Gameplay style

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

rhapsodyindrew wrote:
>
> It's always been my belief that more experience levels = better chance
> of survival, mostly because of the increased HP and PW.

Experience level for example influences the monster types generated;
you'll get tougher creatures. It's a balance issue.

> But I notice
> people ascending at XP levels < 20, and more importantly, with only
> maybe 50 HP more than I've had

Yes. But it depends how many possibilities you experienced and know
to solve any given problems. An more experienced player need not that
many HP's, though a less experienced one might gain a lot from some HP
buffer.

> (I've gotten scores above 1 million
> points, but the farthest I've ever gotten in the dungeon was the Medusa
> level - though I could probably have gone deeper if it hadn't been for
> a fatal mistake involving a damn cockatrice).

Medusa is already quite good, many people out there would be happy to
be there. But there is some edge somewhere between Medusa/Castle/Valley;
once you finished the castle you will have made another big step.

> So my question is a simple one, but the answer may not be
> straightforward: How is everybody doing more with less? I have some
> specific questions though, pursuant to this general one.

I mentioned it above. First, you need to know a lot possibilities to
handle all possible solutions, and be prepared (resp. prepare yourself)
to face them without being surprised. Second, you may delay some actions
to get overall better results; for example, if you collected a couple of
healing potions, don't drink them immediately, but wait until you have
a big bunch of these, all identified and in one inventory stack, and use
alchemy to advance them to blessed full healing. Third, you need some
feeling what you need for specific (ad-hoc or mandatory) situations, and
what you still lack, and how you may best obtain them.

It seems to condense to knowledge, experience, a bit luck, and patience.

> 1. AC seems to be crucial, and everybody has a better AC than I do.
> So I get the idea of running straight to Minetown to buy some cheap
> protection, but the methods for enchanting armors well eludes me.

Enchanting is simple when you follow the spoilers. Wait, if possible,
until you collected a stack of these, and bless them before you read them.
One very valuable exception is to kill some dragon, wear its scales, then
read some enchant armor scroll; you'll get the best type of armor (mind
the dragon color) existing.

> Can you use a scroll of charging to increasee the enchantment on an
> armor/weapon as on a ring?

No.

> Is the general method to find a scroll of
> enchant (armor|weapon), read it, then get a magic marker and a bunch of
> blank scrolls and write away?

Yes and no. First consider collecting a couple scrolls before you read
them as I said. Then if you have need for more scrolls (and don't want
to write other types of scrolls) you can use the marker. But these scrolls
are not too uncommon (as opposed to magic markers!), so there is usually
little need to do so.

> 2. A big one: high XP level = bad? So what's the preferred method -
> get a bunch of gain ability/full healing (how?) and bless with holy
> water?

The advantage of a few HP's gained may vanish compared to the creates
created. But I won't call it bad; it's just that the statistics of the
game changes. Blessing is always (read: mostly) good, especially in the
case of these two potions.

> Bottom line: how do you approach a NetHack character, particularly in
> the early game? I think it's time I got wise, revamped my style, and
> pushed my game to the next level.

Don't fight in melee, if you can avoid it. Get daggers (from the gnomes
in the mines), get darts (from disarming traps), and throw them at the
monsters before they come close. Then do melee. If you get in troubles
flee (make sure you always (read: mostly) can!).

> PS. Bonus! YAAD: So I'm in Minetown, rather strong Valkyrie, Mjollnir
> and the like, and I have an amulet of life saving. Everything's going
> fine, until I turn the corner and there's a troll with a wand of death.
> Hmm. Zap! But wait! My medallion begins to glow... Now I'm sitting
> there thinking, okay, I'll retreat, maybe take him on with ranged
> attacks,

No, at the moment you have a line of sight, the troll has it too. You'll
bite the dust.

> or just come back when I have reflection, but oh no.

That would be one solution. Or obtain magic resistance.

> Not this
> time. VERY SAME TURN the death ray bounces off the wall behind me and
> hits me on the return trip. Killed, in a single turn, with full hit
> points, TWICE! Grr...

Bad luck. And unavoidable.

I had _once_ good luck with such a situation; the death ray missed me,
bounced, missed me again, and killed the zapper.

Janis

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

sjdevnull@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> As others noted, higher xp level = tougher monsters generated. For
> spellcasters, higher xp level is worth it (your magic missile gets more
> and more powerful). For others, once you can do the quest (xp level 14
> I think) there's no reason to advance xp levels.

Well, under some circumstances and for some character roles, you may
still want to get beyond level 14; to obtain some intrinsics (Bar:
stealth; Cav, Hea, Pri: warning; Mon: shock; Mon, Wiz: tele-control;
Pri: fire; Ran: see-invis; Tou: poison), of which some can be quite
easy obtained as intrinsics by other means. Beyond level 20 you will
get no more intrinsics, beyond level 17 no more intrinsics that you
won't get easily by other means.

Another reason to get (at least a bit) farther than level 14 is when
you need another slot to enhance some weapon or spell proficieny.

Janis

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

sjdevnull@yahoo.com wrote:

> Magic markers I use almost exclusively for enchant armor and charging
> scrolls, maybe genocide. Bless the marker before using.

