do
a curse check. Some nice consumables, though.

The long sword's +12,+5. I think I just may phase out that vorpal
falchion after all. This is the last Trog gift I'll comment except for
the useful ones.

I try to take down the ghost (and a hill giant) using missiles and some
teleporting around this mostly-cleared level. If it weren't mostly
cleared, I wouldn't teleport if you *paid* me for it. I get the hill
giant, but hunger and the clearing of the level drive me off it... I
decide to risk starvation and hit my stash for the ?oDC run. It nets:

the +2 cloak of Repulsion (+4 dex)

....and costs me a snack.

This level contains the Hive entrance.

D:13
----

A centaur. I make sure not to sacrifice it -- every corpse is worth the
same value when sacrificed, but some corpses generate a lot more chunks
than others. Normally you can't use more than a fraction of the larger
corpses before they rot, but a berserker...

YA unseen horror. As an armoured character, I have much more time to
maneuver against these things than an evasion character (in Crawl, it's
really hard to evade what you can't see).

## ###.....#
...##.....# #
....x.....# #
####....## #
##....###
#.@...##
#..#..##
#..#..##
##....##
###.###
#...y
#####

I met it at the "x", but since it's hurting so slowly, I've decided to
make my stand at "y". Unseen horrors are basically invisible bats on
steroids, so some forward and back motion a la the bat dance is
generally enough to bring it into melee range even when you can't see it.

It still beats me up pretty bad. Well, the monster density in the main
dungeon isn't TOO bad... I'll teleport.

Erolcha! With a wand of draining! At range! Scrollporting and leaving
the level for some stash work...

When I return, I meet the UH again. No corridors around! So I use a wand
of disintegration...


#..........#
#.........#
. ##...#######
.... #....###
..).# # #..#).@#
...?.## ###.....#######
.......##.....###......
#............# #......
########....## #......

....to make my own. It runs out of charges earlier than I'd like, but it
still gives me the needed whacks at the UH. Whew.

The strange formation to my left is a vault, guarded by four traps at
the edges. My T&D skill doesn't save me from the Zot trap I cross, and
my sword and most of my jewellery get cursed.

Heading to the Lair to try out some armour before reading a ?oRC, I meet
Bevoker's ghost again... while rounding a corner. :-( But some
maneuvering...

####.#.##.##
.........#.#.
......@Hp..##
#...........
#.##...##..#

....does more than I'd hoped for.

y - a ring of see invisible. :-/

Bevoker's ghost gets me on the way down. I use a set of "brown" stairs,
hoping to use them for a quick "free teleportation." Unfortunately the
ones on the other end are brown too and happen to be linked to precisely
these ones. Ack. Bevoker, as a high-level shortblader, has a superhuman
to-hit, and I get drained yet again. :-(

........##
.....@....
#..O##..#
#..p##..#
#.......#
#.*..#..#

Back to D:12 yet again and caught rounding a corner YET AGAIN. After
some hunting for a willing victim, I find a pillar at the position
marked with a star that helps me use an ogre to screen Bevoker.

I give up trying to reach an isolated part of D:13 from above it with
Bevoker chasing me about D:12 (my hoped-for teleportation strategy costs
too much food); I hope to get in through D:14.

D:14
----

A new scroll, that does nothing. I was wielding my hand crossbow...
it'll be Vorpalise Weapon. Oh well.

I sight a skeletal warrior, and decide this is a *fine* time to test new
staircases into D:13.

D:13
----

Oh. Yeah. Erolcha was in this part.

Unrelatedly I also suddenly realize: Oh. Yeah. I HAVE THE CARNIVOROUS
MUTATION. Which I haven't been making use of. Oops.

A berserking uneventfully takes Erolcha down, along with a pack of ugly
things.

Amulet of resist mutation.

D:14
----

1 potion-might and 1 Trog-might take the SW pack down. Note that unlike
most undead, and even unlike most undead with something that looks like
magic, SW are considered magic users by Trog, so be sure to pray before
takin' 'em out.

With my newfound carnivorous mutation , I'm able to berserk a LOT
more freely. GREAT!

Wand of flame.

p - a scroll of enchant armour.

Back to the stash I go. I simply can't stress this enough.

On the way, I lose patience and simply take out Bevoker by berserking. I
get drained a full level in the process, natch. :-(((

Lair:4, small section
---------------------

Standing on L:5, I wield my short sword of flaming, pray, berserk,
ascend, and hope for the best. It works! HURRAY!

Hydras are yummy. There's something about a hydra lunch that mere game
mechanics can't convey... but you feel it anyway.

Lair:6
------

Nothing of note.

Lair:7
------

Things that are here:
a meat ration
a runed ice dragon armour

The mundane protection on ice dragon armour is fantastic, especially in
light of its low evasion penalty. But there are no cold-based attacks in
the Lair system except for a few from uniques, and there *are*
fire-based attacks (ice dragon armour causes fire susceptibility) and
more importantly, lots of poison out there. I prepare to stash it and,
more importantly, to remember it later on.

Another !oCM and a stash trip.

A wand shop. I don't buy wands, except for healing, unless I know
EXACTLY what kinds of stores the game holds and there's one I think I need.

The entrance to the Snake Pit.

A ring of poison resistance... This means I could do the hive in that
ice dragon armour if I want.

Lair:8
------

Errr... don't ever, ever, test unknown wands against something right
next to you until you've ID'd fireball. :-/ It got a scroll, looks like
it wasn't a critical one though.

When you can't find a bottleneck, at least an almost-bottleneck can be
better than nothing...

...mhh#
##hh##
##.@.#
###.##

Death yaks. A berserk at the stairs against them includes the gambit of
killing lots of small stuff at first in the hopes of getting Trog to
extend the rage. None happens, and most of the tough stuff remains at
the end of the rage. :-( The teleport ability really comes in handy here...

A post-berserk crisis where all the teleportations in the world, and
even my sole scroll of blinking, aren't helping -- in fact, worse and
worse enemies just keep on piling on -- is broken by the use of Trog's
Haste invocation, which counteracts the slowing. Shoulda used it sooner.

#..x.## #...##
##....###....#
###..##....##
#..D#@.######
##.#Y..###.#.
####...#....
##.....#...
#..........

In this scenario here, I was berserking at approximately the x when a
hydra made a surprise appearance. Taking the blows from the Y (I'm not
even attacking it, for fear of killing it) is tough, but it sure beats
taking the blows from the D. And teleportations on this level are a
really unsure thing -- I've already landed out of trouble into trouble
several times.

And then -- with me NOT being slowed and AFTER having already taken out
one @#%@ hydra -- another appears, three wands all fail at the same
time, and the hydra pretends I'm buck naked and does an insane amount of
damage in one turn.

You die...

Moral of the story: use something less challenging than a no-spells
no-rods human fighter next time. Or swing the pendulum even faster
-- if I'd swung into the Hive, for instance, I could have probably
gained quite a lot at relatively little risk, and gained a lot of
momentum. The same is also true to some degree for the Snake Pit. I also
was far too insistent on doing Lair:8 in one piece; I should have quit
it while I was ahead.

In a way it's a good thing I died -- players getting to the bottom of
the Lair don't need such a ridiculously detailed guide anyway. And
most of the rest of the (pure fighter's) game revolves around tactics
and strategies similar to the ones discussed up to here, and the same
constant improvisation.

Erik

 

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smartwick@yahoo.com wrote:
> I enjoyed reading it and I'm sorry "a" didn't do so well. I'd like to
> see more, please.

I found the willpower to start up "b" the Minotaur Gladiator and start
logging him, but failed a maintenance check mid-way to the Temple and
launched another attempt at a Skullbreaker instead. I'm not sure what's
the bigger disincentive -- the logging, or the fact that I really am
more interested in less "normal" characters. The funny thing, though, is
that for me, characters with no non-physical attacks are actually highly
*atypical* -- which is I think is part of what pulled me through when I
was logging "a" -- I was doing something new for me.

The other thing pulling me through is that single-role humans are very
weak -- a born JOAT in a specialist's role has, well, a very exciting
time before him. ;-)

> I'm curious about how you'd get, say, that kobald assassin going,

I tried all of the relevant unascended races (besides kobolds, these
were by my reckoning the irrelevant ogres and formerly ogre-mages, the
semi-relevant kenku and common elves, and the highly relevant gnomes)
and a couple of the ascended ones (dwarves), and all in all I found
kobold assassins to be among the easiest to get going. The early game is
when poison is at its most useful; it only takes a couple of poisoned
needles to take down a hobgoblin, gnoll, ogre, or other early-early-game
terror, and by the late early game, you start getting good with short
blades.

> or a so-called "bevoker".

