Deleting player ghosts

[bricks]

I'm pretty new to Crawl and a fairly crappy player (my greatest claim is a MiBe with three runes that I'm too scared to play). It still takes me a few attempts to get a new character off the ground; just recently this resulted in my very exciting HOFE (found a ring of wizardry, a ring of magic power, and a staff of power, plus a Jiyva altar all within the first five floors...) getting nuked by a previous incarnation. I like the idea of a little persistence between games, but this is really a pain. Can I get rid of player ghosts by deleting the bones.* files in my saves directory, and is there a config setting which would prevent player ghosts entirely?

[Davion Fuxa]

You can't prevent your Ghosts from being made, but yes, you can delete the Bones files to get rid of them.

However, something you might do is attempt to clear out the ghosts yourself. Ghouls, Mummies, and Vampires never leave ghosts, and Berserker Background characters tend to do quite well in Ghost clean up - consider attempting to make some of these characters to destroy menacing ghosts. Of course if they are too hard for you to kill on purpose, then perhaps just forge ahead and come back to kill them later.

[bricks]

Great, I'll do that. Yeah, running away has generally been my strategy. For various reasons the ghosts seem harder to shake. It seems like they always appear awake, unlike true uniques. Throwing a bunch of garbage characters through the grinder seems like a waste of time, and far too metagamey.

[SchwaWarrior]

If you hate your own player ghosts so much, you're gonna have nightmares once you meet Mara. Hehehe...

[Psieye]

For mid-game ghosts and beyond, necromancers with Dispel Undead will clean them up.

[palin]

For mid-game ghosts and beyond, necromancers with Dispel Undead will clean them up.

or just make a TSO melee character from the start. It will build piety slooooowly but if you happen to find some imps, orc priests or zombie/skeletons maybe you can bring cleansing flame online to kill post-lair ghosts.
Yes, MiBe are easier to do ghost dispatching...

[Styro]

If you are playing on Windows you can create a batch file in the same directory as your Crawl.exe. Name it something clever like Crawl.bat. Put this inside:

del saves\bones.*
start crawl.exe

Just double-click the batch file when you want to play Crawl and it will automatically clean out any bones files before you play.