I'be always stated that there is no need to bless the marker as blessed
marker cannot write cursed scrolls but uncursed marker can write blessed
scrolls.

But look at it like this:

You've have collected scrolls and magic markers and finally you found
wand of cancellation. So you gather all those scrolls that you think you
don't need for blanking and end up with 50 blank scrolls. Now here are
the questions:

How many holy waters you need to bless fifty blank scrolls?
How many holy waters you need to bless all the markers that you need to
write those 50 scrolls?

Topi
--
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are
always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
- Bertrand Russell
"How come he didn't put 'I think' at the end of it?" - Anonymous

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

rhapsodyindrew wrote:

> I do know plenty about alchemy, except for your mention of diluted
> blessed potions of full healing. Why diluted? Can you somehow turn 1
> uncursed water + 1 full healing into 2 diluted full healings? Or what
> did you mean?

When you mix potions and they turn into something else, the mixture ends
up diluted. No uncursed water required; on the contrary, dipping diluted
potions into water (bottled or running) turns them into water.

Raisse, killed by a contaminated potion

--
irina@valdyas.org LegoHack: http://www.valdyas.org/irina/nethack/
Status of Raisse (piously neutral): Level 8 HP 63(67) AC -3, fast.

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

On 8/7/05 5:31 AM, Topi Linkala wrote:

> I'be always stated that there is no need to bless the marker as blessed
> marker cannot write cursed scrolls but uncursed marker can write blessed
> scrolls.

It depends on how much use you have for cursed scrolls.
>
> But look at it like this:
>
> You've have collected scrolls and magic markers and finally you found
> wand of cancellation. So you gather all those scrolls that you think you
> don't need for blanking and end up with 50 blank scrolls. Now here are
> the questions:
>
> How many holy waters you need to bless fifty blank scrolls?
> How many holy waters you need to bless all the markers that you need to
> write those 50 scrolls?

Right, and if I found myself in that situation, I'd bless the stack of
scrolls, too. However, if I already have some blankable scrolls and find
a magic marker, I'm not going to run around collecting more scrolls and
trying to find a wand of cancellation. (And in what dungeon are you
finding enough magic markers to worry about how many holy waters you're
using on them?)

At that point, do I want to bless three scrolls, and a little later on,
three more, and then another four, and then one more in a pinch.... or
do I want to bless the magic marker itself and be ready to write blessed
scrolls whenever I have a blank one?

Once again, a matter of style.

--
Kevin Wayne

"Sorry, so sorry. I just get carried away."
--Sir Lancelot

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

manchu wrote:
> I would concur with the above, though I don't do quite the prep work
> myself. I tend to play very reckless in the early game, read
> everything, quaff everything, drink fountains, descend too quickly,
> etc. My rationale is that the early game takes so little time that if
> my character survives it is usually the result of a lucky equipement
> find or a nice wand discovery, something like that.

I sometimes do that for the first dungeon level or 2. But as soon as I
get anything halfway decent I go back to super-careful. And at DL1 or
2, halfway decent includes things like a pair of iron shoes, studded
leather armor, skeleton key, and so forth--it doesn't have to be a
shield of reflection, wand of polymorph, etc.

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

In article <1123321628.443462.82010@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
rhapsodyindrew <drew.levitt@yale.edu> wrote:
>Hi all,

>First post to RGRN, but I have a long and sordid history with NetHack.

Welcome.

>Been playing for upwards of 6 years at least, and I've read all the
>spoilers, but after looking around RGRN I'm noticing that I may have
>been going about this all wrong.

There are a bunch of different styles. One reason that I hang out here
is to learn the different ways that folks play NH.

>It's always been my belief that more experience levels = better chance
>of survival, mostly because of the increased HP and PW.

You'll come to find out that the two are orthogonal. There are potions and
prayers that give you addition HP without gaining levels. There are scrolls
and potions that give you PW points without a gain in level.

The minimum requirement for acension is that you attain a minimum level
of 14 for the Quest. Other than that, you can technically ascend as a
level 1 character.

> But I notice
>people ascending at XP levels < 20, and more importantly, with only
>maybe 50 HP more than I've had (I've gotten scores above 1 million
>points, but the farthest I've ever gotten in the dungeon was the Medusa
>level - though I could probably have gone deeper if it hadn't been for
>a fatal mistake involving a damn cockatrice).

cockatrices are bad news. Wear your gloves, be unburdened, and keep them
in a sack. They are bad news in general, but really really great for
clearing out large groups of monsters.

>So my question is a simple one, but the answer may not be
>straightforward: How is everybody doing more with less?

By using other techniques for gaining the required attributes.

>I have some
>specific questions though, pursuant to this general one.

>1. AC seems to be crucial, and everybody has a better AC than I do.
>So I get the idea of running straight to Minetown to buy some cheap
>protection, but the methods for enchanting armors well eludes me. Can
>you use a scroll of charging to increasee the enchantment on an
>armor/weapon as on a ring?

Nope. A ring of protection will lower your AC though.

> Is the general method to find a scroll of
>enchant (armor|weapon), read it, then get a magic marker and a bunch of
>blank scrolls and write away?

