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[Let's Play] Crawl: Ch. 9, Adventures in Probability

syrionsyrion Registered User regular
edited April 2010 in Games and Technology
Everybody always talks about roguelikes, but nobody ever does roguelikes. I decided that I would remedy that sad situation, and so here we have a [Let's Play] of Dungeon Crawl. It probably won't be quite as humorous as SimBen's Chrono Trigger LP, and I'm lacking in the "funny foreign accent" department, but...

Introduction

Crawl is the youngest of the "major" roguelikes. You may be more familiar with NetHack, Angband, or ADOM, the "big three," but I think it's a bit unfair that Crawl gets no attention.

Now, this is a Let's Play, but I think that's a little more literal in this case than it normally is. I'm going to be playing a game--well, a series of games, as I expect to repeatedly get owned in the pants--and you guys can participate. Since Crawl is a roguelike, each game should be different, and there are no pesky plot spoilers. Or plot, for that matter. Grab Crawl Stone Soup if you want to participate. Feel free to ask questions or talk about your own games here--it doesn't have to be limited to mine.

Ahem. So.

Chapter 1: Character Creation
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Here we are at the exciting opening screen. I don't really care about high score lists, so I'm just going to hit "enter" and hopefully get to something more fun.

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I must be new here. I usually run pretty mêlée heavy in roguelikes, but just for S'n'Gs I think I'll run something a bit outside my experience. I'm going to be a Mountain Dwarf...

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...healer. Yeah, this is going to be a barn burner of a game. :)

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"Wait a second!" you exclaim. "Those ASCII characters are remarkably well-rendered."
"That's correct," I say. "In fact, these ASCII characters aren't ASCII characters at all."
"I thought roguelikes had to be all @s and ds and dots."
"That's because you are dumb."

And it is! Actually, the fact that this relatively nice-looking and consistent tile-based version of Crawl exists is what inspired me to make a LP. Most roguelikes are fun, but it's a bit hard for an onlooker to be interested when it looks like the player is reading line noise for entertainment. I learned this first hand when my roommate in college saw me playing Angband--"Why are you playing that dot game?" he asked. Little did he know.

So, anyway. Let's check out my abilities. Press "a" (for ability, obviously), and then "*" (for "list," less obviously). Overwhelmed? Confused? Crawl has a very nice help system. Just hit ?. ?? gives you a brief description of the command list.

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"Destroy weapons?!" What the Hell! That's not what a dungeon crawl is supposed to be about. Except that, you know, we worship Elyvilon. Elyvilon hates sharp things. Let's hit up the religion screen ("^") for a description.

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Elyvilon is a pussy. That said, these powers will become very useful over the course of the game. Maybe. Actually, I'll probably just die on level three and have to start over, being humiliated in the process. Unless the reader has actually played a roguelike, in which case he will sigh and wait patiently for the next chapter of the exciting saga. Roguelikes are hard.

Anyway, let's make with the killin'. I mean, uh, crusading against violence, o righteous lord of peace. But first...

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A bit of an explication. I could of course forego all exploration and immediately dive down the stairs, but that has a tendency to lead very quickly to misery. Monsters get stronger as you descend, see. Anyway, let's grab that scroll and read it.
As you read the scroll, it crumbles to dust.
Your +0, +0 quarterstaff glows red for a moment.

Great. It was an enchant weapon scroll, and now I've got a +0, +1 quarterstaff. Time to crush some skulls. In the name of pacifism.

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Hmm. The leather armor apparently changes my sprite from a "priest" to something you'd see on very late night premium channels. Weird. The jackal sprite is also disturbingly cute, but I didn't think to grab a screen. (Note the exploration on the minimap.)

I did find (and read) a scroll of detect curse, which is always nice. If you're not familiar with the "ID game" in roguelikes, basically you don't know what any item is until you try it or identify it. I'm a fan of trying it. The worst that can happen is ignominous death, right? ...although even that's unlikely in Crawl, which has fewer negative items than, say, Angband.

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That's pretty much it for the first level. Very uneventful. I've got a decent amount of food (2 bread rations and 2 chokos), a missile weapon (darts from a disarmed trap), and a couple of potentially interesting items. I'm also remarkably tough for what basically amounts to a priest of a particularly stupid religion. Upon going up to level three--which happened in the fight I screenshotted above--I got an option to increase my strength, intelligence, or dexterity. Only then did I notice that Mr. Dwarven Doctor started with a headbreaker's strength.

