Tricks to stop being bloody stupid?

[Odds]

I just racked up YASD. It was utterly unnecessary; there were several opportunities to live, right up until the last turn, when I took an action with maybe 80% chance to kill my enemy when I had a 100% safe blinking escape route.

I'd like to stop dying in completely stupid ways, but I can't seem to stop this pattern of occasionally playing hastily and incurring a small but significant risk of death. Anyone have any tips for breaking the habit?

I'm not looking for tactical advice here - just ways to get myself to play more carefully and reduce deaths I'm *already* good enough to avoid.

[moocowmoocow]

Something that helps me a lot is sticking to time limits. I like to play about an hour, and if I go longer I tend to make a lot more bad decisions. So that, and making it a habit to stop and cycle through your abilities and inventory whenever you're in a very threatening situation.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Some time ago I used a lua code that automatically saved game and exit when I lost too much HP between my actions (it was customizable percent of max HP), that greatly helped, I had to load the game and it meant I was completely aware that I was in danger. Sometimes I even analyzed my log file before loading the game to see what happened and what options I have.

[Implojin]

Much of this advice is remedial, but I'm posting it anyway:


Win some characters with an empty body armour slot. Finishing a couple of games with no GDR and low AC really helps to recalibrate your sense of when not to engage.

Win a few CKs. Safe gameplay actions with Xom overlap very heavily with general good play habits.

Save and quit whenever you notice that you've made multiple misplays in succession, and pick up your game another time. Mummy fatigue is real, folks.

Setup force_more_message and flash_screen_message in your rcfile, for every monster that can do dangerous things. paralyse, torment, hellfire, dispel undead, wielding distortion, etc. Anything that could cause problems if you're multitapping and haven't noticed the monster onscreen can have its own more/flash, if you have a tendency towards sloppy play.

In your rcfile, set hp_colour = 85:yellow, 75:lightred, 65:red . This is a nice visual reminder to reconsider your situation at less than full HP.

If you use autofight, set autofight_stop higher than its default percentage in your rcfile. Anywhere from autofight_stop = 65 to autofight_stop = 85 should be fine. Your goal here is to forcibly slow down your gameplay when your character has lost HP.

Make a habit of equipping enough MR that you can reliably resist Sentinel's Mark. (? / m sentinel enter b) This is a catch-all approach to resisting things like paralyse, confuse, and spell banishment. (You should obviously use other tactics to minimize your chances of being hit with those spells as well.) Walking around with low MR, when MR exists in your game (that you can equip without hurting your character in other ways), puts your character at unnecessary risk.

As a flat rule, don't try to save escape resources, buff consumables, and evokables for later. If you have a thing that can make a situation less dangerous, use it! This applies equally to ?acquirement, ?enchant armour, and ?enchant weapon. DCSS is hardest at the beginning of the game, and saving resources is an approach that will get your characters killed.

Don't forget to level Fighting and Dodging on every character. (Sub early Dodging for Armour or Shields on some characters based on aptitudes and size, but in general, tend towards Dodging.) If you are playing a race with low HP growth, get even more Fighting. Many situations in Crawl that would be dangerous for a poorly skilled character simply aren't for one with lots of HP and good defenses.

[Utis]

One thing that I found helps: Keep a crawl journal. After each death, document the situation and describe in clear sentences what mistakes you made.

That requires a little discipline. So, next time you run into a dangerous situation, you're gonna ask yourself: "What's more work, disengaging or having to write yet another journal entry?"

[Airwolf]

Amphetamines.

[tabstorm]

Play better characters to learn how to play, and stop outsmarting yourself.

[stickyfingers]

Stop conserving consumables. There's plenty of them.

[Siegurt]

Also, play in smaller increments, and when you are not tired.

[JFunk]

Watch zxc's streak game videos on Youtube for an example of maximally intentional play.

Recalibrate your mental game. Give yourself a pat on the back every time you steamroll over a potentially dangerous situation by using the right resources, or when you dump an empty wand instead of a full one. The resource management minigame of crawl has a gambling dynamic. It is all too easy to take small risks in order to conserve resources and get that little dopamine rush from the gamble paying off and watching your resources pile up. Replace that faulty reward circuit with one that rewards smart consumption.