The first ingredient is a berserker. It needs to be a berserker
capable of surviving a very long time without ever getting a rod,
because precisely that may happen. The second is a race that is
reasonably good at Evocations; outstanding Evocations is nice, but not
necessary (e.g. Kobolds are at 90 IIRC).

The built-in Amulet of the Gourmand was really useful, as you can burn
through a LOT of food berserking, and (unless you're willing to
sacrifice a lot of rations) you can miss a LOT of chances to berserk in
situations worthy of it when using a character who suffers the normal
hunger model.

Perhaps the easiest combo for the job would be a foo-dwarven berserker:
great fighters, good evokers, able to *start* as berserkers. I tried
these early on, but they lacked cool-factor for me, and I didn't yet
know all the dirty tricks I know today.

> BTW, I somehow missed part two, the bit leading up to the temple.

http://tinyurl.com/cnrzo - Part I - Until Temple

http://tinyurl.com/9sx6t - Part II - Temple to Lair

>
> The midgame is where I run into trouble. If I die off early on--
> happens not infrequently--

Same for me.

> it's no big deal. Not much time wasted, not
> much in the way of attachment. If I die in the middle (or early middle
> or late early) then it's frustrating.

Same for me. :-(

> If I die a bit after that, well,
> I probably saw something new and maybe beat my best score.
>
> Anyway,
>
> I noticed at one point you got a stat bonus, Eric, and put it into Dex
> "of course".

I think I may have been making fun of myself. I'm a dex fanatic... it is
true, though, that the current maintainer called Dex "the most important
stat after Int" at one point.

> No-brainer, eh. Is that a no brainer for all fighter types
> or was there something about the situation that made it such an easy
> decision?

Dexterity helps with a shield, and I long blades are either slightly
tilted towards Dex or right in the middle. Per-incident likelihood (not
efficiency) of training is affected by Dex for missile skills, shields,
and T&D. It's affected by Str for pure-weapon skills other than unarmed
-- I thought perhaps long blades would be Dex-based. On the one hand
this contributed to my bulging XP pool in the late early game; on the
other, it helped with the slightly hard-to-train Dex skills I mentioned.

All in all hard to say. Dex has a cornucopia of little benefits; Str has
that obvious and juicy capacity bonus; otherwise, with no Str-based
weapon, I don't think there are so many benefits.

> How strong is strong enough to get the most out of bows?

Ru's calculation: http://tinyurl.com/8xc7d

My opinion: I thought I saw something a little different (can't recall
what); I need to clarify this, obviously, before I start changing
things.

> I'm surprised dex isn't the key with them, like in most rpgs. True
> enough though, in real life strength determines how much you can
> pull and how steady you are.

The trouble is that a) the current model is out of line with the one for
melee weapons and some other missile weapons, b) it doesn't make sense
-- your strength isn't helping you get the *physical* best out of the
bow, but somehow its *magical* best (unless we assume that, unlike every
other weapon in the game, damage-only (only!) enchantment
("enchantment"!) bonuses for bows/slings are physical), and c) it puts
bows (and slings) at a long-term disadvantage, as you want your
"serious" weapons to have the highest damage bonus possible by the endgame.

> It's funny that you say that vanilla fighters are tougher to keep
> alive, because magic users die on me way too often.

Maybe I was too biased towards my own playstyle. I thrive on
flexibility; with purely physical skills, what you can do is very
tightly defined (though often quite powerful within its boundaries). For
a different view, look up the conversations between me and Johann Strandell.

> I'm keen to know ways you have of increasing survival.

Cheat, cheat, cheat. I don't mean *real* cheating, of course, but
bend the game mechanics until they snap and shatter. You can go even
further than I did and use dirty tricks like dropping scrolls on the
ground when a humanoid monster is chasing you, for example. (Might also
work with other carrying-capable monsters.) But that particular trick
makes even me feel dirty.

> It seems to me that minotaurs are the best race for fighters.

Purely-physical fighters? I'd have a hard time thinking of a better one.
Skills and food consumption are so vital in Crawl that I find the
constant diving pressure and the melee-aptitudes penalties applying to
the most ridiculously beefy races hit them harder than the lacking HP
here or there on a minotaur. So, yeah! Once you start considering some
serious evocations or eventual minor spells, Dwarves start racing up the
charts.

> Their affinity for bows is a big part of that conclusion. Bows reliably show
> up early enough to help out. Crossbows are nice, but may not show up
> until you meet yaktaurs.

The trick is to peek into the Elven Halls as early as a peek (not a
dive) is survivable. This gets you a hand crossbow, which is more than
enough for a start (and lets you train with less valuable and heavy ammo
than bolts -- note that you will also lose fewer missiles as your skills
go up, though I can't recall whether it's Throwing or the missile skill
itself -- thus you'll be losing extra darts rather than extra bolts).

> Minos do well with all the hands weapons, IIRC, although I don't see
> why you'd want to use anything other than axes or mace/flail. Long blades,
> as your example shows, show up kind of late,

For me the Mines aren't late. My Short Blades only reached 5 before
switching, and that's actually an exceptional lot IME -- probably
related to the big pool (you can turn off skills until your face turns
blue, but if your pool is big, you're just *gonna* train your most-used
skill).

It can be difficult to get an axe better than a hand axe before the
Mines, so while an axeman won't have the pool problems (problems?) "a"
did, he won't necessarily be hitting much better pre-Mines. Also, the
early game is swimming in short blades, giving a good chance of a find
like my dagger-of-venom find.

The real reason for axes is that the image you get in your head is
really, really cool.

[...agreement/inspiration...]

> I'm curious about opinions regarding starting class, particularly for
> minotaurs, but other fighter types too. Hunters start with a bow, but
> that's going to run out of ammo pretty soon. Also stuck with dodging,

Minotaurs are equally good at armour and dodging; it's stealth and
stabbing where they lose out. These three plus short blades work best as
a suite, but they're not *bad* as individual units. Also note that light
armour solves some extra worries about heavy armour hampering your Unarmed.

> shields (but no actual shield, so there's a good chance that that skill
> is going to go wasted for quite a while as shields aren't exactly
> abundant),

Agreed.

> a dagger,

You know my opinion on da blades :0) But due to the synergy between
STR-based weapons and bows, and the STR bias of minotaurs' involuntary
skill increases, there really is something to be said for an axe (or
mace... sure, you have the whole butchering-problems thing, but you can
find a half-decent mace/flail early, you don't have to worry about
whether you find a flaming one or not, and minotaurs *might* be able to
use giant clubs, though don't take my word on that).

> and light armor. Still, sort of interesting.
> Oddly, given that strength is so important for bows, only had 17.

Since strength only affects the extent to which you can use a bow's
damage bonus, you'd do just as well as the start bow-wise with a
strength of 4.

> Chaos Knights looked bad (to me) all round: Invokations,

Out of all the non-physical skill, Invocations are a minotaur's best;
meanwhile, Makhleb offers some pretty nice stuff. But early
survivability hinges a lot on how focused your character is, and a CK's
Invocations disperses your starting investment.


> Short Blades, Dodging, Stabbing, and only one point of Armor. Equipment
> was lame, too: short sword and robe.
>
> Monks apparently are meant to go the stealth route, with significant
> amounts of Dodging and Stealth.

It's odd, since there is no special bonus (much though there perhaps
should be, say, at the cost of a toning-down elsewhere) for unarmed
stabbing. Of course, stealth isn't just for stabbing -- it's also very
useful for guerilla tactics that, besides helping survivability, are fun
intellectually.

Again, lightly-armoured unarmed characters have fewer worries than
heavy-armoured one -- not to say that heavy-armoured characters can
never be effective at unarmed.

> Cool that they have 4 points of Unarmed, but it's not so great that
> they don't have any weapons skills-- or even a weapon.

They do -- their fists, horns, and feet. You wouldn't want the
initial skill dispersal inherent in giving them weapons skills (other
than fighting) anyway, and starting weapons are usually nothing special;
why not wait for your marriage? (To a war axe, I mean.)

> Just to make me look like a jerk, the RNG
> spitefully produced a dwarven jewelled helmet next to my test case. +1
> as it turns out.

You should see all the early boots and helmets my Kenkus find. Yep, even
randarts.

Incidentally, "jewelled" is one of the deceptive helmet tags -- it says
nothing about quality.

> Berserkers start with an axe (good), spears (nice if you like throwing
> assorted junk like me),

I don't think spear skill helps with thrown spears, though I'm not sure
offhand.

> and leather armor (ungood).

Not necessarily bad, though I too would probably slightly tilt towards
Armour skill in the long term.

> Skills go Fighting
> 2, Axes 3, Polearms 1, Throwing 2, Armor 2, Dodging 2. So, that's 9
> points of what I'm looking for.