Of course, I then increased it by a point. Never too much of a good thing, right? Next time I will be a bit more in-depth, but honestly the first level of Crawl consists of a) looking for food and b) hoping nothing spawned out of depth.

Chapter 2: Of Poisonous Priests and Obnoxious Orcs
Chapter 3: The Answer
Chapter 4: Yrch!
Chapter 5: The Lair of Beasts
Chapter 6: [Let's Play] Dungeon Cruel
Chapter 7: Rudely Stamped
Chapter 8: A Furious Buzzing
Chapter 9: Adventures in Probability

Disclaimer
I got permission from a mod to create this thread. Please do so yourself if you'd like to make a LP.

syrion on
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Posts

  • SilpheedSilpheed Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    This looks like a promising LP and it's already scored points with me by using a tileset instead of trying to make me see the fucking Matrix.

    Oh, and once your pussy healer meets a painful death I vote that you play as a Kobold Thief :P

    Silpheed on
  • syrionsyrion Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Silpheed wrote: »
    This looks like a promising LP and it's already scored points with me by using a tileset instead of trying to make me see the fucking Matrix.

    I actually prefer ASCII for the gameplay--it's easier to tell what's going on, once you get used to it--but for the casual onlooker it just makes no sense. Most graphical options for roguelikes suck, but this one looks okay.
    Oh, and once your pussy healer meets a painful death I vote that you play as a Kobold Thief :P

    I'll consider it. You might be surprised, though. Crawl isn't as prescriptive as some other games. As the game continues I will gain skills like throwing weapons and using a bit of magic. Hell, if I really wanted I could change my religion at the Temple and become a barbarian midway through.

    It'd just make the game ridiculously hard(er).

    syrion on
  • Rhesus PositiveRhesus Positive GNU Terry Pratchett Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Sweet - this looks like a LP that's sure to result in awesomeness (via death).

    Rhesus Positive on
    [Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
  • CentipeedCentipeed Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Am I an idiot for suggesting that this would be better off as a video LP? You've put some serious effort into just the first section, but it seems like describing all the encounters of note and the items you pick up, instead of doing it on-the-fly, as it happens, is going to take a whole load more effort.

    The effort to make a screenshot LP entertaining, in this case, is probably going to be much more than making a video LP entertaining, is all I'm saying.

    Centipeed on
  • syrionsyrion Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Sweet - this looks like a LP that's sure to result in awesomeness (via death).

    You are basically playing with house money.
    Centipeed wrote:
    Am I an idiot for suggesting that this would be better off as a video LP? You've put some serious effort into just the first section, but it seems like describing all the encounters of note and the items you pick up, instead of doing it on-the-fly, as it happens, is going to take a whole load more effort.

    The effort to make a screenshot LP entertaining, in this case, is probably going to be much more than making a video LP entertaining, is all I'm saying.

    Crawl is fun, but visually interesting it ain't. Furthermore, since it's turn based, I will sometimes pause for a while and just consider my options. Turn based and visually unappealing don't go so well with real-time video, especially given that I'm not really good at on-the-fly repartee. Who wants to listen to me hum to myself as I slaughter kobolds, and periodically say things like "blasted random number generator" and "how can I be so unlucky?" in a Southern accent?

    syrion on
  • syrionsyrion Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Chapter 2: Of Poisonous Priests and Obnoxious Orcs
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    Here we are on level two of the dungeon. Looks boring so far. Crawl must be losing its edge. In the old days, three or four hobgoblins would have spawned around me and I would have died in two turns.

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    Oh. There you are. That's just a kobold, though, and kobolds are weak as hell. Let's just kill him, destroy some bolts to get in good with the Pansy God...

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    ...and run into a hobgoblin. Well, this isn't so bad. It's ideal, actually, for one purpose. Remember how I mentioned getting darts from a disarmed trap? This is a great opportunity for me to use them. Throughout the game, the skills I use will be the skills which improve. So chuck away, young headbreaking pacifist dwarf doctor!

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    I quickly find a potion of heal wounds, which to be honest makes me worry a little. It's superstitious, but whenever I find something nice (and I do love potions) I immediately start to think about what the random number god (RNG) could be planning. In this case...

