NetHack

[Blade]

I keep kinda wanting to try NetHack again.

See, it was the second roguelike I had ever played, and the first big one (the first one I played was Larn, which is a very simple little game with a total of 13 levels plus a home level and had mechanics so easy-to-understand that I could play it at six). I played quite a bit of it over one summer, once reaching Mine's End before acting like a moron and dying, and I subsequently wandered away when I got tired of all its obscure pointless silliness.

But I remain fascinated with it. For all its clunkiness and unappealing bits, it seems oddly appealing. Now that I am somewhat okay at Crawl, I feel like I should try going back to it...see how I do.

So. Can anyone give me pointers or link me to some useful spoilers? The experience I have of the game is mostly irrelevant, since I imagine I picked up more bad habits than I did good ones. I'm basically starting fresh, and I have no idea what to expect. What transfers from Crawl to NetHack, and what doesn't? How do I get over the initial learning brick wall? Is there something fun to be found there, or is it a pointless endeavor that isn't worth any effort to learn? and so forth and so forth

That basically covers it, I think; feel free to also answer things that I didn't ask but may prove useful.

[nicolae]

So. Can anyone give me pointers or link me to some useful spoilers? The experience I have of the game is mostly irrelevant, since I imagine I picked up more bad habits than I did good ones. I'm basically starting fresh, and I have no idea what to expect. What transfers from Crawl to NetHack, and what doesn't? How do I get over the initial learning brick wall? Is there something fun to be found there, or is it a pointless endeavor that isn't worth any effort to learn? and so forth and so forth

Playing Nethack after Crawl, it's the little things that throw you off: doors don't open on the first try, you have a pet, only one spell per book, etc. And the grinding and the note taking.

Spoiler links: http://www.steelypips.org/nethack/
http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

[mageykun]

The biggest change from crawl to nethack is how much you have to internalize. I like to think of it as programming yourself. You learn a lot of if-thens and then follow them to avoid death. Anything careless that crawl would give you a confirmation dialog for, is on you. Then there's the note taking. I find this to be the harder part of going back- you have to start noting things very early in each game (resistances aquired, shops / vaults / branches / stashes) which seems like an excessive investment before you get an "established" character (established meaning winnable barring player stupidity). When you die, it's having to start over on the back of a new envelope or index card that stings the most. :p

Be really careful with tactics regarding monsters that show up in both games. This will get you killed. For instance: in crawl, it's a good idea to kill eyes as fast as possible. Which often can mean melee-ing them. Bad idea in nethack- you want to keep them at a distance and kill them with ranged attacks. Another example is ranged attacks- in nethack it's only on the cardinal directions, so a zig-zagging approach staying off the cardinals can be as useful as corners for dealing with ranged attackers.

Another little thing- pet behavior is different. Many (but not all) of your allies in crawl will stay near you, and not close to attack foes unless you attack first or give the order. In nethack, pets charge pretty much everything as soon as they see it.

A final big difference is the skill system. Xp is limitless is crawl- you can train up whatever build you want. In nethack there's very little skill xp to go around (it's tied to your level, I think) so what you spend your skill points on matters. Especially since some skills are an absolute waste. Read the spoilers, and make sure you spend them wisely.

...I won't go any further into specific spoilers for now, I think. There are way too many, and that's what the wiki's for. Oh! And in nethack, wiki isn't a dirty word, unlike crawl. XD It's pretty dang reliable when it comes to the facts.

One last thing- you might want hearse. It allows you to upload copies of your bones and download other peoples for new and exciting ghosts. This has its ups and downs though.

[dpeg]

I have no idea what the OP is talking about -- a lot of Crawl's design is about learning from Nethack's faults.

However, if you're going to get your Nethack fix, by all means be aware of the forks -- all of them improve the game in different directions. In alphabetical order:
AceHack
Nitrohack
Sporkhack
UnNethack

I hope I didn't miss anyone. It's a pity that the Nethack forkists aren't able to pull their stuff together... they could achieve so much more by doing that. In a sense, that's the curse of the Nethack devteam's ivory tower policy, but I digress.

[Blade]

Thanks for the advice, guys. It's going to be an uphill climb for sure...nethack is so ridiculously nonsensical and confusing. Crawl has spoiled me, and now the multitude of flaws inherit in nethack's design are glaringly apparent. Did it ever occur to the devteam that providing some semblance of balance might be a better use of time than putting in messages for killing your pet while hallucinating?

As for why I want to play it, despite all that...well, it has a certain mystique to it -- when I first played it, the idea that anyone could ever come close to winning seemed incredible to me, and I was in awe at the sheer number of things one could do in it. Even now, I feel like I should beat it just so I can say I did...show my younger self that it's possible after all.

There's also a certain appeal to its utter random brokenness...it adheres firmly to the rule of cool, and while that makes for frustratingly broken gameplay, it has memorable moments. Crawl never quite captured my sense of wonder the same way, even as I saw how much better it was.

As for forks, I've heard of them and considered playing them, but decided in the end that I'd rather stick with the original. Playing a fork wouldn't really have the same feel.