One of either armor or dodging will be most likely wasted, unless you go
for elven chain, where the armour skill will soften the slight to-hit
penalty a bit, or you go for something very close to a balance between
the two, and you use the lightest of the heavy armours... AFAIU.

> Gladiators get choice of weapon (still, gonna be an axe with me), ring
> mail and a buckler. Better than the Berserker's gear if you ask me,
> although I'm not keen on shields.

It's hard not to train unarmed with a minotaur, and the punch attack,
which a shield blocks, is the ring at the center of the auxiliary
unarmed merry-go-round IMO.

[...agreement...]

> Now, I know all this is stupidly obvious, but I'm curious if anybody
> has any input and somebody might find it helpful. I did. For some
> reason in thought MiHu started with slings. Still, I think the lack of
> ammo on early levels makes them less viable.

I've found slings to do OK that way with a little luck... but in the end
of ends, they're... slings. :-/

Erik

 

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Erik Piper wrote:
> smartwick@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> I enjoyed reading it and I'm sorry "a" didn't do so well. I'd like to
>> see more, please.
>
> I found the willpower to start up "b" the Minotaur Gladiator and start
> logging him, but failed a maintenance check mid-way to the Temple

"Failed a maintenance check" means what?

> I tried all of the relevant unascended races (besides kobolds, these
> were by my reckoning the irrelevant ogres and formerly ogre-mages, the
> semi-relevant kenku and common elves, and the highly relevant gnomes)

"Unascended"? If that means "not won with", it seems you're wrong.
Weren't there kobold *and* kenku YAVPs here fairly recently?

--
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"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

 

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Twisted One wrote:
> Erik Piper wrote:

>> I found the willpower to start up "b" the Minotaur Gladiator and start
>> logging him, but failed a maintenance check mid-way to the Temple
>
>
> "Failed a maintenance check" means what?

It means I failed an attention-deficit-disorder check. :-/

The intended phrase (tongue in cheek, but actually understandable unlike
the nonsense "maintenance check") was "willpower check."

>> I tried all of the relevant unascended races (besides kobolds, these
>> were by my reckoning the irrelevant ogres and formerly ogre-mages, the
>> semi-relevant kenku and common elves, and the highly relevant gnomes)
>
> "Unascended"? If that means "not won with", it seems you're wrong.
> Weren't there kobold *and* kenku YAVPs here fairly recently?

At the time when I was trying to ascend a bevoker, there were no kobold
YAVPs (though there was one informal statement of victory and one
informal statement of being-ready-for-victory-and-then-quitting). Then I
ascended a kobold, which was the recent kobold YAVP...

No kenku YAVPs out there yet, at least not showing up for [kenku YAVP]
in GG.

Erik

 

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Rubinstein wrote:
> Erik Piper wrote:
>>Rubinstein wrote:
>>>Erik Piper wrote:

>>> [I'd do some things differently than you did in that erotic
masterpiece, The Story of A, in which an athletic, resourceful man gets
serviced by a hydra...]

>>More info! More info! I like to learn too, you know!
>
> I doubt you'll find that interesting, but - here we go...
> (none of the words below are meant as 'my way is better than yours',
> it's rather the other way around or just a matter of taste)

I'd say taste.

> The most significant difference probably is our stash management. At
> least until the early mid-game I carry scrolls and potions you wouldn't
> dare to risk.

Looking back over, I find I understressed the most important scroll of
all -- blinking. You can die as a delayed consequence of an
unnecesarily-carried, fried scroll of blinking much more easily than due
to a ?oEA one way or the other, since they are, quite simply, a "get out
of death free" card.

[...]

> OTOH I *never* would dare to play around with starvation like you do (or
> did in your recent post).

It's a sacrifice of the short term for the long term (making sure I have
enough rations for the whole game), but I'll admit my obsession with
eating only chunks reaches irrational heights sometimes. You know how
experiences in your youth can leave you with habits that you apply
without regard to the real situation at hand? Crawl has a youth too...
and mine was spent learning the ins and outs of chunks.

[...]

> In my current game I've learned an easy but decent (though pretty
> obvious) method of corpse management: easy spoken, I always try to carry
> one single corpse (as long as it's not too heavy) around.

My Crawl youth was spent on characters with strengths in the instadeath
range... ...and gods who didn't meddle in my eating habits! PP

> When I kill my next monster, I don't have to wait for prayer timeout, I
> just drop this one (it may be rotten by now), offer it (and the other new
> corpses, if more than one) and pick up the most recent and/or eat some of
> the fresh ones, if I'm hungry. That way I managed to survive the Mines
> with almost no 'clean' food. Meanwhile I think there must be a difference
> between fresh and older, though not yet rotten orc flesh.

case CE_CONTAMINATED:
if (you.attribute[ATTR_TRANSFORMATION] == TRAN_LICH)
this_chunk_effect = CE_CLEAN;
else
{
switch (you.species)
{
case SP_GHOUL:
// Doing this here causes a odd message later. -- bwr
// this_chunk_effect = CE_ROTTEN;
break;

case SP_KOBOLD:
case SP_TROLL:
if (!one_chance_in(45))
this_chunk_effect = CE_CLEAN;
break;

case SP_HILL_ORC:
case SP_OGRE:
if (!one_chance_in(15))
this_chunk_effect = CE_CLEAN;
break;

default:
if (!one_chance_in(3))
this_chunk_effect = CE_CLEAN;
break;
}
}
break;


(Sorry!)

> Losing stats happened at least less frequent this time than it used to do.
> Also, as a positive side-effect, I still can offer the rotten corpse, while
> rotten chunks would have been entirely wasted.

But you could have offered it in the first place rather than ever
picking it up? I'm missing something here... of course there *IS* the
advantage that you don't have to do guesswork regarding rotting periods,
but I'd rather have the extra carrying capacity. My love of free
carrying capacity probably relates to my dungeon-hoovering fanaticism,
though (but that fanaticism has a real practical reason for me
personally -- I would never remember what's junk and what isn't if I
left junk laying about where I found it).

> Scrolls of enchant Armor/Weapon: I usually don't wait using them as long
> as you do. The optimist says, soon I'll get that artifact weapon/armor,
> then the scrolls would have been wasted anyway.

In my experience, it's a *very* rare artifact weapon that outperforms a
+9,+9 weapon of slicing... it's a *very* rare artifact armour that
outperforms a +8 (?) robe of resistance or higher-dragon armour. But
this is less true for a pure fighter, of course, with all the
otherwise-unavailable powers he can find in randarts.

> The pessimist agrees,
> cause w/o a slightly better equipment _now_ I probably don't survive up
> to the point where those artifacts appear.

That's Okie's job.

> That even goes for ?oID, but
> always depends on the vague feeling whether I need it or not.

??

> At last something so obvious you even haven't mentioned so far (unless I
> missed it): pseudo IDing missiles.

[brilliant technique for pseudo-IDing missiles]

Whew... the thing is, now *I'm* the one who's too lazy for a technique.

Considering the power of a hand crossbow, darts are by no means just a
toy for the early game anyway, so this stuff can be pretty important.

[challenge ascensions E. has planned ahead]

[...]

>>Common-elf Elyvilonite Crusader going for "Elf Ballista" or whatever
>>the top-level title is -- another double; this one will be
>>considerably harder than the other.
>
> Sounds somewhat masochistic to me, but I'm quite sure you know what
> you're doing. ;-)

You'll notice it's *second* in the order... ;-)

>>Bows patch -- cleverly delay until the next alpha release, then release
>>one that respects any changes there. ;-)))
>
> Meanwhile I regret not having followed your indroduction thread about
> your bows patch (which was pretty long and right now I'm not in the mood
> to work through all that posts). At that time I wasn't particularly
> interested in bows, but my current Mintotaur has changed my mind
> dramatically!
>
> I never thought I'ld ever would kill Yaks entirely from afar with a
> simple +2 +2 Bow. Can't wait to get a nice artifact bow. *evil grin*

I was also amazed by what my bevoker was doing by the endgame... missile
weapons come *so* *close* to being roleplayable before falling flat :-/

>>I mention all this because minotaurs are *excellent* candidates for
>>the bows title
>
> What you say!

Somebody set up us the bows!

>>-- they have a good bows aptitude and poor (invocations) to awful
>>(other stuff) aptitudes for other sources of ranged attacks, and
>>meanwhile thanks to their high strength, they can eventually enchant a
>>bow all the way up and still reap the benefit. 'Course it's still
>>probably more a liability than a benefit (though the same is not true
>>for the use of bows *as such*).
>
> Again, I regret not knowing anything about your bows patch. Maybe I'll
> have a look at it during the next days.

Maybe I'll finally *work on it* again during the next few days. (Where's
that ICQ "embarrassed" icon when I need it?)

> What I'm talking about is this: for these little (in your terms) post

:-/ :-D

In any case. If you ever decide to write a log, I look forward to it, no
matter what the grammar and spelling.

