The Tavern

This was unexpected. Cruising along as a Minotaur Berserker, get to dungeon floor 10, open the only door I see, and...bam. Fiery death.



I didn't get a chance to do anything. There was only one door, autoexplore opened it, and then I got burnt alive. Maybe I could've made a different decision earlier on, I'm no pro at this game, but damn.

Character dump:
http://pastebin.com/JwaHqj78

Try closing the door and then running next time. From the dump it looks like you had one turn to do something, namely close the door.

There was no pause between autoexplore starting and the character dying.

Yes, it can happen, also without autoexplore (I had it too, was doy's ghost in my case: dead from full health). Given the nature of the game, these kind of deaths are part of the package. In principle, it would be possible to prevent them, but that way lies madness. They're pretty rare, so just go with it. Condolences, and better luck next time!

I know. I was mostly just surprised. Usually when I die it's totally my own fault ("I don't need to use a potion. He can't possibly hit me agai-- shit.").

Are some rooms/layouts pre-set? This looked too perfect to have been generated randomly. If it's a ready-made room, I'd vote that it should appear deeper than floor 10.

edit to add: Heh, started over and found a ring of slaying +6 on the first floor. Luck is a fickle master.

Well, you were autoexploring a "vault room", but then again, it was that vault you only acess by the staircase.

edit:
Nvm, just noticed you actually walked over the door you had just opened before diying.

This must have been because you were mashing o, allowing autoexplore to make its move into the doorway, between this:

and this:

But there is also this part in between:

Why would the death log have you find just one escape hatch when at least 2 stairs/hatches must have come into view at the same time?

Imho, the true problem here is with resistances. Fire (and other elements) deal far more damage than they should, because the player can find some lucky drop which cuts that damage entirely in half. So the numbers on fire damage have to be much higher to overcome this, and then you have characters who don't have fire resistance yet and get immediately roasted.

This could be solved by making both elemental damage and elemental resistances smaller; ie a fire dragon's breath deals about 35% less damage, but each rank of fire resistance only lowers damage by 10% (so you take 70% at rF+++). Numbers are ballparks, go ahead and tweak away

Imagine a hypothetical door which when you opened, the fire dragon and giant were both magically in melee range (no step required) and then they both hit you with melee. Do you think their melee damage could have one shot you?

So kind of like how rN reduces torment damage? 1 pip makes you take 90% of the damage you would normally take, 2 pips make you take 80% of the damage you would normally take, and 3 pips make you take 70% of the damage you would normally take? We could even increase the maximum number of pips allowed e.g. from 3 to 5.

Another problem could be opening a vault on D:10 containing a fire giant and a fire dragon in the first place. He's only 8000some turns into the game... Seems a bit rough.

its like in los angeles when your doorbell rings and you go open the door and its a cop and he shoots you

This brings up another slightly tricky issue: how hard should D:10 be? The character might be level 9 with limited loot, or level 14 with decent loot. It depends on if lair spawned on d:9 or D:11. Lair spawn range was narrowed down slightly but I think making it even just 8-10 instead of 8-11 might improve consistency. Although I am sure there are people who think the challenge of doing d:11 to reach lair is interesting, and there's certainly merit to that. But it's hard to say how difficult d:10 should be, as characters may or may not have done a whole additional branch, or two, before getting to it (orc can spawn on d:9-12).