    5.png
    It was a snake and a giant newt in a low-visibility spot. These monsters should, theoretically, be extremely easy... but this is crawl, and they're not. The snake is out of depth by a few levels, and hits mre pretty hard. He also poisons me. I used a prayer of purification to survive the poisoning and then drank a potion of healing to survive the newt.

    After that little adventure, frankly, the rest of level two was boring. I picked up a few piles of coins and killed a newt. I also butchered the rotting corpse of my enemy, the snake, just because. You can't eat snake meat without poison resistance, but damn if it ain't satisfying to cut up the mean ones.

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    And there you go. A hobgoblin, within view of the stairs. Maybe not so bad, though; I'm getting tougher. He falls easily to a few well-placed darts, as do his friends the newts.

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    The level started to piss me off a bit, though, because it had a long, winding hallway. I consider these hunger sinks. Basically, they almost never contain anything interesting and serve only to cause problems for me. I did run into this nice room of scrolls... but the only one I can use-ID is the upper one, which turns out to be a blink scroll. These allow you a short-range controlled teleport, and are very nice.

    You may also notice that I've changed my weaponry. I'm now using a dagger of venom and a +2 shield, both found in the previous chapter but only use-ID'd recently. Risky, but obviously there are rewards.

    9.png
    Unfortunately, I was right about that hunger sink. I went up a level (and got even stronger), but I'm really suffering from a lack of comestibles. What I need is a nice, delicious corpse to butcher. Mm, corpse. In general, it's best to preserve your non-perishable items--bread and meat primarily--until you have no options left. For now, when I fall to very hungry status, I eat my choko. It should tide me over.

    10.png
    Not that it matters. What the fu--

    Next Episode: We discover whether Syrion is crafty enough to survive two orc wizards, two (armed!) orcs, an orc priest, a hobgoblin, a rat and an ant.

    syrion on
  • MahnmutMahnmut Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Very cool LP. I think I'll try this Crawl thing -- I've done some Roguelikes in the past, but mostly stuck to Powder because it didn't expect me to have a number pad (or do that awkward thing with the letter keys). But at the moment, I have a number pad, so...!

    edit: *awaits Syriondeath* ;)

    Mahnmut on
    Steam/LoL: Jericho89
  • ScosglenScosglen Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Awesome. Dungeon crawl was the only roguelike I could ever really get into, thanks to the great tileset. I picked it up and am playing again thanks to this LP.

    I'm playing a draconian chaos knight of Xom. Xom considers all his subjects to be playthings so he doesn't care how much you pray or sacrifice to him, but randomly he'll decide to mutate you and give you a crab claw hand, or scaly skin, or make you vomit acid onto monsters, or drop implements of death at your feet, or just straight up make you see red and go into a berserker rage.

    It's lots of fun :0

    Scosglen on
  • RedcatRedcat Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Say "Hi" to Sigmund for me.




    (I hate him.)

    Redcat on
    360 Metatag for Borderlands: PA Borderwangs
    My 360 tag: Redcat Rising
  • syrionsyrion Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Chapter 3: The Answer
    Is no.

    Well, I'll try to get something else going. :)

    See, this Let's Play is the weirdest one ever. There's actual failure in it. Hmm.

    syrion on
  • INeedNoSaltINeedNoSalt with blood on my teeth Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    So I take you were slain mightily

    details please

    INeedNoSalt on
  • syrionsyrion Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    It's a bit of a "smack myself in the face" moment. I accidentally turned on numlock, didn't realize it, pressed an arrow key and ran off the stairs into the lower right-hand corner. To add insult to injury, there was a damn ogre there. I didn't even get multiple hits. He just hit me in the face with a flail and I died.

    That, folks, is why I was worried.

    syrion on
  • Ragnar DragonfyreRagnar Dragonfyre Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Oh fuck. This looks awesome.

    I've always liked Roguelikes, but could never get into the ASCII ones. I played the piss out of IVAN and wanted to try Stone Soup, but I got lost trying to visually translate wtf I was looking at.

    I'm gonna try this out asap.

    Ragnar Dragonfyre on
    steam_sig.png
  • MahnmutMahnmut Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Redcat wrote: »
    Say "Hi" to Sigmund for me.




    (I hate him.)