> The hardest thing right now is to prevent myself from overrating
> and from playing while tired.

Perhaps the most important Crawl advice... and the hardest to follow.

Erik

 

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Erik Piper wrote:
> smartwick@yahoo.com wrote:

> > Minos do well with all the hands weapons, IIRC, although I don't
see
> > why you'd want to use anything other than axes or mace/flail. Long
blades,
> > as your example shows, show up kind of late,
>
> For me the Mines aren't late. My Short Blades only reached 5
before
> switching, and that's actually an exceptional lot IME -- probably
> related to the big pool (you can turn off skills until your face
turns
> blue, but if your pool is big, you're just *gonna* train your
most-used
> skill).
>
> It can be difficult to get an axe better than a hand axe before the
> Mines, so while an axeman won't have the pool problems (problems?)
"a"
> did, he won't necessarily be hitting much better pre-Mines. Also, the

> early game is swimming in short blades, giving a good chance of a
find
> like my dagger-of-venom find.
>
> The real reason for axes is that the image you get in your head is
> really, really cool.

I've always liked axes/maces because they are so tilted to one side.
Long blades tend to be in the middle. The way I assume the better for
the strong/dextrous code works, having it tilted one way or the other
is vastly better than in the middle. Since you only get so many
statpoints, focusing exclusively on one stat that your weapon is tilted
should give you more total bonus than alternating between the stats
when your weapon is balanced. And obviously more than focusing on a
stat when the weapon is balanced. Am I correct in this interpretation,
or is there a balancing factor in the code to offset this?

> Again, lightly-armoured unarmed characters have fewer worries than
> heavy-armoured one -- not to say that heavy-armoured characters can
> never be effective at unarmed.

I've got two characters going now. Both inspired by "a" (got me back
into crawl). One is a demonspawn martial artist planning on using
heavy armor. Right now armor is at 13 in the early swamp. Using the
only randart armor I've found which is +2 scale mail with resist poison
and cold. (I think it's scale, the 5/-2 one anyway.) Working well so
far, ev at 10, attacking seems fully effective. Hoping to go to
heavier armor later, but right now that randart is too good.

Noticed one very odd thing. He put on a dwarven spiked helm early
(nice find for unarmed). Then he grew horns. But he still has the
helm on. Do horns prevent me from putting on a helmet, but not
forcibly remove an existing one? My headbutts are pretty deadly, but
I'm guessing that's just because spiked helms do that, not because the
horns and spikes are adding. Is this all intended?

As a total aside, the other character is my old standby, Mountain Dwarf
axe fighter. Tried Ely for the first time. He's my first character
started in months, and he has killed all the vault guards. Isn't brave
enough to go further into Vault 8 yet, but he's going really strong
despite not finding a single usable randart, executioner's axe, or rod.
(He did find an early ring of slaying +6/+5 and another +0/+8 though.)
Despite clearing Elf halls, Naga pits, Swamps, Hive, and two
acquirements used trying for rods. I now believe the hype about Ely!

 

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Eric, that so-called dirty trick of dropping items to distract pursuers
has been a part of rpgs as long as I can remember (thinking
pen-and-paper here, not PC). It doesn't strike me as sleazy in the
least.

I'm not sure exactly when Elven Halls starts usually, but centaurs
start turning up around, oh, say, level 6, just in time to burn up
excess experience getting a couple levels in bows. And speaking of when
things show up, I usually find a morningstar or flail before the mines.
I may even find a war axe with decent bonuses prior to the mines and
almost certainly within. However, as in your example with "a", yes, you
will find long blades in the mines but options are limited, to, say, a
+1 +0 scimitar and a falchion. Meanwhile, you have 0 skill in long
blades.

I can see why you're going that way, you like dexterity and the late
game long blades are nice. I'm probably overly focused on strength and
trying to wring out of it all I can.

No, minos can't use giant clubs.

The butchering thing is a bit of a pain while using maces because I'll
have the mace type in slot a and a bow in b and need to remember what
letter the axe is in, but it's not that big a deal. Ceteris paribus
I'll use a axe in slot a just to avoid extra keystrokes. In any event,
I usually end up carrying around several weapons that I figure I'm
going to ID sometime and naturally some have edges. It's also a good
idea (as you illustrated with "a") to carry a weapon one doesn't care
about but is still fairly effective for dealing with jellies. No, no
problem, just make that backup a dwarven hand axe.

What you have to say about the fun in stealth and stabbing makes me
wish I got somewhere when I tried it. Right now I'm still berserking--
and doubtless building habits that will make the transition to a
stealth character more difficult. Maybe a monk would be a good way to
break into them.

Rubinstein commented on how infrequently his characters have died due
to starvation, I can go a bit better: I only recall one ocassion when
I've allowed a Crawl character to get to starving status. Granted,
I've lost a few stat points to sickness from eating iffy corpses and
picked up mutations that way too. I think it's just that I'm not very
cautious and dislike going backwards. Reading on, TwistedOne remarks on
ADOM's notoriety for early game starvation. Food wasn't much of a
problem there for me, either, although I do recall getting to starving
status more than once or twice. While I'm not very good at Roguelikes,
I guess I can reasonably claim I'm good at keeping my guys fed.

I tried your corpse carry method today, Rubinstein. I kept forgetting I
was carrying one and ended up missing out on some sacrifices. Also, it
was a lot of weight. I'll try it again sometime but I ended up going
back to my usual habits-- wasting time waiting for prayer to end (but
it's not like I'm going to lose anything, I'm going to cut up a corpse
in a little bit), carrying a lot of chunks, being picky only when I'd
mutate, and using excess healing potions to deal with sickness.

 

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Erik Piper wrote:
> Looking back over, I find I understressed the most important scroll of
> all -- blinking. You can die as a delayed consequence of an
> unnecesarily-carried, fried scroll of blinking much more easily than due
> to a ?oEA one way or the other, since they are, quite simply, a "get out
> of death free" card.

Except that it's only such if it's carried, so how can it be
"unnecessarily carried" unless you know *for sure* you won't need it soon?

> But you could have offered it in the first place rather than ever
> picking it up? I'm missing something here... of course there *IS* the
> advantage that you don't have to do guesswork regarding rotting periods,
> but I'd rather have the extra carrying capacity.

Guesswork? I always get a variety of amusing messages when stuff begins
to rot -- you smell decay, yuk; something smells rotten; smell of
rotting meat makes you sick; and there's something really disgusting in
your inventory. Plus of course you can look at your inventory to see if
the word "rotting" is in the description of an item you might otherwise
want to eat.

> My love of free
> carrying capacity probably relates to my dungeon-hoovering fanaticism,
> though (but that fanaticism has a real practical reason for me
> personally -- I would never remember what's junk and what isn't if I
> left junk laying about where I found it).

Eh -- if it's laying around in an explored area, rather than moved to a
stash or in a new area, it must be junk no?

>> What you say!
>
> Somebody set up us the bows!

We get shot at.
Main Deflect Missiles turn on.

--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

 

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Twisted One <twisted0n3@gmail.invalid> wrote in
news:07udnbe9sIYP1BzfRVn-gQ@rogers.com:

> By the way, as of last night your final "a" installment was still not
> visible on Google Groups,

Is it still not visible for you? It shows up fine for me, as of now. Only
took a moment on Google to find it.

 

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Chipacabra wrote:
> Twisted One <twisted0n3@gmail.invalid> wrote in
> news:07udnbe9sIYP1BzfRVn-gQ@rogers.com:
>
>>By the way, as of last night your final "a" installment was still not
>>visible on Google Groups,
>
> Is it still not visible for you? It shows up fine for me, as of now. Only
> took a moment on Google to find it.

It is not there yet. An advanced search for posts up to 7 days old with
"human fighter" in the subject in this newsgroup reveals Blow by Blow
(first installment), From the Temple to the Lair (2nd), and Midlevel
Pendulum (third). That one ended with him doing the Mines. Which leaves
the one where he's rumored to have died.

Unless Google discriminates on some basis or another, my not seeing it
means IT IS NOT THERE, so you can't have seen it either. You may have
seen one of the other three installments and mistook it for the one in
question.

--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

 

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smartwick@yahoo.com wrote:
> The butchering thing is a bit of a pain while using maces because I'll
> have the mace type in slot a and a bow in b and need to remember what
> letter the axe is in, but it's not that big a deal. Ceteris paribus
> I'll use a axe in slot a just to avoid extra keystrokes.

Who the heck is Ceteris Paribus? One of the d00ds who stabbed Caesar or
something?

