Hydra Unavoidable Death?

[arandomperson12]

I opened a door as a OpTm with 77 hp (fully healed), and a 7 headed hydra immediately came out and bit me for 50 damage. Had I not been lucky, it would have one shot me. Thoughts?

[CypherZel]

Death was avoidable, you didn't have to open the door did you?

[VeryAngryFelid]

Were you in ice form? I explore in ice form if I have a ring with rF+.

[lethediver]

True. He also couldve rolled a MiBe instead, or avoided it by not playing crawl.

[Elitist]

I opened a door as a OpTm with 77 hp (fully healed), and a 7 headed hydra immediately came out and bit me for 50 damage. Had I not been lucky, it would have one shot me. Thoughts?

R A N D O M E N E R G Y

[jwoodward48ss]

Were you in ice form? I explore in ice form if I have a ring with rF+.

Are you serious? Do you have an init.txt and macros so that you just press 4 whenever "your form is running out" comes up and autoexplore stops?

[VeryAngryFelid]

Are you serious? Do you have an init.txt and macros so that you just press 4 whenever "your form is running out" comes up and autoexplore stops?

Yes, I am serious.

runrest_stop_message += Your transformation is almost over

and macro a key to z<spell letter>

[goodcoolguy]

I don't understand. You say you didn't die, right?

edit: To elaborate, the difference in probability between getting hit for around 50 damage by a 7-headed hydra and 77 damage by the same hydra is huge, probably a factor of over 100. So you're talking about a rare event, you open the door to an awake monster who can't open the door but still poses a significant melee threat which then double moves you, and a highly improbable damage roll to produce your "unavoidable death." Even in this remarkable case you cite, this confluence of factors is not present.

[Shard1697]

But they could have with different damage rolls, is their point.

[goodcoolguy]

see edit, this is a lot less likely than they probably think.

more: He says he was "lucky," but in fact the situation he describes is quite unlucky and he still didn't die. Like, I'm not too sure, but I think 50 is already an above average damage roll for this situation.

[VeryAngryFelid]

7-headed hydra can deal up to 7*18=126 damage (63 average damage assuming 100% accuracy). It has HD 13 like green death so I used fsim with green death (it has a single melee attack): with EV 11 accuracy 71%, with EV 15 accuracy 61%. 50 damage seems to be slightly above average value in any case.

[goodcoolguy]

Right, if you assume 66% accuracy and 3 player ac, you get something like 35.6 average damage with standard deviation about 6. 77 damage would be a crazy outlier roll.

edit: okay, I think the odds of getting hit for over 77 damage in this situation were bit over 1 in 200, whereas over 50 is like 1 in 5.

[CypherZel]

True. He also couldve rolled a MiBe instead, or avoided it by not playing crawl.

MiBe is the only way you can play the game and not get salty after a death

[BabyRage]

How do you die with MiBe?

[CypherZel]

How do you die with MiBe?

Let's start that again, you die by playing extremely risky

[dowan]

Threads like this are funny. You realize that first lizard you ran into could have hit you for max damage every turn, you could have missed every turn, and that death would also have been unavoidable. That could happen with every single speed 10 or faster monsters (The speed 10 monster could get lucky on his random energy, so you can't get away).

There's no need to prove the possibility of unavoidable death, or autoexplore death (not completely unavoidable, but in some ways just as bad). It's quite possible, as you see here, but it is rare. Dpeg has said recently he'd prefer the chances of unavoidable death would be about 20% instead of the 1% it is now!

[CypherZel]

Threads like this are funny. You realize that first lizard you ran into could have hit you for max damage every turn, you could have missed every turn, and that death would also have been unavoidable. That could happen with every single speed 10 or faster monsters (The speed 10 monster could get lucky on his random energy, so you can't get away).

There's no need to prove the possibility of unavoidable death, or autoexplore death (not completely unavoidable, but in some ways just as bad). It's quite possible, as you see here, but it is rare. Dpeg has said recently he'd prefer the chances of unavoidable death would be about 20% instead of the 1% it is now!

How do you even accurately measure what deaths are avoidable or unavoidable and if you do show mr evidence of you checking all the deaths in crawl. Also you are speaking as if because dpeg said it it's an amazing idea (it is a terrible idea), literally nothing is added to the game if you can't avoid death, the entire point crawl is to create situations that can be avoided in some sense and your ability to avoid them is rewarded with progression and ultimately a win, and you can choose if you want to improve your ability to do this or not.