A thought exercise: Imagine the entire course of a game abstracted to two lists. One is a list of all resources that will be acquired over the course of that game. The other is a list of all hostile encounters. The resource management part of Crawl comes down to distributing the items on the first list among the items on the second list. Think of the nastiest situations and uniques in the game: the unexpected hordes, the shaftings, Sigmund, Mara, Mennas, etc. Of course you would allocate some of your resources toward those situations. So when those situations arise, don't debate with yourself whether you "need" to use them. Don't even think about conserving. The situation has come, so use the resources that--given full information--you would have allocated for yourself in exactly this situation. If the fight almost seems to go too easily, don't be tempted to think that you wasted the consumable. Instead, congratulate yourself, because the tactic worked.

Play a very weak combo that really needs to wring the maximal advantage out of every situation, has to make the most out of every charge of that first wand of confusion or slowing, etc. Realize that you should use the same techniques to tip the scales in your favor even with more powerful combos. During tourney, I used a FeTm as a warm-up character, meticulously clearing a few levels before playing more typical combos, and it helped slow down my play a lot. (And that FeTm eventually ascended, with the help of a lot of good luck, as well as the benefit of short, careful play sessions.)

Never get in a fair fight. Instead of rushing through the levels, think of each encounter as a chance to find more ways to maximize your advantage in each fight. Think of ways to keep that polearm opponent from getting a free first hit. Instead of just engaging that pack of orcs or yaks, hit a choice few with a wand of confusion or enslavement. Carrying around exp-gated consumables like phial of floods or lamp of fire and just leaving them charged? That's a waste. Make sure they are recharging as often as possible by actually using them. Are you a draconian? You should probably be starting many or most fights with your breath weapon so you can immediately start recharging it. After a while, you will develop a litany of small advantages and personal tricks that will become habit and add up to great effect.

The previous points are part of a larger one: don't be bored. If you're bored with a given combo, or even a living character, play something else. I've done remarkably well on weak combos I've never played before, and won a few of them, just because they were different and interesting and forced me to think carefully and play my best. If you are running the same combo over and over, and one dies after some investment, that is a recipe for tilt. Psychologically, there is a desire to compare the new character to the previous one and rush to "catch up," which in turn leads to worse play. If you're susceptible to this kind of tilt, try playing a different type of character to keep things fresh, or just taking a break.

[TonberryJam]

1. Understand how your play. You play like the Minotaur Berserker.
2. Easiest deaths are dungeon levels 1-10 if you play sloppy.
3. Never approach enemies. use "s" to wait if melee. Stabbers are exceptions if monsters asleep.
4. Moving backwards 1-2 steps each encounter helps.
5. Always tactically retreat to walls, corners or hallways.
6. If you encounter a group that has even one non-popcorn monster, follow steps 3 and 5.

[Nino]

3. Stabbers are exceptions if monsters asleep.

No. Get their attention and lure them back one at a time too, unless you know they are completely alone.

[lethediver]

Play a Deep Dwarf. It teaches you that all health loss is bad not just the one that kills you.

[severen]

I think it kind of comes down to belief. I find I play better when I play a delicate species like octopode or felid simply because I believe I could die very fast.

And by belief I mean I died in enough situations enough times to say to myself "Yep, can't really do that; its just too risky" and accept that its true.

So if you look at your situation. In a situation where you have an 80% chance to kill with this action but the alternative 20% is guaranteed death; those are shitty odds in a perma-death game. 20% chance of death is bad. When you play the delicate species, especially in the early game it basically pounds that into your head.

However when you switch over to a stranger species or get a lucky drop that can all go out the window and you might start doing that again.

But in the end the delicate species help you form a "Murhpy's law"/"Assume the worst DOES happen" point of view. Basically you should never put yourself into a situation where your next move has a chance to kill you. Its the difference between COULD and WILL. If you have 1 AC 20 EV and 25 HP then meleeing an Ogre COULD kill you, but you should operate as if it WILL kill you. Yes certainly that 20 EV will make you survive much longer on average. But you are still one move away from dying.