--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

 

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Twisted One <twisted0n3@gmail.invalid> wrote in
news:Xoadnd8oTb8awRzfRVn-uw@rogers.com:

> Chipacabra wrote:
>> Twisted One <twisted0n3@gmail.invalid> wrote in
>> news:07udnbe9sIYP1BzfRVn-gQ@rogers.com:
>>
>>>By the way, as of last night your final "a" installment was still not
>>>visible on Google Groups,
>>
>> Is it still not visible for you? It shows up fine for me, as of now.
>> Only took a moment on Google to find it.
>
> It is not there yet. An advanced search for posts up to 7 days old
> with "human fighter" in the subject in this newsgroup reveals Blow by
> Blow (first installment), From the Temple to the Lair (2nd), and
> Midlevel Pendulum (third). That one ended with him doing the Mines.
> Which leaves the one where he's rumored to have died.
>
> Unless Google discriminates on some basis or another, my not seeing it
> means IT IS NOT THERE, so you can't have seen it either. You may have
> seen one of the other three installments and mistook it for the one in
> question.

Try one more time. Here's a hint: The post where "a" dies is the
beginning of THIS thread.

 

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Twisted One <twisted0n3@gmail.invalid> wrote in
news:Xoadnd8oTb8awRzfRVn-uw@rogers.com:

> Unless Google discriminates on some basis or another, my not seeing it
> means IT IS NOT THERE, so you can't have seen it either. You may have
> seen one of the other three installments and mistook it for the one in
> question.
>

Oh, and I certainly did not mistake the post. Cut and pasted from Google
Groups, with my own >s added to offset it:

>And then -- with me NOT being slowed and AFTER having already taken out
>one @#%@ hydra -- another appears, three wands all fail at the same
>time, and the hydra pretends I'm buck naked and does an insane amount of
>damage in one turn.

>You die...

 

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Erik Piper wrote:
> Rubinstein wrote:
>> Erik Piper wrote:
>>> Rubinstein wrote:
>>>> Erik Piper wrote:
>
>>>> [I'd do some things differently than you did in that erotic
>>>> masterpiece, The Story of A, in which an athletic, resourceful man
>>>> gets serviced by a hydra...]

Aah, your marvelous art of snip-quoting! ;-)

>>> [Erik astinishingly expecting to learn something from - me!]
>>
>> The most significant difference probably is our stash management. At
>> least until the early mid-game I carry scrolls and potions you wouldn't
>> dare to risk.
>
> [I find I understressed the most important scroll of all -- blinking]

Fully agree. Meanwhile I've learned that painful lesson a little bit too
often for my taste, but I forget about it again and again. I even
managed to lose some of my most promising chars by just forgetting about
the one(s) in my inventory due to panicing. But enough is enough: Right
now I'm carving "BLINK OR DIE" into my monitor screen.

Seriously now: this one is definitely worth to stash! But then I think
your way of stash organizing is an art I'm still too lazy for (not the
only reason though, but more further below <*>).

> [...]
>
>> [Rubinstein too coward to take the risks of starvation]
>> [oops, a self-insult. Is this allowed?]
>> [Nevertheless, don't snip it please]
>
> [...]
> Crawl has a youth too... and mine was spent learning the ins and outs
> of chunks.

Basically the same here, though my 'youth' was quite different from
yours (fortunately. I *love* diversity). Usually I'm no friend of
statistical observations, but this time I can't resist: out of >1000
dead chars (I hope there never will be something like a 'Crawling Rights
Foundation'), I've lost <5 to starvation. Only 1 of them died from plain
starvation, all others from starving as a symptom for (or result of) a
much worse problem. Btw, I'm much more afraid of the negative
side-effects (not being able to cast spells or using boosters like
might/berserk) than of starvation itself.

So what do you think how many chars did you lost (if any at all,
directly or as a side-effect) from your risky games with starvation?
Just curious...

> [Erik wasting some precious looking code snipped to completely C++
> illiterate Rubinstein]

If (*IF*) I understand this part of food.cc correctly, than even Kobolds
and Trolls should have a slim (1 in 45) chance of catching a
contamination. Something I entirely fail to recall from my former games.

> case SP_KOBOLD:
> case SP_TROLL:
> if (!one_chance_in(45))
> this_chunk_effect = CE_CLEAN;
> break;

I guess what you was trying to tell me here was the probability of
contamination being PC race dependent. But how does this apply?
Minotaurs seem to belong to the default group with a chance of 1 in 3.

Anyway, I couldn't find any hint in food.cc indicating any differences
between a fresh and a somewhat older (but not yet rotten) chunk. So yes,
I must have been dreaming:

>> Losing stats happened at least less frequent this time than it used
>> to do.
[shifting up this 'dream' a bit, for keeping in context]

> break;
>
> break;
> break;
>
>
> (Sorry!)

Forgiven, but thanks for the breaks.
I probably could need some or the other. ;-)

>> [SCS (single corpse surfing)]
>> [...]
>> Also, as a positive side-effect, I still can offer the rotten
>> corpse, while rotten chunks would have been entirely wasted.

At first I had a hard time to understand your following question

> But you could have offered it in the first place rather than ever
> picking it up? I'm missing something here...

Assuming I don't want to touch any 'natural' food, but chunks only. Also
imagine I'm usually not (and don't want to be) hungry after a fight, but
prayer still has to time out. If I now would offer the fresh and keep
the old corpse, there would be a much higher probability of having a
rotten corpse when I actually want/have to eat something. In this case I
would *have* to find and kill some edible monsters while still hungry
(=additional risk, and of course I still want to pray during the fight)
After killing the monster I'ld still have to wait for prayer timeout to
get my chunks. Whereas with my now prefered method I'ld just have the
*option* to dissect this (fresher) corpse now, with the additional bonus
of not having to wait for prayer timeout this time.
Got the picture? Sounds much more complicated than it actually is...

Or in short:
while taking a fresh one and eating/offering the old one(s), I just
extend the time window in which I'll keep more options open.

But let me guess (and here we're back to different viewpoints again),
you neither carry chunks nor corpses around but simply stash them on the
floor!?
If that is true, which also would fit to what you've stated here...

> My love of free carrying capacity probably relates to my
> dungeon-hoovering fanaticism, though (but that fanaticism has a real
> practical reason for me personally -- I would never remember what's
> junk and what isn't if I left junk laying about where I found it).

....then we both seem to focus on almost opposite priorities:
You - equipment
Me - time/energy

From my point of view, time, energie and food are almost exchangeable in
Crawl, with the main difference of the latter being a limited resource,
as you know all too well. So, just moving around to reach my pile of chunks
appears like 3 steps forwards - 2 steps back to me (leave alone the risk
of an entirely rotten pile by the time you reach it, just another waste
of energie, because it was potential piety stuff which also is some sort
of energie). Leave alone your runs for stash managment.

Taking this to the edge, we even (or better: almost) could compare the
relation between energy and equipment to the relation between energy
and matter in RL: while it's possible to transform one into each
other,in the end you can't actually *win* something. The art of playing
Crawl is probably all about the balance between those two forms.

But then it's pretty late now and I'm not quite sure whether I still
understand my own theories anymore...
*almost looking like Einstein, with a strange, sheepish flair though*

Anyway, you're still one step ahead while I'm waiting for my first win.
But I strongly believe in more than just one single 'golden way' to win,
that's why I love this game so much. That's also why I even don't want
to argue which methods might be the 'best' (feel free to do so, if you
want, of course). Diversity is the name of the game!

>> [early use of enchant scrolls]
> [...]
> ...it's a *very* rare artifact armour that outperforms a +8 (?) robe

Throwing in another '?' here. Is this actually possible?

>> The pessimist agrees, cause w/o a slightly better equipment _now_ I
>> probably don't survive up to the point where those artifacts appear.
>
> That's Okie's job.

Future experience may change my mind, but for now I still believe in the
best possible equipment at *any* given time, which of course includes
'as soon as possible'.

>> That even goes for ?oID, but always depends on the vague feeling
>> whether I need it or not.
>
> ??

Uuuuh, careful. The answer to these 2 innocent question marks would
directly lead to my most irrational side (mystic, voodoo, black magic,
caballa, all that stuff. Not really, but sort of...) which I promised
myself to *never* *ever* discussing in the public. With a probability of
98.35% this also would lead to yet another flame war.
Buhuhuhuuuuuh ~~~~~


> [brilliant technique for pseudo-IDing missiles]

"Brilliant". C'mon, you must be kidding!
Obvious like rolling cigarettes, something *every* one just needs to
survive... *g*

> Whew... the thing is, now *I'm* the one who's too lazy for a
> technique.

Still kidding, aren't you? For me it appears much less cumbersome than
any kind of sophisticated stash management (leave alone yours).
To the cost of very little real time, but not a single bit of precious
crawl time (=energy =life =everything =...you get the point)

> Considering the power of a hand crossbow, darts are by no means just a
> toy for the early game anyway, so this stuff can be pretty important.