[TehDruid]

I've tried Nethack several times in the past and always stop playing after the first 3 floors or so. The whole system is unintuitive and of course there's the UI that screws it even more for me, especially after coming from Crawl's smoothness. I can't really get into it at all. I hate most of the silly races/classes too.

[Stormfox]

The more that I look back on Nethack, the more I believe it's a completely different class of game from Crawl.

Crawl is a tactical game. Yes, there are MacGuffins and the standard roguelike ID minigame and other forms of resource management, but the meat of the game is about ensuring that you can always bring overwhelming force to a fight that you plan to win -- and learning that when you aren't likely to win the fight, disengage or don't even engage to begin with. Most of the resources that you do manage are force multipliers of various sorts, and the major ones that aren't (the food clock and, indirectly, the OOD timer) are for pacing -- get moving on to your next tactical exercise.

Nethack is a puzzle game, with the meta-puzzle being how to "break" the system that is presented to you. Strategy and tactics are important, but if you just go at it as a tactical game, you will get smashed. (Possibly literally metaphorically, if you blindly quaff booze.) Success requires knowing the rules of the system, and which ones can be bent, and which "broken" (with the understanding that TDTTOE and the system knows how to react to your "breaking" it, most of the time). Some vital information is hard to come by, like the prayer timeout. Some features are horribly unbalanced and are yet essential to playing the game sanely (Elbereth, unihorns). It's to the point where the game tracks whether or not you have used the most common "exploits", or other behaviors that are hard to maintain without using other "exploits" (pacifist foodless, anyone?).

In Crawl, you don't win by fighting fairly, because you bring a lightsaber and a storm bolter to a fist fight.

In Nethack, you don't win by fighting fairly, because you use every trick in the book to fight dirty. And unless you've studied the game intimately, there are always more pages in the book.

[rebthor]

I've never won nethack either, but that's because unlike crawl where you can mostly turn off your brain around mid-game until the end, in nethack it's even worse. Once you've done your quest/gotten crowned, the game is pretty much won except for the tedious bit of actually winning. Sure you need to deal with Rodney (death wand) and the riders (ok, not as easy - just run) and hope you picked the right altar, but everything in between is pretty much a snooze-fest.

[Pereza0]

Played nethack before crawl - cant go back now

As a game, crawl beats nh to a pulp

As a whatever the hell nethack tries to be, its good in its own way. Reading about cockatrices and other sorts of miscellaneous stuff was hilarious.

Trying whacky stuff and getting feedback for it, made me grin too

[crate]

I can't ever play Nethack again because I will either have to switch from vikeys to numpad, or I will have to type #jump every time I want to jump.

[mageykun]

I can't ever play Nethack again because I will either have to switch from vikeys to numpad, or I will have to type #jump every time I want to jump.

Seriously, this.

I learned to play Nethak on a full keyboard with numpad. But now on my lappy, the friggen vi keys overwrite (j)ump (k)ick and (l)oot. There is an option to turn the vi keys off, but then you lose yubn. So the real reason I'm not playing anymore is because I'm too lazy to figure out how to manually rebind the keys the way I want them (lose hjkl but keep yubn).

...that and the tiles are way too tiny on my screen resolution, and the bigger size options have horrible distortion (and I really don't feel like manually changing my resolution and having everything on my desktop rearrange itself whenever I play). I need to get at the source images and re-size them appropriately myself and recompile. Something else I've been too lazy to figure out how to do.

So yeah, interface annoyances and laziness. (This is where everyone who've already got their reflexes bound to vi and play in ascii get to gloat and be jerks :p).

[Jabberwocky]

So yeah, interface annoyances and laziness. (This is where everyone who've already got their reflexes bound to vi and play in ascii get to gloat and be jerks :p).

I guess I am entitled to gloat then.

[Blade]

(This is where everyone who've already got their reflexes bound to vi and play in ascii get to gloat and be jerks :p).

Except that we still have to use #foo and it's silly. So no gloating here.

[rebthor]

(This is where everyone who've already got their reflexes bound to vi and play in ascii get to gloat and be jerks :p).

Except that we still have to use #foo and it's silly. So no gloating here.

Why stuff like #dip, #pray (and to a lesser extent #ride, #enhance and #force) never got non-Meta keyboard shortcuts, I'll never understand.

[Blade]

(This is where everyone who've already got their reflexes bound to vi and play in ascii get to gloat and be jerks :p).

Except that we still have to use #foo and it's silly. So no gloating here.

Why stuff like #dip, #pray (and to a lesser extent #ride, #enhance and #force) never got non-Meta keyboard shortcuts, I'll never understand.

because that's too logical

On another note, I am finding myself quite enjoying nethack for the very silly thing it is. I think I'll have to set up a pudding farm or something to remind myself of just how broken it is.

[nicolae]

On another note, I am finding myself quite enjoying nethack for the very silly thing it is. I think I'll have to set up a pudding farm or something to remind myself of just how broken it is.

You could find out how to exploit bugs. A few years ago, I saw some player who did a hack to get free gold from nowhere, got so much gold the counter flipped over into negative numbers, which threw off the weight calculations so that he could carry literally everything. He had a bag of holding with like 40 pages of stuff and was beating everything in the dungeon with a boulder.