almost there

[Patashu]

Or maybe just have poison damage only interrupt the player if the game can calculate that such poison will be fatal? Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has deterministic* poison, and can display if the poison will kill you or not.

*There's a small edge case, where if the poison will BARELY kill you, but the specific timing of your regeneration ticks might save you by one HP, it will display that it is fatal. Presumably this edge case could also be stamped out, but no one has put the developer work into it yet.

[Sky]

damn. died to the tarrasque.
it's ok, i figured out how to dive and can make a CL40 in 1 day, maybe 2.

[Grotug]

I used to play just like you. It took me awhile to overcome the desire to kill everything. Now I only want to kill things that are worth my while. That has greatly increased my success rate in Angband. This mainly occurred when the novelty of all these mystical super powerful monsters wore off. I remember Great Wyrms of Balance were these legendary monsters to be awed at and if I could kill one that would be a story to live to tell about. But when I finally killed all the Uniques and beat the game, that desire was sated. I've learned it's very fun to sneak around dangerously OOD, carefully picking fights. It's fun to see how fast I can beat the game, though I'm still not very efficient in my doings and prone to becoming distracted by unnecessary side-quests.

If you play paranoidedly, detect regularly, inspect every monster and don't become too comfortable then winning is merely a matter of applying discipline and experience.

One thing that continues to get me in Angband is after there has been a long period of not being seriously challenged (even if I'm descending at a decent pace) I'm liable to get lax, forgetting that serious danger can crop up at any time; and does when I least expect it, and so I don't inspect the C or the p carefully and bam, dead (oh, that was the mouth of Sauron, woops). The only deaths that really stick out to me as being truly unavoidable are deaths by Drolems playing as a warrior since they are monsters that are out of depth for their depth, compounded by the fact that they are only detected by monster detection, which warriors generally don't get before DL60s-70s.

TOing monsters away that can one shot you should have you very paranoid and cautious the rest of the time you are on that level.

I still die to stubborness: 'but I wasted half my {splendid} arrows trying to kill the thing, I'm not just gonna abandon the fight simply because my odds of not dying have grown dismally small'. I never regret, later, having abandoned the fight. It's just for the first 20 minutes or so that it's painful. It's a good learning experience to abandon when you really don't want to. But I often forget to tell myself there will be better opportunities deeper in the dungeon. Also, the more games I play, the less it bothers me when I die. 98% of the fun is the journey to Morgoth, not actually fighting him.

[Sky]

my real problem, as a player, is that i play too much and too fast. i load angband, and for the first half hour i check every move by every mob. three hours later i waltz into a melee with 3 high-risk mobs and then go "WHAAT?!? HOW DI HE ...!! WT...man this **** game ..."

you know what i'm talkin'bout, willis?