Works with bolts and arrows too, of course.
I know that you already sort your missiles as soon as you detect some
enchanted ones, so you're sooo close already. If you only could bring
yourself carrying around larger amounts of more or less useless missiles
for a while... *g*

[OT] What a long post again. Without these I'd easily have a winner
by now! ,-) -> sleeping on one eye already...zz.z.zzz.zzzzzz

Rubinstein

 

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"Twisted One" <twisted0n3@gmail.invalid> wrote in message
news:Xoadnd8oTb8awRzfRVn-uw@rogers.com...

> It is not there yet. An advanced search for posts up to 7 days old
with
> "human fighter" in the subject in this newsgroup reveals Blow by Blow
> (first installment), From the Temple to the Lair (2nd), and Midlevel
> Pendulum (third). That one ended with him doing the Mines. Which
leaves
> the one where he's rumored to have died.
>
> Unless Google discriminates on some basis or another, my not seeing it
> means IT IS NOT THERE, so you can't have seen it either. You may have
> seen one of the other three installments and mistook it for the one in
> question.

You should read all of "Midlevel Pendulum (third)", and then be less of
a dick.

--
Jeremey

 

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Chipacabra wrote:
> Try one more time. Here's a hint: The post where "a" dies is the
> beginning of THIS thread.

I told you already. I did the search I described, and didn't see it.
Only the other three. If you are calling me a liar then this discussion
is over. If not, then you really need to clarify what you mean because
it looks like you are.

--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

 

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Twisted One <twisted0n3@gmail.invalid> wrote in news:W5mdnZKg5MYXBxzfRVn-
hw@rogers.com:

> Chipacabra wrote:
>> Try one more time. Here's a hint: The post where "a" dies is the
>> beginning of THIS thread.
>
> I told you already. I did the search I described, and didn't see it.
> Only the other three. If you are calling me a liar then this discussion
> is over. If not, then you really need to clarify what you mean because
> it looks like you are.
>

http://tinyurl.com/9vawm is the groups.google.com link to the post where
"a" finally dies.

As an aside, I did a search for "human fighter", and got that post (["a"]
a the Human Fighter -- The Midgame Pendulum Hits the ... ) as the 6th
result, with "you die..." displayed in the preview text.

Just to see what would happen, I just tried an advanced search for posts
up to 7 days old with "human fighter" in the subject, just like you said
you did. The post came up as the third result.

 

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Twisted One wrote:
> Erik Piper wrote:

[EP: I started to log "b" the minotaur gladiator, but failed my
maintenance check [sic]]

[TO: maintenance check?]

>> It means I failed an attention-deficit-disorder check. :-/
>>
>> The intended phrase (tongue in cheek, but actually understandable
>> unlike the nonsense "maintenance check") was "willpower check."
>
> Meaning you simply gave up?

Meaning the save and the log are sitting on ice for a day when I can
convince myself to "do" them rather than something more entertaining, or
when they become the most entertaining thing to do.

> I guess the term "ascension" for a win is specifically used for
> roguelikes in the "fetch this and return it to dungeon level 1 and then
> go up some stairs" genre of roguelikes? Since it seems to be used for
> crawl and nethack and both start you in the dungeon, both have up stairs
> on dl1 that exit the game, and both have as the win condition that you
> use those stairs with a specific object in your inventory -- an amulet
> in one case, an orb in the other...

I'm not sure that I've ever heard anyone else call a Crawl win an
ascension, but it seemed only natural to me, for the reason you
mentioned. 'Course from what I've read, the stairs up from DL:1 are only
a checkpoint in the Nethack ascension, but... in any case, you ascend.

Erik

 

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Rubinstein wrote:
> Erik Piper wrote:
>>Rubinstein wrote:
>>>Erik Piper wrote:
>>>>Rubinstein wrote:
>>>>>Erik Piper wrote:

>>>>>[I'd do some things differently than you did in that erotic
>>>>>masterpiece, The Story of A, in which an athletic, resourceful man
>>>>>gets serviced by a hydra...]
>
> Aah, your marvelous art of snip-quoting! ;-)
>
>>>>[Erik astinishingly expecting to learn something from - me!]

I'm not very good at roguelikes; the successes I *do* [1] have are to a
large extent of what I've learned from others. You learn the best if you
always keep your ears open...

>>>The most significant difference probably is our stash management. At
>>>least until the early mid-game I carry scrolls and potions you wouldn't
>>>dare to risk.
>>
>>[I find I understressed the most important scroll of all -- blinking]
>
> Fully agree. Meanwhile I've learned that painful lesson a little bit too
> often for my taste, but I forget about it again and again. I even
> managed to lose some of my most promising chars by just forgetting about
> the one(s) in my inventory due to panicing.

Yeeeaaaaggghhh... yep. If rule number one is "don't play late at night"
(thank God for aioe's free newsserver -- now I, a dialup user, can again
waste my latenight hours *discussing* roguelikes instead of pointlessly
killing off my roguelike characters so successfully launched during more
aware hours ), then rule number two is "hit a crisis, take a
real-life break." And it's just as hard to follow...

[...]

> Seriously now: this one is definitely worth to stash! But then I think
> your way of stash organizing is an art I'm still too lazy for (not the
> only reason though, but more further below <*>).

I can't remember where I mentioned it, though it seems I must have...

Actually, my Crawl stashes are *nothing* compared to my former ADOM
stashes. In Crawl I just have a bunch of piles by in-game type, plus a
pretty library and maybe a "to be DC'd" pile or, more rarely, a "to be
ID'd" pile. Well, and the occasional trophies pile or whatever. So --
look at ingame categories til I find one with an excess, go to square
for that ingame category, drop, repeat. Now ADOM... I think the insane
complexity of my old *ADOM* stashing habits can be best illustrated by
the pile type that could only be termed "things that can be used for
stat-scumming after the type of stat-scumming related to that other pile
over there runs out of steam"... ))

>>[...]
>>
>>>[Rubinstein too coward to take the risks of starvation]
>>>[oops, a self-insult. Is this allowed?]
>>>[Nevertheless, don't snip it please]
>>
>>[...]
>>Crawl has a youth too... and mine was spent learning the ins and outs
>>of chunks.
>
> Basically the same here, though my 'youth' was quite different from
> yours (fortunately. I *love* diversity). Usually I'm no friend of
> statistical observations, but this time I can't resist: out of >1000
> dead chars (I hope there never will be something like a 'Crawling Rights
> Foundation'), I've lost <5 to starvation.

How can one check? I looked up a known starvation death and noticed the
"-9999", but that's shared with stat-loss deaths...

> Only 1 of them died from plain
> starvation, all others from starving as a symptom for (or result of) a
> much worse problem. Btw, I'm much more afraid of the negative
> side-effects (not being able to cast spells or using boosters like
> might/berserk) than of starvation itself.

I was hoping you wouldn't ask that. My last "major" character to die
died of starvation -- I was handling starvation-entered-from-berserk
as if it were starvation-entered-during-normal-hungering. :-(

You know -- assuming you're like me -- those X seconds that you spend
staring at the screen with your mouth hanging weirdly open when instead
of the usual flow of messages, you see "you die..."? X was a pretty big
number at that moment...

(Of course, I have all sorts of weird deaths, often not detectable in
the scores file line alone -- "a reaper wielding a scythe of orc
slaying" doesn't say anything about the }oFixation I was *evoke-testing
in Hell (!!!)*, "an electric golem" doesn't tell the story of winning
the Crusader anti-lottery and passing out from berserking in Zot:5 after
teleportitis from a fire orb bounced me into a crisis, "a bolt of
lightning from Antaeus" doesn't tell a thing about how, having not done
Cocytus in so long, I mistook him for an ordinary C bumbling about in
the Cocytus goal-room, and only saw him in LOS in the brief time between
beginning-of-turn and "you die..."... "a skeletal warrior wielding a
long sword" doesn't mention the part about me changing clothes on an
almost entirely uncleared level... "an acid blob" doesn't tell half the
story of how I spent most of the game unable to eat chunks (>1
herbivorous) and, too afraid to spend precious extra herbivorous-
compatible food on defense, I gradually descended into a mutated mess
and dove the Pits underprepared in hopes of a !oCM... and so much more!)

> So what do you think how many chars did you lost (if any at all,
> directly or as a side-effect) from your risky games with starvation?
> Just curious...

I don't know.

>>[Erik wasting some precious looking code snipped to completely C++
>>illiterate Rubinstein]
>
>
> If (*IF*) I understand this part of food.cc correctly, than even Kobolds
> and Trolls should have a slim (1 in 45) chance of catching a
> contamination. Something I entirely fail to recall from my former games.

