Playing without all the things dark

[MyOtheHedgeFox]

Is it easy and overall possible to play completely without dark items (wands of draining, vampiric and draining weapons, demon weapons), Hexes and Necromancy while not being a worshipper of one of the good gods?
Did anyone try doing such a playthrough, intentionally avoiding using all the mentioned things and not being an undead at the same time?

[eharper256]

Is it easy and overall possible to play completely without dark items (wands of draining, vampiric and draining weapons, demon weapons), Hexes and Necromancy while not being a worshipper of one of the good gods?
Did anyone try doing such a playthrough, intentionally avoiding using all the mentioned things and not being an undead at the same time?

Ah, someone else playing for flavour, good man! Yeah, go for it.

Hexes is meh, and Necromancy is good but by no means essential. You may not even ever find a vampiric/draining weapon. Avoiding Polearms and Long Blades as your primary weapon would be advisable, since demon items are some of the best of their kind. Just ID wands before using them if you want to avoid a Drain Wand. If you want to be extra picky, you can also avoid distortion brand (its chaos!) and summon scroll (since that makes a free abomination with necromancy).

[eharper256]

I think you mean maces and flails, not long blades.

Why? Is there a demon mace now?

I thought that would be a safe category for him. He's gotta avoid Long Blades due to Demonblade being part of it, right?

[galehar]

Why? Is there a demon mace now?

No but there's a demon whip.

[eharper256]

Why? Is there a demon mace now?

No but there's a demon whip.

Yeah, of course! I just closed the forum and then thought of it, I'm an idiot.

I guess you're restricted to Short Blades and Staves then.

[Mackerel]

Yet surely he can use long blades, and simply avoid the demon blades? And can wield maces and flails, and never pick up a demon whip?

[MyOtheHedgeFox]

Well, actually, now that I've asked for it, is there even a slight chance of getting eudemon or blessed weapons without killing their owners and not being among the followers of The Shining One?
Aren't double or triple swords, bardiches and rare whips good enough to substitute for demon-crafted weapons?

By the way: QUARTERSTAVES. Another topic with quarterstaves. Looks like they are going to be the best main weapons for a non-dark adventurer from the very beginning.
Is it possible to cut bugs' corpses with lajatangs, not quite by the way? =)

Or nice axes of electrocution are good enough? I guess executioners' axes are not to be taken into account...

Short blades might lead you to a way of thief, which is a bit shady way of living. I don't think that dealing with somebody with a sabre is good enough without stabbing or relying on some Very Powerful Magic, and stabbing is actually a bad thing.


By the way, I was not talking about not even touching those weapons and avoiding them completely like a troll card, but rather not using them once you learned the lesson. The concept of not using something you know about, but being forgiven for using something bad you did not know about on the first place seems rather convenient for one who decides to go for a discovery.


Speaking about Trog: he is a god of destruction, after all, or rather a god of eternal battle for the living. Even though he is not considered evil, his means of dealing with things hardly are better.
Though the adventurer himself is not going to pacify each first opponent he sees without even taking a single sweep, I doubt that the rage his powers support is going to be cleansing. And a ban on magic blocks some quite useful non-dark abilities.


Actually, I tried a few playthroughs where my characters used only two spells of Necromancy school: Dispel Undead and Regeneration. That was pretty much enough, since I mostly relied on Ice or Air spells - a nice combination, I suspect, especially because of Freezing Cloud.

[Bim]

Doing a completely 'light path' game is easy enough, especially if you pick long blades. The Elven halls and hall of blades are guaranteed to give you something good/holy and if you worship TSO you're gonna have nooooo problem with demons/undead (which is pretty much all there is late game). The only problem is that getting to elven halls/Blades can be a bit difficult, especially without any of the 'dark stuff', plus, if you don't find a weapon of flaming, hydra's are going to be a painn.

[MyOtheHedgeFox]

Hm-m-m... Let me ask a fairly weird question.

Which spells you consider evil, apart from the necromantic charms?
(in example, Mephitic Cloud might be considered evil because it does not let your opponent escape)

[eharper256]

Depends on if you class 'dishonorable' as evil. If you do, a good chunk of the spells are included; I mean its not really honourable to break reality and fling a roasting hot ball of flames.

And to take another tact, smiting evil is still killing, and in effect, doing anything that kills is evil.

But, TSO is generally fine with dishonorable, just not with cowardly (poison, attacking the helpless, not giving quarter), for example.

I guess in the end its all rather grey.

[sir_laser]

Although the good gods in Crawl are portrayed as adhering invariably to moral absolutes, to the extent that even the unwitting use by the player's character of items tagged 'evil' is cause for divine punishment, there is a certain degree of ambiguity in the notion of evil in Stone Soup. Consider that the ordinary practice of an adventurer is to kill and in many cases eat an entire dungeon full of living beings, many of them sapient. In other words, a player can expect, even in low-rune runs, to perform actions constitutive of genocide. Devotion to one of the good gods hardly alters this. It would not be unusual for a favored worshipper of The Shining One, for example, an ostensibly “good” god who frowns on indiscriminate slaughter, to nevertheless kill all, and eat many, of the elves, orcs and nagas in the entire dungeon.

It is unclear what if anything the various societies of dungeon denizens, which, judging by the absence of intra-monster violence within the dungeon,are wholly peaceful, have done to deserve this horrific retribution. On the face of it, the adventurer is simply seeking the Orb. Since “evil”-aligned adventurers act in essentially the same way that “good” ones do in pursuit of this goal, it is unlikely that the finding of this orb is a sufficiently good act in itself to justify the avalanche of butchery.

In the final analysis, it seems that Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is the story of a peaceful, multi-cultural and multi-species society falling victim to a single adventurer's avarice and quest for glory. By the time the worshiper of Zin has waded through the rivers of blood he must spill in order to claim the Orb, it is more than a little difficult to distinguish him from a devotee of Makhleb.

Against the background of the game's overarching narrative, namely murder, cannibalism, genocide and theft on an industrial scale introduced to utopia, the Necromantic spell “Regeneration”, a spell anathematised as “evil” by the “good” gods, hardly compares.

[XuaXua]

Demon whips outclass the other M&F by so much that choosing that weapon class is pretty much saying you want to use one.

Holy Scourge.

[sir_laser]

Demon whips outclass the other M&F by so much that choosing that weapon class is pretty much saying you want to use one.

Holy Scourge.

Good luck w/ the Holy pan level or your Mennas spawn then.

[eharper256]

Demon whips outclass the other M&F by so much that choosing that weapon class is pretty much saying you want to use one.

Holy Scourge.

Good luck w/ the Holy pan level or your Mennas spawn then.

Though if you have a Holy Scourge, that means you worship TSO, and hence Mennas is neutral and so are angels.

[sir_laser]

Though if you have a Holy Scourge, that means you worship TSO, and hence Mennas is neutral and so are angels.

Not necessarily. I've seen Daevas carry Holy Scourges before.
On that note, are seraphs implemented in 0.10? I saw one while playing trunk.

[MyOtheHedgeFox]

Well, actually, I agree to Sir Laser: playing without all the things dark would also mean avoiding killing (intelligent) creatures (unless they corner you) and eating their meat (Zin Conduct).

[sir_laser]

I'd like to see a new updated record on the most pacifistic game.

[MyOtheHedgeFox]

What about Food acquirement? It still gives a decent amount of food.

[crate]

A few days ago someone got the orb on a complete pacifist (well, killed one toadstool, but I assume you're not really going to count that) and then died to bad teleports: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/hippy ... 065848.txt

[MyOtheHedgeFox]

Nice attempt!