Avoiding getting shafted

[delarado]

Is there any way to avoid this? my last 3 games...

3 floors is quite a long way to fall... And I always get placed next to a bunch of monsters.

  Code:

12654 | D:9      | You fall through a shaft for 3 floors!
 12696 | D:12     | Noticed a red ugly thing
 12706 | D:12     | Slain by a red ugly thing

  Code:

2994 | D:3      | You fall through a shaft!
  3036 | D:4      | Slain by an orc

  Code:

3443 | D:4      | You fall through a shaft for 3 floors!
  3444 | D:7      | Noticed a slave
  3449 | D:7      | Shot with an arrow by a centaur

  Code:

 5131 | D:6      | You fall through a shaft for 3 floors!

  Code:

 1300 | D:2      | You fall through a shaft for 2 floors!

[Turukano]

Is there any way to avoid this?

There is only one solution if you don't want to be shafted. But it's very easy:

don't play crawl!

[njvack]

Ashenzari gives trap detection. Mostly, though, you're supposed to get shafted from time to time.

[delarado]

I've played about 10 games tonight. I'd estimate 50% of them I've gotten shafted and died! (OP edited)

[Magipi]

Don't play trunk until they fix the new trap thing. It happens sometimes that trunk is unplayable thanks to some new feature.

[delarado]

Excuse the noobness but I don't understand what trunk is. I've been clicking "Play 0.22" which appears to be later than trunk. Should I be playing 0.21?

It does feel like I get shafted a LOT. And it's generally multiple floors, early on. Last night I played probably 15 games as I'm trying to do a 15 rune DEFE game. I gave up in the end because I just kept getting shafted multiple floors and landing next to bands of centaurs and orc priests/wizards.

[TheMeInTeam]

I get shafted nearly every game at some point, but in > 300 games with a worse record than I care to admit I can still count the number of times it's directly resulted in unavoidable death on one hand, and might need 200 more to get to two hands. It happens rarely, most typically in first floor or two before you can ID pots/scrolls to avoid the blind read/quaff with 3-4 enemies on you (noting that a fraction of those your panic quaff/scroll fest works out).

Getting abyssed by zot traps is rough, but usually not lethal. Zot paralysis can be game over though.

There's no consistent way to avoid traps in crawl. They amount to an RNG-laden escape resource check. Most times if you've played carefully you can pass it. Sometimes you can't. I don't like them as a design concept but they're not sufficiently bad to prevent me playing the game.

[Stonar]

Excuse the noobness but I don't understand what trunk is. I've been clicking "Play 0.22" which appears to be later than trunk. Should I be playing 0.21?

It does feel like I get shafted a LOT. And it's generally multiple floors, early on. Last night I played probably 15 games as I'm trying to do a 15 rune DEFE game. I gave up in the end because I just kept getting shafted multiple floors and landing next to bands of centaurs and orc priests/wizards.

"Trunk" is the word we software engineer types call "the most up to date code." Every time someone makes a change to DCSS, they're making it to "trunk." So trunk is the cutting edge of the current code. The point releases (0.21, 0.22, etc.) are the stable releases, and don't get any of the new developments. So if you want something more stable, you should keep playing 0.22. If you want to see the new changes, as they happen, play trunk, but keep in mind that you're accepting some risk when you do that of something getting broken. It's pretty rare at this point, but it does happen occasionally.