Universal Plan B wrote:

anon wrote:

so pretty much what you want is a game where every enemy is level one, and you can just plow through all of them without any strategy or having to worry about anything?

I dunno, maybe he means how when you're fighting against an 'H' it might be a level 5 giant or it might be a level 15 titan? But the colors are different, and it doesn't make a whole lot of difference when you're fighting against a bunch of ascii characters anyways. Fighting the monsters is not the biggest draw in Nethack.

I agree that in most rpgs the "different color for more powerful variant" idea is really sucky. When a game has four different colors of wolf, I can never remember that the red wolf is just a somewhat tougher version of the normal grey one but the black wolf is a spellcaster that can haste the rest of the wolfpack. Obviously one of them needs to be targeted first, but it's annoying to need to write these things down. In one rpg game that I played several years back, the artists actually took the time to scale the sprites so that the black wolf was also slightly bigger, which made a big difference. Most of the time they're too cheap.

anon wrote:

good news, they have that.

it's called 'cheating'

We don't want a cheat, we want to play games where the obstacles are difficult challenges to overcome, not annoying limitations to work around (or put up with). A game where gems have to be identified is not very believable but ok, but a game where the best method of identifying them is to find a unicorn to throw them at is ridiculous. Besides, nethack's cheats don't solve the problem that you have to read a 50 page manual (written by eric raymond for god's sake) and memorize 100 one letter commands before you can even begin to play. Nethack is a game for people who think that emacs or vi are great ways to write text.