[BabyRage]

instead of the 1% it is now!

How did you calculate that?

[dowan]

Hah, well I don't think it's a good idea at all, I'm just pointing out that a seemingly quite influential dev was talking about it just recently, and it seemed relevant to the conversation.

1% seems to be a fairly well accepted estimate around here, I've not checked it in any way, and like you say, how the hell would you go about calculating that?

I was just trying to point out that you don't have to prove unavoidable deaths are possible, the devs not only know they're possible, at least one of them wants a lot more of them!

[duvessa]

1% is far higher than the actual figure

[dowan]

I suppose it could be, once again, it's pretty hard to test. Do you have any evidence for your far less than 1%?

It doesn't really matter what the exact chances are, suffice it to say they are possible, and the devs know it happens. There's no need to prove it could happen, it's a trivial exercise to come up with scenarios where it could happen. If you have a 1000 sided die you don't need to roll it a bunch of times to prove it's possible to roll a 1.

[duvessa]

I suppose it could be, once again, it's pretty hard to test. Do you have any evidence for your far less than 1%?

The game guarantees at least one player action worth of entropy before a monster comes into view, the entropy generated from each player action is very high, and well under 0.1% of characters die before turn 10.

[dowan]

That's... certainly an assertion, with a fact mixed in, but I see no evidence, or even a claim of evidence, that this gives you any kind of number as to unavoidable deaths. I assume there's some subtext I'm not reading that makes that statement less of a non-sequitur.

I also want to stress when I talk about unavoidable deaths (and I assume most people) I mean a death that was not avoidable using information available. For example, in the case of the OP, if he had actually died from the hydra from full health upon opening a door, I'd consider that death unavoidable, even though perhaps it could be avoided by not opening the door. This is because there's no way of knowing what was behind the door.

That gets messy of course when you get into strategic considerations. If you die from a paralyzer getting you when you came into LOS, maybe it could have been avoided by stacking more mR, or training more fighting. So I guess there's a division between 'tactically unavoidable death' and 'completely unavoidable death'. I guess the 'completely unavoidable deaths' are extremely hard to imagine outside of extremely early game, but that's mostly because it's easier to come up with contrived circumstances that would have avoided the death the further into the game you go. And that's not even going into the whole "You could have avoided that death by not being an octopode, by worshipping a different god, etc."

[duvessa]

Of course it doesn't give you an exact number. Computing the exact chance of an unavoidable death occurring would require more computing resources than exist in the universe, and then some. But it should be easy to see that 1% is way too high.

I also want to stress when I talk about unavoidable deaths (and I assume most people) I mean a death that was not avoidable using information available. For example, in the case of the OP, if he had actually died from the hydra from full health upon opening a door, I'd consider that death unavoidable, even though perhaps it could be avoided by not opening the door. This is because there's no way of knowing what was behind the door.

I don't see how this logic could lead to anything other than "all deaths are unavoidable", since as far as I can tell, your hypothetical player knows absolutely nothing. I'd wager that even the newest players know that doors can have monsters behind them, and I'm pretty sure the OP knew that hydras existed since they knew hydras can do more than 50 damage, so they knew that the door could have had a hydra behind it.

[dowan]

So is optimal play to never open doors? Sometimes you have to.

[duvessa]

There are a lot of things you can do before opening a door that will prevent you from instantly dying to a hydra behind it.

[dowan]

Well I'm sure you know exactly what to do before opening doors to prevent hydra deaths, but trying to tease one detail of your argument out at a time is exhausting, so I'll just pretend my response to babyrage was the end of this thread...

[VeryAngryFelid]

I suppose it could be, once again, it's pretty hard to test. Do you have any evidence for your far less than 1%?

The game guarantees at least one player action worth of entropy before a monster comes into view, the entropy generated from each player action is very high, and well under 0.1% of characters die before turn 10.

I don't understand. Are you implying here that all crawl games are won in less than 100 turns?
Let's assume that an average 3 runes game lasts for 30k turns, how much entropy (or whatever term you use) you need to make 50% characters die before 30k turns? I am lazy to calculate but I think it is much less that 0.001 and yet we lose 50% characters without any problems.

[Siegurt]

Well I'm sure you know exactly what to do before opening doors to prevent hydra deaths, but trying to tease one detail of your argument out at a time is exhausting, so I'll just pretend my response to babyrage was the end of this thread...

Well, what seems obvious to me, is that since the OP was playing a trasmuter, i assume that being transmuted into a form with better defenses (more hps, better ac, say ice form maybe) before opening a door into potentially dangerous territory is the thing to do.

