Caltrops - NetHack - Re: What took you so long?

Forum Overview :: NetHack

by Bananadine 11/28/2007, 11:10am PST

ADOM fag wrote:

It is hard, brutally hard, but it gets away with it because most of the times you die teach you enough to avoid similar circumstances in the future. Sometimes you just hit a falling rock trap on the first level of a dungeon, though. ADOM ruined all other roguelikes for me - the smoothness of its interface and its general polish make the rest seem like timewasters.

Yeah, that's part of what had kept me starting over after all--you die, but you start again smarter and thus stronger, and in a sense it's all part of a single, greater game session.

But despite the polish of ADOM, I feel like that game edges past some threshold beyond which I should not pass. I had several characters die on their first little outings, yeah, and that was no big deal. But sometimes a random falling stone in the dungeon I'd been struggling to reach for five hours would destroy my badass character instantly because just one time I had chosen to walk a moderate distance on unexplored paths without fully healing first, and if I started over at that point I feel like I would just be repeating myself. Once or twice it was an explosion whose source I never learned; a few times it was a slightly stronger than normal group of monsters. On my last attempt, I was trapped in a narrow hallway between two fire vortices while ill--I was temporarily invisible, so if either one had been missing I probably would have slipped away. When these things happen after so much work, it wears me down.

I guess you can get past general-purpose dangers like that--I mean, ones for which you don't happen to have a special countermeasure of some sort--through simple prudence. Maybe you just shouldn't ever take big risks in ADOM, except when you're first starting and you've got nothing to lose. Maybe I should have left the entire dungeon just as soon as I got sick. Maybe I shouldn't have gone into the pyramid without a strong helmet and a ring of fire resistance. That's a strange thing about this kind of game--it maybe doesn't train cleverness or curiosity or persistence the way other games do, though it certainly requires and responds to those things to some extent. Maybe what it really trains, in the long run, is prudence. And maybe some people dig that. But for me it's become a paradox, because the more prudent thing to do in my greater life is to stop spending so much time playing this game. So, airplanes.