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Hear, hear! by the way, something I was wondering about stealth is that it seems possible to end up with a monster "too close for your liking" during autoexplore that you should have seen sooner. Does stealth actually have the harmful downside that it lets you blunder close to a monster be...

I'm not sure why the beetle changes. How about ... graboids and assblasters?

I'm pretty unfamiliar with all the throwing stuff. If you get a super sling, it seems powerful. But bows.... I mean, you can't use a shield, switching means you can't even really use a shield with your other weapon, so you're vulnerable to getting hit, and ... it seems like you're throwing candy at ...

This is mostly a matter of having _convenient_ documentation. I think the "A" ability screen should actually say "You cannot use X, Y, and Z, and A, B, and C can be used only with two hands." I mean, I know that's wordy but will you really run out of room?

You hit "5" to wait out a lot of things in the game. The problem is, you have to do it SO much, to get back HP, MP, wait for status effects ... and yet, it's a really long waste of moves, food etc. if you happen to hit it when you're at full for everything. This aggravates me and I don't e...

Nerfing paralysis seems pretty obvious - I mean, the strategic fun value of hitting spacebar until you die is not much. If you nerf it in some general way, you might even UN-nerf the "you shrug off the repeated paralysis" bit. I mean, why allow monsters one sucker punch that can kill you, ...

Suppose you have a great character you might want to screw around with later. Is there a way to put it aside but get it back on the server later?

It's great to have an army (Death Channel, Infestation, or I suppose something summoned might work) - so you can have something save you.

Generally a good plan, though Captain Obvious says to make sure to pack a scroll of mapping, haste, Control Undead spell if proficient. Dispel Undead is a decent option for greater mummies directly - Control works if they happen to bring in a bunch of undead minions for you. It would be very good to...

I had one of those late-stage characters doing pointless stuff like wield-identifying all the scythes of distortion he had hoarded together. After a few entertaining side effects I found myself staring at the Abyssal Rune, and was surprised to see I was on Abyss:5. I tried some more wield-identifyin...

Why not just have some command like ^T to deliberately set off the trap? I mean, there's no <em>logical</em> reason why your character shouldn't be able to do it, and net traps are serious enough risks (and rewards) that taking them out is a loss.

The idea of getting rid of stairs has been done many times, from the original Rogue to the Ziggurats. And the new Tomb has something a bit similar in it. And a lot of people play Vaults:5 that way (using the hatch to avoid the mob in the middle). That said, if you get rid of the stairs, you have a b...

Berserk is good whenever you can get a dangerous monster alone and want to kill it with melee attacks. Yeah, but how often does that happen? As a general rule, there's always a stall. I mean, whenever you're fighting a big nasty monster some other monster not so tough but demanding to be killed fir...

The most important time measure is that the Elf Demonologists' spells eventually run out, so that you can - after a good long wait - go back down the stairs and not die.

I don't really get this. the Orb level is just like any other - you can clear it out first bit by bit, then pick up the loot with less harassment. It just has a fancy bit of loot in it.

axes are dogshit if you arent playing a super heavy melee tank worshipping a gifting god The can include stuff like a MuWz of Gozag. I mean, if you're afraid of the big bad warg you can always kite anyway. But if you can stand in the midst of a bunch of stuff, you don't get hellfired or fireballed,...

TV and crawl work well together.

As for the turns, well, a frustrated mummy afraid to dive can just wait for something to show up. But actually, come to think of it, that's mostly in "G T" trips where I sort out the loot.

I think this is a really easy build, but I wanted one to live. This one just finished with the first ziggurat, and now has two little +1 ziggurat callers left. Advantages: a) take as long as you want doing WHATEVER you fancy b) with no mutations even when you spam Irradiate or Controlled Blink c) wi...

Early amulet of rage pretty much guarantees your char will get to mid game. Killing strong monsters that you would have otherwise run from gives that easy exp to stay ahead of the difficulty curve. I don't get this argument. I mean, in my current game the only things I remember bypassing for any le...

Everything with success chances needs to be massively more apparent upfront. Starting with which spells SUFFER success chances so you don't memorize them by accident.

I also like this idea, but let's go a step further. Since there are AFAIK always three stairs on a level, let's give them some *flair*. I mean, different icons and different names for each of the three standard stairways - maybe golden stairs, silver stairs, bronze stairs. Or Path of Might/Finesse/W...

Wow... I can't believe people are this turned on about going berserk. I mean, it prevents you from doing just about anything to save yourself ... it's all do or die. And then you pass out... I basically never use it. Now if you want to talk powerful item, think running around with a scarf of cloud i...

I think that changing items may be problematic to balance. Besides, usually something is like +1 or +0, or +9, +11, +12 ... doesn't seem like there's a lot in between. How high will you let characters go? Because if you can't get higher than a good item, there's no merit to messing with the plus. An...

My feeling based on what you've said here is that you just overvalue the spell. It is hard to overvalue impunity to laugh at Ancient Lich which has Lehudib's Crystal Spear (3d48) and can kill most characters in 2 turns. My feeling is that you undervalue the spell, maybe you play just heavy melee ch...

Hmmm, if an axe swings through a square and there's nobody there to get injured by it, did it really pass through the square at all? Deep... It seems kind of absurd though to say that you can always kite monsters. I mean, how's that working out for you in Cocytus? I think though that finding the mos...

