13-in-1 YAAP, mainly statistics

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Packrat that I am, I am blessed with a complete logfile. I rarely
throw stuff away in the real world, and I never throw stuff away on my
computer.

My nethacking career has two distinct parts: pre- and post- spoiler. I
first played 3.4.0 in January 2003 according to my logfile, although
this does not include a few games of Falcon's Eye which I played
totally unspoilt and ignorant. Now, 167 proper games later (proper
meaning didn't quit or use wizard mode; there were 518 total entries
in the logfile; a couple of those quits were re-rolls but I quit that
practice sharpish after I realised how lame it was), I have ascended
all classes. This is the order in which I ascended them, with some
extra info. The ordinal number is the number of attempts it took, the
3rd field is the number of turns, and the rest are some minor
conducts.

Val-28th-85417-killed2times
Wiz-15th-62397-killed2times-polyselfless
Pri-12th-73989-survivor-polyselfless
Tou-11th-74318-survivor
Kni-10th-56715-survivor-polyselfless-polyless
Bar-6th-118767-survivor
Sam-7th-50476-survivor
Arc-14th-35709-survivor-polyselfless-polyless
Ran-10th-51113-survivor-polyselfless
Cav-5th-42900-survivor-polyselfless
Rog-12th-40832-survivor-polyselfless
Mon-12th-31920-killed1time-polyselfless
Hea-20th-46553-survivor-polyselfless-polyless

All were artifact-wishless, the only conduct I explicitly attempted.
The number-of-attempts figure is not that useful; I used to only play
Valkyries while I was learning the game since initially they were the
only class I could make survive beyond the first room There came a
point, about November 2004, when I considered myself absolutely 100%
revoltingly spoiled, including source diving and patch writing. After
this point, the ascensions were much easier. (I read the Ellora
stories last year with great interest; it made me wish I was unspoilt
again. I considered trying zangband without spoilers, but a few games
convinced me that I didn't really enjoy it.)

There were two hatricks: the Arc, Ran and Cav were ascended
consecutively, as were the Rog, Mon and Hea (not counting wizard mode
experimentation).

Subjectively, the Wizard was the easiest, and the Healer was the
hardest (I once lost 16 consecutive Healers before getting deeper than
Dlvl10.)

A note about wands of wishing:

The Rogue and the Monk had special help. The Rogue found a randomly
generated wand of wishing, which pretty much guarantees ascension. The
Monk found a phenomenal bones file from Hearse which contained no less
than 3 quest artifacts. The guy had kindly named his character after
his email address, so I wrote to him to check it wasn't a wizard mode
bonesfile. He claims not. (Besides, one of the artifacts was the Eyes
of the Overworld, which had thus been nerfed into plain lenses by the
fact that I was a Monk, and the others were The Longbow of Diana and
the Master Key of Thievery, both chaotic, so I had to wait until I got
a helm of opposite alignment before I could use them. I actually kept
the Longbow in the bag since it's not that great.) The Wizard also
found a second wand of wishing in Orcus' town, but by that point I
didn't need it at all. Finally, the Samurai did not find a wand of
wishing, but he did find the bones of the previous Samurai attempt who
had, and had thrown it all away by stupidly attempting to pick up a
cockatrice corpse. The wand was used up, but most of the wished for
items were a big help.

So that's 4 out of 167 games which featured a randomly generated wand
of wishing. This seems like a lot, especially since 90% of those games
didn't last beyond Dlvl10, and so may also have carried on to find a
wand.

Some more facts: 14 characters got past the castle, 13 of them
ascended. The odd one out got poisoned by Demogorgon (my first Valk
who did well - so well that I went for extinctionism. I got bored and
careless.).

Ten of those ascensions were in the last 3 months. They all came after
I decided "to play properly", without being careless. The key to
winning turned out to be: "Consider what your next move will be." Keep
saying that over and over again in your head until you understand that
a game of nethack progresses in chess-like moves rather than frantic
keystabbing!

Genocidewise, I got rid of L and h in every ascension, and ; once or
twice - for example, I had just lost a promising Barbarian to a giant
eel on his quest, so in my next game I geno'd them all with a
vengeance.

Postscript: after writing this, I went on to try some conduct games.
My first was a GWP-less Priest, who found *another* wand of wishing in
sokoban. Doh.