The Many Ways To Die in Nethack

The GameSetWatch column '@Play' deals with the storied history of Rogue-like text adventures. This week, author John Harris discusses the many ways to die in Nethack. From the article: "The lowly cockatrice is perhaps the most dangerous monster in the game. There are plenty of monsters with more hit points, who do more damage, who have special attacks, and are just bigger, but cockatrices instantly kill anyone who touches them with their bare skin, and are thus very likely to kill players unwise in their dealings with them. Even Death up on Astral Plane has to succeed in an attack against a player to deliver an instakill, but a cockatrice can kill by being attacked. If the player attempts to fight a cockatrice without a weapon or wearing gloves and hits, he turns to stone. If he attempts to pick up a dead one with his bare hands, that will also turn him to stone. (It can also be wielded, however. Applications for a wielded cockatrice corpse are left for you to imagine, but I will say that it can be, hm, useful.)"

Comments

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[tehshen]

This is going to sound a bit weird at first, especially if you're new to the game, but really... NetHack isn't that hard. After a few years of playing, NetHack is "normal" difficulty, and most other games come under "easy". Redefining terms to suit myself? Yes, but once you get going, losing a game due to bad luck or lack of knowledge becomes less and less believable.

I haven't ascended yet. I've come close twice: I once made it to the VS without the candles [:(] and once had a very promising character blow up Lord Surtur's drawbridge while trying to clear a boulder out the way. Neither of these were my own bad luck, well, not much; the problem was my own stupidity and not paying attention.

Is there a lot to learn? Not really, no. It might take you a few plays of random characters to get to know all the items or monsters, and (if you're not spoiled) some time to get acquainted with them, but from that you can deduce most deaths. Once you've learned that touching or handling a cockatrice (or its corpse) in any way stones you, you know not to take its corpse, feel it while blind, kick one, help one out of a pit, or all those other things. The game still needs to know all these, which is why the list of footrice-related deaths is so long.

The best way to die is to not pay attention. Playing late at night or while tired, playing when you have better things to worry about, or playing too fast are all ways to get you killed quickly. Thought that purple h was a dwarf king? Too bad, you should have checked. Wielding a c corpse while burdened? Should have looked at the status line. I've often died, surrounded by monsters, with (identified!) wands and scrolls of teleportation in my inventory. Woe is me.

On the nethack.alt.org server, the record for ascension streak is IIRC 23 straight ascensions, some with conducts. So although luck plays a part in all games, it's not as big as you think, and ascending with 95% certainty can be done, just as long as you keep paying attention.

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Re:Attention demands 27096 gold pieces. Pay? (yn)

[Chris Burke]

This is going to sound a bit weird at first, especially if you're new to the game, but really... NetHack isn't that hard. After a few years of playing, NetHack is "normal" difficulty, and most other games come under "easy". Redefining terms to suit myself? Yes, but once you get going, losing a game due to bad luck or lack of knowledge becomes less and less believable.

I've ascended a couple times, and I still think the game is hard. Once you've got a bag of holding full of wands, scrolls, and potions for every occasion and are sporting a good number of pieces of your Ascension Kit(tm), then sure it's not terribly hard and mostly a matter of paying attention -- because even fully decked out, one slip up can mean YASD.

Before that, though, the game is very difficult and the random number generator can be very cruel to you. For example, if you haven't found some form of magic resistance (I prefer the grey dragon mail) before reaching roughly the castle level, then you're in danger of being on the reciving end of a Touch of Death that ends your game instantly. Or just because you know not to handle a cockatrice corpse doesn't keep you from getting blinded, confused, and then stumbling into a pit which contains a cockatrice corpse. Or you could encounter my nemesis before finding sufficient armor to stave them off: the soldier ant.

On the other hand, there are so many ways to deal with problems that many things that seem bad are survivable. If you're surrounded by monsters, and don't actually have any scrolls of teleportation, you might have a wand of digging to dig yourself an escape hole down to the next level.

In the end, I'd say nethack is hard, but not cheap. Games like Diablo II achieve "hard" by being "cheap" (Multiple shot - fire - lightning enchant anyone?), where you can be killed instantly by random chance, or games where the RoF/damage/hit-points of enemies scales ridiculously until you can't possibly evade them. I think this is part of what sets nethack apart.

Playable on anything!

[wandazulu]

Nethack has been one of my favorite games throughout the years, though I've come to realize that I've had more fun getting it to work on obscure hardware than playing the actual game (in the 18 years I've played it, I've only ascended once).

Nethack is one interesting in that they don't provide a config file that presumably would make compiling simple (and less of a challenge), so when building it on anything, you have to figure out what features your flavor of Unix has and set the #defines in the .h file appropriately.

In the 18 years, I've compiled it on an original NeXT cube, a Playstation2 running Linux, a Vax running Ultrix (didn't like the BSD flavor, nor the SYS V..was weird blend), a Cray2 and a Convex something-or-other.

The only problem was that the Convex used an accounting system to track usage, and between compiling and playing, I ended up being "charged" around $1000 in cpu time.

Good times.