I remember trying silence just once recently - Mara, who according to his description "possesses a number of magical abilities, negated by antimagic". I double checked, triple checked, and, needless to say, just as I kind of figured, he kept right on casting without the slightest hindrance...

It seems like the lookups for ?/I are missing some items. I mean, if I look up ? / I for running or flying they have nothing, and if I have a character who doesn't have boots of flying I start wondering if they were removed or if they just didn't drop. Is there a rule on what you should or shouldn't...

I don't really remember the G-Man, but I certainly remember trying to hunt down every last scientist with the crowbar...

screw it I hate this character I'm gonna go melee Gastronok Odd... that's what I usually do. My level 10 mummy wizard just ran across Gastronok, ran up to him with a rapier and cut him up with it. Had 76/85 hit points at the end of the battle, pre level up. (True, the wizard had +9 plate mail of so...

There's all kinds of stuff in this game for flavor. It's a GAME, not an exercise in matrix mathematics.

There would be a really simple way to do a two-god user: have a race of Two-Faces who have an ability to Change Face. The two faces can have different abilities and different gods... probably even different attributes since each picks something as it levels up. The catch, of course, is that only one...

Making Beogh followers unkillable seems out of place ... I mean, the Osama bin Ladens of the world are always praising the "martyrs" they have to part with. Seems like it would be way more fun to just bite the bullet and set up a followers' inventory menu, from which you could equip any fo...

It sounds like there is more support for the nerf, which is the simplest possible thing to implement: the spell simply can't be cast on an existing flame, just like any other cloud. As I said at the beginning, for me this "nerf" is often practically almost a buff, since it keeps you from w...

I just retried to make sure, and I stand by what I said. Maybe my use case is atypical, but I tend to focus wizards exclusively on fighting skills when they're young so they don't die when they run out of MP (which generally seems to work, since they typically die when I give into the temptation to ...

The current situation with Conjure Flame is that you have to watch the tile the flame is on, wait for the one turn where it is extinguished before the big nasty monster moves onto it, and then make sure to cast it right then. Now if you fail to cast it in time the problem is obvious, but if you cast...

This seems like political correctness run amok. (Not that Crawl developers would dare to have a "run amok" power in the game nowadays, since that might be taken to refer to a real world culture! Indeed, now that I think of it, how DARE they make a cultural appropriation of berserkergang th...

Every Roguelike player knows the awesomest weapon is the two-handed sword. Got a big problem, need a big sword, logic enough. And some variant of the Claymore of the Scottish highlands remains a winner around here to this day. But here's the thing: lots of people who knew what they were doing in anc...

I realize that a LOT of the easy ways to get banished early have been taken out. I was actually thinking that if you make an early banishment more survivable, you get the leeway to throw a few more ways for it to happen back into the mix! I mean, too much "well that can't happen" can make ...

I think this change should be made because it's expected. Whenever you find something that has an effect that theoretically you can train with, you get a chance to train the skill. This is usually taken to a ridiculous degree. Even if your one hand is locked in a *Drain weapon and the other is locke...

this mechanic is both (a) completely spoilery (you need to know details about the game's math that the game doesn't tell you), and (b) completely counterintuitive (the unspoiled player presumably thinks that weapon skill always matters more). This *COULD* be fixed by improving the player status rep...

Animate Skeleton *is* a very powerful spell for the level (unless you follow Qazlal and they all just get burned up all the time, or Gozag and there's nothing to animate except the occasional thematic vault skeleton or freed slave). I certainly wouldn't mind nerfing it by getting rid of the weapons....

There are some levels like Shoals that give you a message that they are noisy and sound won't travel as far, and others like Crypts where sound travels further. I think one way to play-balance the Abyss a little better would be if high level characters make more noise there, and new ones less. You m...

Disintegrate doesn't seem to work on anything anymore (it never really worked on monsters worth speaking of, and now they're the last thing it affects). I'm not sure if before you could have summoned forest on it and fireballed it, but that doesn't work anymore either. I'm surprised if wand of diggi...

I just wanna be able to order out for a freaking slice of pizza so that I don't HAVE to be a mummy, or always in a freaking rush to go everywhere, to follow Gozag. Come on, gold for pizza, it's not alien to Gozag's business model...

Suppose, say, a mummy just wants to drop any potions it has gotten hold of. So you hit d)rop, !), Enter. Problem is, you don't have any potions (you were just making sure. And so now it's asking you to enter a letter of something to drop again. Result: some item with a move key letter is now lying o...

It seems like people are pretty keen to remove features, but it tends to take flavor out of the game - like with the rods, for example. I think an alternative to taking out identification is to simply provide more item IDs. How? Well, one way is to throw yet more identify scrolls, but that's uninspi...

It was the one with a little castle at top, a moat, full of large and small kobolds. The mummy had wasted a lot of time, as mummies do, but not on that level; the acid dragon showed up really early during exploration.

It doesn't matter if the character is level 1 or level 27 - if I start training stealth, there is a virtual certainty the character will be dead before it goes up more than a level or two. I don't know why, I don't really understand how. This time it was a mummy wizard on Nest:2 who had a grand tota...

I've been honestly surprised to read that these consoles, with these given limitations, are still relevant. What kinds of situations do people find themselves in where they have access to the console game but not the tiles?

To be sure, Nethack is OK with life saving - they literally have an amulet for that. If people are that worried about the notion that a lucky character finding the scroll might use it to not die , even though I kind of thought that was the point of artifacts, well, you could always have it pre-place...

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