The Tavern

Here is a guide to dying in crawl:

1. Retreat into an unknown area such as down stairs to a new floor or into the black area of the floor you're on. You will almost always run into something else and whatever you're retreating from will catch up to you and kill you.

2. Engage something you've never seen before and get killed when something unexpected happens.

3. Get poisoned in the early game without any health potions and continue to fight thinking you can just shake it off. You usually end up heavily poisoned and die.

4. Overestimate your abilities and think you can just use berserk or might to take out a group of enemies without luring them into a hallway. You will die.

Any other tips are welcome.

Play an Ogre.

6. Think you've determined a wand is haste or healing by process of elimination. Test ID it on yourself to prove it.

7. Continue playing at 2:00 am, instead of going to bed.

8. Go through a trap door or escape hatch in slime.

9. Learn a spell you've never learned before. You'll almost certainly kill yourself by accident with it.

10. Switch from a keyboard with a numpad to one without. For a few games, you'll get killed just by moving wrong.

11. Multitask- try to play crawl while doing something else at the same time.

12. Save a character and don't come back for at least a week. Death is guaranteed as soon as you pick them up again.

13. Try to fully complete branches before moving on- ie, don't skip the branch ends.

14. Give your character a creative, original name. Or name them after someone you care about.

15. Try again with a a race class combo you just almost won with. You will die before the temple.

16. Get frustrated after almost winning with a specific race class combo and play something completely different. You will die before the temple.

17. Start a character for a sole purpose of exploiting some cool trick you only heard about because it got nerfed out of trunk. You will always die before getting to try it.

18. Worship Xom. Now, sometimes Xom will keep you alive- he is the god of chaos after all- but putting your hand together over his altar is a form of attempted suicide. Management is not responsible (or liable) should your attempt fail.

That's enough for now. These are fun!

Play a mummy.

Alternatively, trying to lure monsters in hallways with orc priests involved. This is most of the time a very effective tactic, but the priests will happily smite your face while you deal with the other critters.

Underestimate creatures based on their names/appearance/description.

Thinking that you can "take another hit before the teleport works or before you drink the heal wounds potion".

Play an AC based character (0.6 and 0.7).

Play a deep elf without train fighting.

Smiting enemies while using Beogh's Water Walking ability.

Using electrocution weapons while in water.

Finding Nikola and having less than 150 hp.

Forget that when the Ice Form ends you will drown.

Going upstairs with hydra next to you.

Keep fighting when both you and the monster are nearly dead, because you just need one more shot to finish them.

When you are in trouble, don't bother looking if you have any abilities, spells, potions, scrolls or wands that might help. Just keep bashing or running, because that's kept you alive so far.

More:

Play Troll/Ghoul and go unarmed vs Hydras.

Play Demigods. You will die of boredom.

Use Ring of Ice and die to the first <creature with fire attack> that appears in the dungeon (happened to me once, yay). Better if you're a Mummy, because then you will have rF--.

Using Makhleb's Greater Servant with low invocation. Yeah, the chance of hostile is low, but the first one that shows up WILL kill you, specially if its an executioner.

Using Makhleb's Greater Destruction/Spark Card next to you. You will NOT want an Orb of Electrocution exploding on your face for 100+ damage.

Start starving while next to an Orange Statue and eat a ration right there instead of backing off.

Try casting spells rated "Terrible" and watch the miscast fireworks.

Decide you're going to play a specific combo until you win. You'll never reach Lair, if you're lucky.

/thread

Deep Dwarf Fighter=instadeath

Put off reading that scroll of teleport for 'just one more turn'.

thanks for the great thread, guys! Imagine my frustration when I accidentally did a 15 runer with a mummy warrior--I'll make sure that doesn't happen again.