....and even berserkers have a slim chance of catching a bad case of
post-berserk unconsciousness... Fortunately, the contamination
effect is a little less severe. It happens, but it takes a *long* time
to reach a 1 in 45 chance, especially if you have some real-life luck in
that regard.

>> case SP_KOBOLD:
>> case SP_TROLL:
>> if (!one_chance_in(45))
>> this_chunk_effect = CE_CLEAN;
>> break;
>
> I guess what you was trying to tell me here was the probability of
> contamination being PC race dependent. But how does this apply?
> Minotaurs seem to belong to the default group with a chance of 1 in 3.

I was surprised, too -- not to see those numbers (they match my
experience), but that Minotaurs would ever get those numbers; the mental
image I get of them is pretty carnivorous-looking. Probably just a
balancing decision.

>>>[SCS (single corpse surfing)]
>>>[...]
>>>Also, as a positive side-effect, I still can offer the rotten
>>>corpse, while rotten chunks would have been entirely wasted.
>
> At first I had a hard time to understand your following question
>
>>But you could have offered it in the first place rather than ever
>>picking it up? I'm missing something here...
>
> Assuming I don't want to touch any 'natural' food, but chunks only. Also
> imagine I'm usually not (and don't want to be) hungry after a fight,
> prayer still has to time out. If I now would offer the fresh and keep
> the old corpse, there would be a much higher probability of having a
> rotten corpse when I actually want/have to eat something. In this case I
> would *have* to find and kill some edible monsters while still hungry
> (=additional risk, and of course I still want to pray during the fight)
> After killing the monster I'ld still have to wait for prayer timeout to
> get my chunks. Whereas with my now prefered method I'ld just have the
> *option* to dissect this (fresher) corpse now, with the additional bonus
> of not having to wait for prayer timeout this time.
> Got the picture? Sounds much more complicated than it actually is...

I keep trying to imagine myself carrying so much extra weight, and
can't... I guess mainly I'm more willing to fight hungry -- in the worst
case, I'll break my general approach and have a snack (I'm more liberal
with these than with rations) to fuel a special power.

Back to the formative years, though -- a DECj is very light on food
consumption, since most of his spellcasting has a food cost of 0, so
basically he never pays anything but the 3 food for turn charge for
existing... and no corpse saccings to worry about. Perhaps if I go on to
play more "normal" fighters (Kobolds are a completely special case),
I'll look at things differently.

> Or in short:
> while taking a fresh one and eating/offering the old one(s), I just
> extend the time window in which I'll keep more options open.
>
> But let me guess (and here we're back to different viewpoints again),
> you neither carry chunks nor corpses around but simply stash them on the
> floor!?

DECj history: chunks.
Bevoker history: chunks, although after an important battle, I'd
generally have no trouble finding the appetite to eat post-battle on the
spot ;-)
Various fighter-mages: chunks. 'Course most of these have been
no-consecration (no saccing kills/corpses) gods, and food management
with consecration gods is very different. Maybe that's why I needed a
kobold to win.

My characters (again, usually being no-consecration or
no-corpse-consecration characters) have usually been in a situation
where if they weren't generating corpses faster than the rotting
timeout, it was a sign of a deeper problem.

> If that is true, which also would fit to what you've stated here...
>
>>My love of free carrying capacity probably relates to my
>>dungeon-hoovering fanaticism, though (but that fanaticism has a real
>>practical reason for me personally -- I would never remember what's
>>junk and what isn't if I left junk laying about where I found it).
>
> ....then we both seem to focus on almost opposite priorities:
> You - equipment
> Me - time/energy
>
> From my point of view, time, energie

That's the beauty of Evocations -- (nearly) food-free energy )

> and food are almost exchangeable in
> Crawl, with the main difference of the latter being a limited resource,
> as you know all too well.

Energy is limited too -- you can't be more berserk than berserk, you
can't be more lichform than lichform, you can't do more conjurations
damage than a max-munckined 27/27/27 character casting crystal spear,
there are only so many power boosts out there, (non-randart) weapons can
only reach +9,+9...

Food is limited mainly by diving speed ("time" above). I like the rush
of diving; it's filling a gap left from years of ADOMing and
potential-energy-based Civilization-ing before that...

> So, just moving around to reach my pile of chunks
> appears like 3 steps forwards - 2 steps back to me (leave alone the risk
> of an entirely rotten pile by the time you reach it, just another waste
> of energie, because it was potential piety stuff which also is some sort
> of energie). Leave alone your runs for stash managment.

Actually, I try not to leave undissected corpses on the floor, and if I
can be bothered, to consolidate them onto a few squares or into my pack,
for a completely different reason -- the level map is my indicator to
myself of what needs to be checked and what not, and since a multi-item
stack capped by a corpse looks the same on that map as just-a-corpse, I
want to save myself nagging doubts. I, too, don't want (in ordinary
cases -- there are always exceptions) to make switchbacks for stuff on
the floor; rather, I try to always have fresh flesh in my pack or
cheaply attainable. Keeps me diving -- though in the case of a god with
piety leak (like, say... Vehumet -- formative days again), that can be
called a *good* thing.

'Course like many things in Crawl, piety involves diminishing returns. I
was surprised to hear your many reports of frequent use of Might, but
I'm more and more of the opinion it merely puts your piety back low
enough that you can actually gain some from a reasonable investment again.

> Taking this to the edge, we even (or better: almost) could compare the
> relation between energy and equipment to the relation between energy
> and matter in RL: while it's possible to transform one into each
> other,in the end you can't actually *win* something. The art of playing
> Crawl is probably all about the balance between those two forms.

Or between potential and kinetic energy. I guess you "win" by having a
better intuition for the "nature" of the energy you choose... and by
knowing you've chosen it. This discussion is cool in that respect.

>>...it's a *very* rare artifact armour that outperforms a +8 (?) robe
>
> Throwing in another '?' here. Is this actually possible?

It's possible (see Bevoker), but I can't recall offhand whether or not
+9 is possible.

>>>The pessimist agrees, cause w/o a slightly better equipment _now_ I
>>>probably don't survive up to the point where those artifacts appear.
>>
>>That's Okie's job.
>
> Future experience may change my mind, but for now I still believe in the
> best possible equipment at *any* given time, which of course includes
> 'as soon as possible'.

Formative days? A DECj who needs his AC or his weapon is doing something
wrong... ;-)

My Kenku Reavers (well, intended Skullbreakers) (well, Fire
Elementalists) have suffered (and my current reaver is suffering) for
his hardheadedness to be sure, but he has a buffer named "Bolt of Fire"
to ease the suffering...

>>>That even goes for ?oID, but always depends on the vague feeling
>>>whether I need it or not.
>>
>>??
>
> Uuuuh, careful. The answer to these 2 innocent question marks would
> directly lead to my most irrational side (mystic, voodoo, black magic,
> caballa, all that stuff.

My words above about the "nature of energy" are hardly innocent of that
sin...

> Not really, but sort of...) which I promised
> myself to *never* *ever* discussing in the public. With a probability of
> 98.35% this also would lead to yet another flame war.
> Buhuhuhuuuuuh ~~~~~
>
>>[brilliant technique for pseudo-IDing missiles]
>
> "Brilliant". C'mon, you must be kidding!
> Obvious like rolling cigarettes, something *every* one just needs to
> survive... *g*

Startky (a prepackaged type I smoke) are cheap, and I figure if Philip
Morris bought the company, they can't be *that* bad...

>>Whew... the thing is, now *I'm* the one who's too lazy for a
>>technique.
>
> Still kidding, aren't you?

In light of recent discoveries I've made, I'm becoming very careful
about kidding anyone, period.

> For me it appears much less cumbersome than
> any kind of sophisticated stash management (leave alone yours).
> To the cost of very little real time, but not a single bit of precious
> crawl time (=energy =life =everything =...you get the point)

I have -- as you might have guessed from my obsessing with map-as-memory
-- an awful short-term memory. Maybe "too short-term-memory-and-
concentration-limited-in-the-absence-of-strong-stimuli" would be more
accurate than "too lazy".

(I have a strong hunch that the dissemination of information on
Attention Deficit Disorder into Germany has been good enough that you
can read up on it and understand my otherwise-pretty-incomprehensible
words above better.)

[...]

[muuuussttt sleeeep...]
muuuussttt sleeeep...

[1] I'd like to start a petition campaign for the addition of DE "doch"
or CZ "přece jenom" into English.

 

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Twisted One wrote:
> Erik Piper wrote:
>
>> Looking back over, I find I understressed the most important scroll of
>> all -- blinking. You can die as a delayed consequence of an
>> unnecesarily-carried, fried scroll of blinking much more easily than
>> due to a ?oEA one way or the other, since they are, quite simply, a
>> "get out of death free" card.
>
> Except that it's only such if it's carried, so how can it be
> "unnecessarily carried" unless you know *for sure* you won't need it soon?