    What's up with that guy, anyhow? He's all mean and stuff. =(

    Mahnmut on
    Steam/LoL: Jericho89
  • augustaugust where you come from is gone Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Sludge Elf?

    That is pretty amazing.

    august on
  • syrionsyrion Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    So I'd intended to do another chapter tonight, but I am doomed by a hideous run of failures. I honestly... well. It's just been really weird.

    There were the three healers, all of which died to out of depth snakes on the first level. There was the minotaur berserker who got ogre'd in the face; the conjurer with the food poisoning; the conjurer with a severe Sigmund problem; and finally a promising conjurer brought low by the ghost of the conjurer who met Sigmund.

    This is bizarre. The LP has jinxed me. :(

    I will try again tomorrow.

    syrion on
  • TorgoTorgo Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Crawl and IVAN are my favorites of the genre. I like the body/equipment stuff of IVAN, but like the classes and religion stuff in CRAWL. However, Crawl is like a pissed off nanny with a pillow. It smothers infant characters (sub 3 level) harshly and brutally.

    Torgo on
    History is a spoiler for the future. (Me on Twitter)
  • caeonospherecaeonosphere Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Is it unfair that Nethack gets all the attention? Maybe. Is there a damn good reason for that? Yeah. I'll be around for the LP of Nethack.

    Oh, and: I've recently tried my hand at roguelike development. Behold! http://citadel-studios.com/

    It's called RogueLite, and it doesn't have much, yet. It's already hard as hell, has about 50 different items, and a dozen or so monsters. What's different about this one is that I'm taking suggestions for items and features, openly. If you've got any ideas, PM me or send the word at feedback@citadel-studios.com. Thanks!

    caeonosphere on
  • syrionsyrion Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Is it unfair that Nethack gets all the attention? Maybe. Is there a damn good reason for that? Yeah. I'll be around for the LP of Nethack.

    Oddly enough, I always hated Nethack. I never could get a good feeling for its pace, and it relies more than any other roguelike on this sort of "received knowledge." Too many arcane events and possibilities. With Angband, sure, you end up in stupid situations where you die sometimes, but most of the time careful play is rewarded. With Crawl, you know that the game wants to murder you constantly, and that the food pressure isn't that great. Still, both have a better feeling of progression than Nethack (in my experience).

    syrion on
  • 4rch3nemy4rch3nemy Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Demon-Spawn Reaver!

    RAWR!

    This roguelike looks somewhat interestin and I hate pretty much all roguelikes ever since Diablo upped the ante and made me enjoy the less brutal, prettier side of life. Don't want to jack the thread but are there any roguelikes like this one (classes/races/religion/customization) that are free and prettier?

    4rch3nemy on
  • cjeriscjeris Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    syrion wrote: »
    I used a prayer of purification to survive the poisoning and then drank a potion of healing to survive the newt.

    You know you didn't need to use the purification prayer if you were going to drink the potion of healing, right? Potions of healing cure poisoning and disease as well as healing a few hp.
    syrion wrote: »
    You can't eat snake meat without poison resistance, but damn if it ain't satisfying to cut up the mean ones.
    This is not true. Snakes (without an adjective) are nonpoisonous to eat, as are small snakes. Most but not all later snakes will poison you if you eat them without resistance.
    syrion wrote: »
    In general, it's best to preserve your non-perishable items--bread and meat primarily--until you have no options left. For now, when I fall to very hungry status, I eat my choko. It should tide me over.

    Did you get any goblin or hobgoblin chunks? I usually find that the risk of disease from possibly-tainted but nonpoisonous meat can be ignored.

    Edit:
    I'm going to advertise, once again, the
    PUBLIC TELNET SERVER
    where you can play Crawl with nothing more than a telnet or ssh client, and have other people watch your games, and give advice, or just point and laugh. I haven't been to the IRC channel in several months, but when I was there, it usually had some tens of people kibitzing and watching games. It's irc.freenode.org:##crawl.

    cjeris on
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  • syrionsyrion Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    cjeris wrote: »
    syrion wrote: »
    I used a prayer of purification to survive the poisoning and then drank a potion of healing to survive the newt.

    You know you didn't need to use the purification prayer if you were going to drink the potion of healing, right? Potions of healing cure poisoning and disease as well as healing a few hp.