I mean it seems like you always want to encounter any new area at max range whenever possible, and if it isn't possible, you either just don't explore that area, or you go in with as much reusable protection as you have available (whatever that might look like)

I can't verify what the global unpreventable death percentages are, but mine are way under 1% (having played many thousands of games at this point, I can only think of two, both very near the beginning of the game, one of which is no longer possible) i have to assume the global rate is similar to my personal one.

[duvessa]

I don't understand. Are you implying here that all crawl games are won in less than 100 turns?
Let's assume that an average 3 runes game lasts for 30k turns, how much entropy (or whatever term you use) you need to make 50% characters die before 30k turns? I am lazy to calculate but I think it is much less that 0.001 and yet we lose 50% characters without any problems.

In this context, entropy refers to how many possible states the game can be in after some number of actions. More entropy means fewer unavoidable deaths, not more.

[VeryAngryFelid]

In this context, entropy refers to how many possible states the game can be in after some number of actions. More entropy means fewer unavoidable deaths, not more.

I think when people talk about 1% unavoidable deaths, they are not talking about "1% of all possible game states includes a dead character who died without player mistake", they are talking about deaths, only 1% of deaths happens without player making a mistake.
It's like if I meet a dinosaur tomorrow and it has 50% chance to be male, it does not mean I will meet a male dinosaur with 50% probability tomorrow

[duvessa]

only 1% of deaths happens without player making a mistake.

That's what I'm talking about as well.

[VeryAngryFelid]

only 1% of deaths happens without player making a mistake.

That's what I'm talking about as well.

Then I don't see how states are relevant. It does not matter which path you walk before you open a door.

[duvessa]

Okay, I'm not exactly saying that "X% of deaths happen without the player making a mistake", because if you take that sentence literally it makes no sense at all - it's entirely a measure of the frequency of player mistakes rather than the frequency of deaths that cannot be avoided.
My assertion is that with perfect play, far more than 99% of games are won.

[goodcoolguy]

Of course it doesn't give you an exact number. Computing the exact chance of an unavoidable death occurring would require more computing resources than exist in the universe, and then some. But it should be easy to see that 1% is way too high.

I also want to stress when I talk about unavoidable deaths (and I assume most people) I mean a death that was not avoidable using information available. For example, in the case of the OP, if he had actually died from the hydra from full health upon opening a door, I'd consider that death unavoidable, even though perhaps it could be avoided by not opening the door. This is because there's no way of knowing what was behind the door.

I don't see how this logic could lead to anything other than "all deaths are unavoidable", since as far as I can tell, your hypothetical player knows absolutely nothing. I'd wager that even the newest players know that doors can have monsters behind them, and I'm pretty sure the OP knew that hydras existed since they knew hydras can do more than 50 damage, so they knew that the door could have had a hydra behind it.

When I play f'real, I generally avoid opening doors unless there is no way around or I've seen the other side. That already reduces the odds of the hydra scenario, which is highly unlikely itself. Then you have to ask whether 77 hp was the right amount of hp for the character to have at this point of the game, any decisions he could've made that would improve his defenses and whether they were warranted, etc. I estimate the probability of this situation occurring and killing an "optimal player" as vanishingly small, like powerball odds.

The optimal player does know that he does not know what's on the other side of the door and takes that into account. Known unknowns, etc.

[Croases]

What Duvessa really means is "after the first few monster encounters, it is impossible to die a death that cannot be construed through unlikely optimal play scenarios to look like your fault". If your "mistake" (!) weren't "you shouldn't have opened the door" (like say, if you turned a corner into that hydra) it would be "you should've autoexplored in ice form", if not for that it would be "you should've shouted and waited for roar response first", if not for that it would be "you shouldn't have allocated your skills/picked your god like that"...

Essentially, hindsight is 20/20 and it is always possible to find some "optimal" path leading to non-death for every death scenario, and Tavern will abuse that fact to hell and back to maintain its "you won't die with optimal play" meme, even though nobody actually plays like that.

[BabyRage]

even though nobody actually plays like that.

Some people probably do, since they have 100% chance to win after 1 hour.

[Shard1697]

People who get the big streaks do actually play like that. example

[duvessa]

if you present a death as unavoidable, and there were ways to avoid it, it's likely that they will be pointed out. it's not some kind of elite tavernite conspiracy

also uh, you did notice that the OP didn't even actually die right