There are many ways to refine, elaborate and/or manage this basic idea. But if your next decision has ANY chance of risking you dying then ALWAYS opt for something to decrease that chance (preferably eliminates it). In fact you should continue to do this until you either have eliminated the chance of dying or run out of options. Efficiency goes out the window when you are about to die. In some regards it can be very hard to "waste" a consumable on something that is only a 1% chance of killing you. But this is the wrong mentality you should NEVER allow yourself into a situation where there is ANY chance of dying on the next turn without having run out of options or having made a mistake etc.

Basically you have not gotten to a point where you believe this cushion is necessary and that it is ok to sometimes gamble. When you play a delicate species, you die so much when you gamble that it basically forces you to change your beliefs.

It is easy to say "Oh well you got greedy." And this is essentially accurate, but the deeper point is that on some level you still believe that an 80% chance to win is good odds. This is fundamentally wrong. In a permadeath game a 20% chance of getting killed is HORRIBLE odds. As soon as your HP is at a point where you can be killed on the next turn you absolutely should attempt to get "safe" in some manner it doesn't matter if you have 100 AC or 100 EV or whatever, if there is any chance at all assume you will die if you allow it to happen. Preferably you actually give yourself two or even 3 turns using some foresight. But for simplicity's sake if you have 50 HP and you know something can hit for 25, you could attack, if it hits you for 25 and you hit it and leave only 2 hp on it you should run no questions asked. You will probably kill it, but it can kill you in the next turn. You basically have to form the belief that this branch of your decision tree is only for when you have no options (like its faster than you and all your consumables are gone, then roll the dice). If it hits you for 10 then you have less leeway, but you will, no matter what, still have another turn to get away if it hits for 25.

This is of course extremely simplistic and I am not taking situations like some other monsters wandering in etc and leaving extra cushions for these cases etc. There are a whole host of other tactics to be optimally "safe" and frankly I often don't even do those on the delicate guys when I want to be kind of fast. But what i am saying here is very narrow because you know you could have lived but didn't and did the "risky" move anyway I believe this is because of belief. In general if you can get an octopode or similar to clear the lair fairly often you will probably have had the belief pounded into your brain that "luck" is a bad strategy. Yes the game is highly random, but that just determines whether you flee on turn 3 or turn 5.

[stoneychips]

I'm sure it's been said many times before, but especially if you've been having an easy stretch with the character... Slow the heck down and look at everything. Do it more than once when things are looking tough.

There's so much stuff in inventory and abilities that I rarely use, and then later I'm like, duh you know that really could have made it a difference in that close pinch situation if I'd remembered I had it.......

[Utis]

I'd like to repeat my advice of keeping a crawl journal or scrapbook. Maybe I got too flippant too soon, assuming that it's value is obvious: It's not actually my idea, I got it from advice given to chess players. Serious chess players typically do a so-called "post mortem" after a game, analysing and evaluating positions, looking for missed tactical opportunities, bad moves etc.. At least one book I know strongly recommends that learning players should write all that down in a scrapbook, in order to identify bad recurring patterns.

I'm not looking for tactical advice here - just ways to get myself to play more carefully and reduce deaths I'm *already* good enough to avoid.

Not too long ago I was in the same situation and I actually started too keep a journal in a text file on my computer. Every time I died in crawl, I would download the morgue file, fire up Emacs, copy the ASCII "screenshot" of the situation to my journal, describe what happened from my (still fresh) memory and write down in clear sentences all that I did wrong. Starting from why I didn't recognise the potential danger of the situation a couple of dozen turns before it became dangerous (with being specific about which signs of danger I missed or ignored) down to the last "being too parsimonious with that scroll of blinking". That helped a lot with enforcing pattern recognition of dangerous situation and with the formation of better habits. (Oh, I'm still a very bad player, but nowadays I die most of the time rather conscious of what's coming to me, because I'm too lazy to bother.)

The thing is, if you're playing hasty, like me, then you're probably just not the type of person who likes to play carefully and attentively all the time. And you are not very likely to be able to change your personality. So, what you need to do is to enforce pattern recognition of dangerous situations and to enforce the habit of slowing down when that pattern recognition kicks in. Doing a "post mortem" and writing it down in a journal/scrapbook for a while helps enormously with that.

[Rast]

Play a Deep Dwarf. It teaches you that all health loss is bad not just the one that kills you.