    No, I didn't know that. Oops.
    This is not true. Snakes (without an adjective) are nonpoisonous to eat, as are small snakes. Most but not all later snakes will poison you if you eat them without resistance.

    Roguelike knowledge cross-wiring in my mind.
    syrion wrote: »
    In general, it's best to preserve your non-perishable items--bread and meat primarily--until you have no options left. For now, when I fall to very hungry status, I eat my choko. It should tide me over.

    Did you get any goblin or hobgoblin chunks? I usually find that the risk of disease from possibly-tainted but nonpoisonous meat can be ignored.

    Yep. Just not timed properly.

    syrion on
  • cjeriscjeris Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    syrion wrote: »
    cjeris wrote: »
    syrion wrote: »
    I used a prayer of purification to survive the poisoning and then drank a potion of healing to survive the newt.

    You know you didn't need to use the purification prayer if you were going to drink the potion of healing, right? Potions of healing cure poisoning and disease as well as healing a few hp.

    No, I didn't know that. Oops.

    This is only potions of healing, though. Potions of heal wounds restore many more hp, but don't cure anything else.

    I never tried a healer; always read that they were quite difficult. I tend to play glass cannon classes, like deep elf conjurers and fire elementalists, although in the ancient days of 4.0.0b26 (2002) my standard character was a sludge elf ice elementalist. Ice elementalists actually make really good generalist mages, since Ice spells include some useful enchantments and summonings in addition to the damaging conjurations, and they don't need to find a second book quite as early as wizards do. Ozocubu's Armour by itself helps quite a bit. You need to pick up earth magic eventually (every conjurer needs Lehudib's Crystal Spear, or at least Bolt of Iron), but I always found that ice kept me alive longer than any of the other magic specialties.

    cjeris on
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  • SniperGuySniperGuy SniperGuyGaming Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Never been able to play these things, but this looks actually halfway noobie friendly. I shall try!

    SniperGuy on
  • Trevor GoodchildTrevor Goodchild Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    So where'd you find that tile version of Stone soup?

    Edit: errrr uhhhh, I found it. Boy I feel silly.

    Trevor Goodchild on
  • cjeriscjeris Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    SniperGuy wrote: »
    Never been able to play these things, but this looks actually halfway noobie friendly. I shall try!

    *choke* *gasp* *snorfle*

    Pardon me, sir, a fish bone must have stuck in my throat.

    The single most important piece of advice I can give a new player is: Pay attention to which skills your experience points are being spent on. Where those first 25 points go can affect your survivability quite a bit, not right away (because you won't be that different just from spending 25 XP), but shortly afterward, when you have, or have not, gained a skill level that will help keep you alive.

    You can manipulate where your skill points go by turning skills on and off on the 'm' screen. When a skill is turned off, you will spend XP to exercise it much less frequently (not never). This is important because just standing and waiting, or walking around the dungeon, exercise Stealth and Dodging or Armour (Dodging if you are wearing leather armor or lighter, Armour if you are wearing heavy armor).

    If you are a new spellcaster, and you walk up to your first goblin, you probably have 3 shots of Magic Dart (or whatever your first level attack spell is) before you are out of MP. These may or may not kill it. If they do, great. If not, you may get into a dagger fight with it. Neither goblins nor baby wizards do much melee damage, so the fight may go on for a while. During this fight, you are steadily spending those first 25 XP on Short Blades and Dodging. Dodging is fine for a bit, as it will help keep you alive. Short Blades, not so much. (You may also spend some points on Fighting, which is useful -- not least because every level of Fighting grants bonus HP -- and you can't prevent it anyway because you can't turn off a skill before you gain level 1 in it.)

    I begin every spellcaster character by turning off all my skills except for Spellcasting and Dodging. Obviously I reassess this every so often. But at the beginning, if I leave my principal spell school skill (Conjurations, or Ice Magic, or whatever) turned on, it will drink my XP very fast, because it's already high enough to need more XP to advance. Better to channel those points into a skill that will make me better at all magic, not just some of it, and one that will do an awful lot to keep me alive.

    cjeris on
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  • VelmeranVelmeran Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    I fully endorse this lets play and blue dot it! yay!

    Velmeran on
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  • TorgoTorgo Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    I went and installed the ASCII version of Crawl 3.4 nice and easy from the Ubuntu repos. It has a "tutorial" mode that taught me a few things that make the game SO much easier for new characters. It even suggests various "builds" that are well suited for play for beginners. Yay for making an ASCII roguelike more friendly but still playable in a console!