*One* is a lifesaver. I've yet to enter a situation where two or more
would have saved my life, but one would not have. Thus the "unnecessary"
ones are any in my pack in excess of one.

>> But you could have offered it in the first place rather than ever
>> picking it up? I'm missing something here... of course there *IS* the
>> advantage that you don't have to do guesswork regarding rotting
>> periods, but I'd rather have the extra carrying capacity.
>
> Guesswork?

You know your general satiation status, but not your precise status, and
thus you can't be sure (except perhaps with ridiculous amounts of
beancounting) whether you'll re-enter Hungry first, or the
freshly-acquired chunks you couldn't eat after the first ones satiated
you will rot first. There are *guidelines* I keep in mind like
"Standard-hungering 'Hungry' is about 2 chunks wide" and "chunks will
generally rot before you can eat if their sister chunks were eaten at
the 'top' of 'Hungry'", but it's all pretty fuzzy.

>> My love of free carrying capacity probably relates to my
>> dungeon-hoovering fanaticism, though (but that fanaticism has a real
>> practical reason for me personally -- I would never remember what's
>> junk and what isn't if I left junk laying about where I found it).
>
> Eh -- if it's laying around in an explored area, rather than moved to a
> stash or in a new area, it must be junk no?

It could have been merely overlooked.

Erik

 

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smartwick@yahoo.com wrote:
> Eric,

Erik.

> that so-called dirty trick of dropping items to distract pursuers
> has been a part of rpgs as long as I can remember (thinking
> pen-and-paper here, not PC). It doesn't strike me as sleazy in the
> least.

Definitely everyone needs to find his own way on "ethics" in the
roguelike sense -- e.g. Brent Ross find Silence to be overpowered and
refuses to use it; I find it to be balanced and use it where
appropriate. I find item-dropping to be overpowered and refuse to use
it... but I see your point.

> I'm not sure exactly when Elven Halls starts usually, but centaurs
> start turning up around, oh, say, level 6, just in time to burn up
> excess experience getting a couple levels in bows.

I usually still have other welcome venues at that point.

> And speaking of when
> things show up, I usually find a morningstar or flail before the mines.

That's the really nice thing about maces/flails (and polearms for that
matter) -- decent ones tend to show up early.

> I may even find a war axe with decent bonuses prior to the mines and
> almost certainly within. However, as in your example with "a", yes, you
> will find long blades in the mines but options are limited, to, say, a
> +1 +0 scimitar and a falchion. Meanwhile, you have 0 skill in long
> blades.

Base weapon-type damage isn't everything -- I've played numerous
short-blades characters who sooner or later were carving through
everything they saw like through hot butter. Thus I don't mind a
1-handed sword with good accuracy and speed just because it has less
punch than an axe. (Though falchions are just a learning toy).

The thing is with the 0 skill in long blades for characters that start
with short blades is that the effect of cross-training combined with the
inevitable big pool combined with how quickly early levels in a given
skill are gained, it's not 0 for long, and it's not even 5 for long.

> I can see why you're going that way, you like dexterity and the late
> game long blades are nice. I'm probably overly focused on strength and
> trying to wring out of it all I can.

Also, there are a *lot* of long blades generated in an average game, so
it's pretty easy to find some nice ego blades by, say, the end of the Halls.

But "overly"? Like Ruby says -- diversity makes Crawl go round. The two
categories come pretty close one way or the other, so it's mainly a
style difference.

> The butchering thing is a bit of a pain while using maces because I'll
> have the mace type in slot a and a bow in b and need to remember what
> letter the axe is in, but it's not that big a deal.

Darshan's patch includes "easy butchering" -- it will search for the
first letter with a valid weapon in your place. I'm fairly certain it's
in the patch's default ini settings (Darshan only turned off by default
the new settings that had a reasonable chance of doing harm or being
annoying).

[...]

> What you have to say about the fun in stealth and stabbing makes me
> wish I got somewhere when I tried it.

I never got anywhere at first, either. And really, stabbing's not a
game-winner on its own (especially if you do the Hells, where even if
you had a maxed stealth counter, you literally can't stab every threat),
but it *is* a powerful supplement.

> Right now I'm still berserking--
> and doubtless building habits that will make the transition to a
> stealth character more difficult.

Bevoker was a stealthy berserker. Actually, stealth is pretty useful
for berserkers -- there's nothing that creates a sigh of relief quite
like sitting there with 10 turns of slowing still in front of you and
seeing "A gray snake. It doesn't seem to be interested in you."

> Rubinstein commented on how infrequently his characters have died due
> to starvation, I can go a bit better: I only recall one ocassion when
> I've allowed a Crawl character to get to starving status. Granted,
> I've lost a few stat points to sickness

Well, they're never really lost, just on vacation and forgot to post
when they'd be back.

> from eating iffy corpses and picked up mutations that way too. I think
> it's just that I'm not very cautious and dislike going backwards.

Me too! (Memories of Tina Hall...)

> Reading on, TwistedOne remarks on
> ADOM's notoriety for early game starvation. Food wasn't much of a
> problem there for me, either, although I do recall getting to starving
> status more than once or twice. While I'm not very good at Roguelikes,
> I guess I can reasonably claim I'm good at keeping my guys fed.

If there really were a Crawl Characters' Rights foundations, cynical
starvation of characters as appropriate to fit my ends would be the
first point in the indictment (can ordinary citizens indict?). Forcing
them to fire Magic Dart at a wall all day with no overtime pay would be
the second...

Erik

 

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Erik Piper wrote:

>>> But you could have offered it in the first place rather than ever
>>> picking it up? I'm missing something here... of course there *IS* the
>>> advantage that you don't have to do guesswork regarding rotting
>>> periods, but I'd rather have the extra carrying capacity.
>>
>>
>> Guesswork?
>
>
> You know your general satiation status, but not your precise status, and
> thus you can't be sure (except perhaps with ridiculous amounts of
> beancounting) whether you'll re-enter Hungry first, or the
> freshly-acquired chunks you couldn't eat after the first ones satiated
> you will rot first. There are *guidelines* I keep in mind like
> "Standard-hungering 'Hungry' is about 2 chunks wide"

I just realized this makes no sense -- hungering rate has no effect in
the chunk-width of "Hungry." Blame it on late-night posting.

> and "chunks will
> generally rot before you can eat if their sister chunks were eaten at
> the 'top' of 'Hungry'",

It does, however, affect this equation -- which is why regeneration
effects (which speed hungering) are a slightly better deal than they
seem at first sight.

Erik

 

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Twisted One wrote:
> Rubinstein wrote:

>> Only 1 of them died from plain
>> starvation, all others from starving as a symptom for (or result of) a
>> much worse problem.
>
> Being trapped in a disconnected area without teleportation or digging,
> you mean?

In Crawl, this can happen too -- in the Mines and in the main branch of
the Lair (in both cases you're most likely to encounter it in the bottom
2 levels, and the chances are higher IME in the Mines, probably due to
the 100% probability of Mines levels being "spotty" (complicated term --
think of it as "having a layout like Mines levels ") compared to the
Lair levels' less-than-100% chance).

I never wanted to believe it could happen -- then one night, it happened
to me. Cursed up a storm that night...

For (not only) this reason, if you find a ring of teleportation in the
early levels, don't throw it away; you'll eventually have a game where
you'll be glad you didn't. They're the lightest "infinite-charges"
teleportation/digging item out there.

Erik

 

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Igor D. WonderLlama wrote:
>
> I've always liked axes/maces because they are so tilted to one side.
> Long blades tend to be in the middle. The way I assume the better for
> the strong/dextrous code works, having it tilted one way or the other
> is vastly better than in the middle.

I'm very interested in how this works as well. The only spoiler page I
know about this topic is:

http://www.swallowtail.org/crawl/weaponspeeds.shtml
(by Brent Ross)
It's indroduced with the words "Here's some details (not too spoily, it
isn't really documented, and the effect is typically very small)".
The meaning of the word "typical" in this context is beyond my
understanding, but "the effect is very small" suggests not to overrate
the effect.

> Noticed one very odd thing. He put on a dwarven spiked helm early
> (nice find for unarmed). Then he grew horns. But he still has the
> helm on. Do horns prevent me from putting on a helmet, but not
> forcibly remove an existing one?

Yes and no, as far as I know. Just try to remove and wear the helmet
again... *evil grin* (but don't blame me if you didn't get the joke)

Rubinstein

 

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Chipacabra wrote:
> Just to see what would happen, I just tried an advanced search for posts
> up to 7 days old with "human fighter" in the subject, just like you said
> you did. The post came up as the third result.

Must have shown up between my previous posting in this thread and when
you did that, then.

Google groups is definitely not very prompt in getting new articles.

--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."