Bingo. Also blessing them makes them infinitely more potent.

>2. A big one: high XP level = bad?

It has its issues. The levels of randomly generated monsters depends on
the character level and the dungeon level. So the lower level the character
is, generally the lower level of the monsters the character encounters.

Now of course there are a bunch of fixed monsters in the dungeon. However,
even at a lower XP, a well equipped character can pretty easily tackle them.

>(2A) So what's the preferred method -
>get a bunch of gain ability/full healing (how?) and bless with holy
>water?

That's certainly one technique. I generally like to save FH for the
ascention run.

Here are some others:

1) Praying at an altar. If you keep creating and scrificing monsters, your
god will buff you up. Divine protection directly from your god lowers you
AC. and there are no restrictions as to how low you can go. Golden glows
at 5HP to your max. It's one of the reasons that as boring as it can be, that
pudding farming is so intriguing. With a level full of black puddings you
can spend days getting items, golden glows and protections from your god.
This is in addition to the death drop items from the puddings themselves.

2) Nurse dancing. Dangerous but extremely beneficial to HP. One technique is
to reverse genocide a group of nurses in sokoban. They can't teleport so they
will stick around giving you a ton of HPs.

3) One spoiler that I recently found. Blessed scrolls of charging will add
5d4 of power to you when read while confused. But you have to be at your
power max when you read it. If not, you'll be taken to your power max. So
if you have 400 PW points max and you expended yourself down to 50 (which
is easy to do in an ascension run with the amulet) you can get confused and
get charged back to 400 in no time flat.

4) Blessed gain energys are straightforward. However, I generally save them
for converting Xhealings to FH.


>To give you a sense of perspective on my skill level, I do pretty much
>know the spoilers and tables forward and backwards, but I've come to
>RGRN for more general strategies and tidbits that just aren't in the
>spoilers. (Like how to use nurses to your advantage.) And believe me,
>even though I haven't looked around here very much yet I've picked up
>quite a bit.

That's how you do it. Generally after you've ascended the first time, you
have a pretty good grasp of all the big issues in the game. Scrounging
around for nuances is the interesting part.

>Bottom line: how do you approach a NetHack character, particularly in
>the early game? I think it's time I got wise, revamped my style, and
>pushed my game to the next level.

Actually I play pacifist in the early game until I get my protection from
the Minetown priest(ess). Keeping the XP at level one makes it cheap to
get protection. It also gives my pet an opportunity to get up to XL9. It
keeps random monsters at a really low level. Generally I only kill kobold
zombies because it help improve the god alignment of my character while
only costing 3 XPs each. Clearing out the shops in the early leveles,
getting the AC down to something reasonable, buffing up the pet, and
getting to minetown in one piece are early game goals.

Getting the AC starts midgame for me. The next goals are setting up for the
quest. So that means buffing up to 14XL, getting the AC down, and acquiring
MR, reflection, holy water, and a bag of holding. I'll use the time getting
skill slots in weapons and spells that I'm interested in.

Generally I'll get down to a dungeon depth that starts generating wraiths.
I use wraith corpses to get those last 2 to 3 levels from 11 to 14 for
the quest. If I can convert an altar along the way then I'll start
sacrificing for artifacts, spellbooks, golden glows, and protection.

My current game is interesting. I've cleared out the castle and the VotD.
But I hadn't been crowned. So I decided to sacfest at my altar base camp
at level 23. While casting create monster what pops out but a black pudding!
I proceeded very carefully as I wasn't prepared for pudding farming. I went
ahead and prepped the altar area with Elbereths (written in lightning) and
boulders (due to the fortuitous circumstance of pick-axe carrying dwarves
tearing up the level. I sacfested away until I got crowned. But this time
I got smart and killed and sacced all of the puddings (kill them with a
unihorn so they don't split). The only mistake I made was praying before
the prayer timeout and losing all my protection. I think I'll go kick a
sink in a upper level, draw in another pudding and have at it again
until I get my 10-15 points of protection back before tackling Gehennom.
I'll pick up another 100 HP in the process. Coupled with a HP in the -40
range should make everything work out just fine.

There are a bunch of different styles of play. But getting to 30th level
in XL isn't a requirement.

BAJ

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

Byron A Jeff wrote:

> Welcome.

Welcome indeed. I've gotten oodles of useful information out of this
thread, and it pleases me to give a positive update: after successfully
pulling off the protection run to Minetown as a healer, I've been
playing a Valkyrie with great success. DL 2 gave me an altar, which,
after surprisingly extensive camping, got me Mjollnir (it took forever
because I kept needing food prayers). On DL 6 I found a throne room
which was very very good to me...I found a BoH on the ground and I got
a wish from the throne. Blessed +2 SDSM suits me fine, and went well
with my blessed +5 orcish helm, which I found randomly. I just cleared
out Sokoban (getting another BoH) and I'm off to greater places...in
this case, probably Mine's End.

Final question (in this thread at least): I have a wand of polymorph,
but I don't know how many charges I have in it. Is it worth it to try
to polymorph my (large and sturdy) dog?

Thanks a million for the brilliant advice,
- Drew