    Torgo on
    History is a spoiler for the future. (Me on Twitter)
  • SniperGuySniperGuy SniperGuyGaming Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Man, I killed off two guys already. The tutorial things seem to show up and then if I accidently continue moving, they disappear rather quickly. That's frustrating.

    SniperGuy on
  • MahnmutMahnmut Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    SniperGuy wrote: »
    Man, I killed off two guys already. The tutorial things seem to show up and then if I accidently continue moving, they disappear rather quickly. That's frustrating.

    Hit CTRL+P to see past messages -- tutorial included.

    Mahnmut on
    Steam/LoL: Jericho89
  • cjeriscjeris Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    SniperGuy wrote: »
    Man, I killed off two guys already. The tutorial things seem to show up and then if I accidently continue moving, they disappear rather quickly. That's frustrating.

    Control-P will display your entire message stream and let you scroll up and down through it. I don't know whether tutorial messages are included, but they might be.

    cjeris on
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  • JamesDMJamesDM Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    I've played nethack for a long time(with relatively limited success) and have enjoyed it... I suppose I'll give this a shot too.

    JamesDM on
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  • GoodOmensGoodOmens Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    SniperGuy wrote: »
    Never been able to play these things, but this looks actually halfway noobie friendly. I shall try!

    It's only newbie friendly in that there's less context-specific silliness than Nethack. Crawl hates all organic life, let there be no mistake...it's just slightly more fair about it.

    GoodOmens on
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  • SniperGuySniperGuy SniperGuyGaming Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Ahahaha. I got a wand of random effects and turned a giant ant into my thrall, and a jackal into a human.

    And the human killed me. :(

    I have a bit of trouble figuring out the skills and such I have. The monk seems to have one, which is "hit things".

    SniperGuy on
  • SniperGuySniperGuy SniperGuyGaming Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    What do I do with scrolls of Fear and potions of poison and stuff? I mean, using it seems like a terrible idea. How do i use it at enemies?

    SniperGuy on
  • syrionsyrion Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Scrolls of fear cause fear in the next enemy you hit, if I remember correctly; negative potions I'm not sure about. I don't think you can chuck them at the enemy effectively.

    syrion on
  • A raptor!A raptor! Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    My only previous experience with rogue-likes is Shiren for the DS (which I absolutely loved).

    But this is on a whole different league. I love it. I just got killed by a killer bee zombie. Why is a kiler bee zombie so strong? Is it because I can't hit it with my sword? How dangerous can a killer bee zombie be, anyway? Can't really eat your brains or anything, and bees can only sting once, they lose their... stingy-thing.

    A raptor! on
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  • cjeriscjeris Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    SniperGuy wrote: »
    What do I do with scrolls of Fear and potions of poison and stuff? I mean, using it seems like a terrible idea. How do i use it at enemies?

    A scroll of fear causes all (maybe all sufficiently intelligent) enemies within your line of sight to flee in terror -- but not for very long.

    Potions of poison, degeneration, etc. are useless except to Transmuters and others who possess the spell Evaporate. This spell consumes a potion and creates a cloud of vapor whose effects depend on the noxiousness of the potion, but which can include a little bit of steam damage, confusion, or poisoning. The cloud lasts for a few turns. There is no way to throw a potion at the enemy, or break one on an enemy, as you can in Nethack.

    Scrolls of paper, on the other hand, are completely useless. (Scrolls of random uselessness are actually not completely useless -- I once had my life saved by the "summon butterflies" effect.)

    cjeris on
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  • SniperGuySniperGuy SniperGuyGaming Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Also, I got a "Legendary Deck of Cards" which I ID'd into a deck of war. How the hell do I use it?

    SniperGuy on
  • cjeriscjeris Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    SniperGuy wrote: »
    Also, I got a "Legendary Deck of Cards" which I ID'd into a deck of war. How the hell do I use it?

    Most strange, unique magic items are used by wielding them in your weapon slot and (E)voking them. The success rate and effect depend on your Evocations skill; the best way to exercise this skill at low levels is to zap wands. (For instance, you need a substantial amount of Evocations skill to get a non-harmful result out of a crystal ball.)

    cjeris on
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