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Background:
I'd been working a job for the past five years that started sucking the life out of me. It was a startup, and I decided that if I wanted the company to succeed I should put my full energies into the company. Meanwhile, the company kept growing, and new people were brought on who made it hard to feel like my efforts were ever going to pay off.
Somewhere in there, we had our first child, and between work, childrearing, and the rest of life, I forgot how to enjoy myself. I tried reading more, watching movies, playing games on the switch, etc, but all those things felt like I was trying to have fun, and not like having fun.
So, about a month ago I re-downloaded angband for the first time in ten years. (Some background: I got moria on a shareware disk around 1994, and then the next month got angband, and have regarded the game fondly ever since.) I re-read TooMuchAbstraction's let's play, and it gave me some ideas about how I could up my game.
I rolled a hobbit ranger and had a blast with the new spells... infinite StM makes setting up traps a breeze, the entire dungeon book is a game-changer, and all the spells dovetail amazingly with what I remember about the ranger class from back in the old days. (I never did get very far back then, but I always did best as a ranger...) Plus, I got a couple killer drops: wormtongue, with its +1 moves (that's a great change, BTW; separating moves from speed), a Lothlorien and a bow of the bard that I ended up swapping back and forth, some pretty early +10 speed... all ended when I tried clearing out a false wall vault on DL64 and got a "The pit fiend breathes chaos. You die."
When that happened, it was already midnight, but after taking a breather for five minutes, I went right back at it. I rolled up a rogue, and played him on and off for the next two weeks. The class "clicked" for me around DL40, and from then on I couldn't wait to play again each night. I started coming up with stories for him and planning my goals for each session during the day, and pretty soon I hit DL100 for the first time in my life.
I'll save the rest—bug reports, pull requests, stories—for elsewhere, but in the meantime, I wanted to say: thank you all. To the maintainers, for keeping this project going after 40ish years; the posters, for sharing their hints and AARs and everything; and to the lurkers and everyone else, for playing the game and justifying the continuation of this community over all these years.
I'd been working a job for the past five years that started sucking the life out of me. It was a startup, and I decided that if I wanted the company to succeed I should put my full energies into the company. Meanwhile, the company kept growing, and new people were brought on who made it hard to feel like my efforts were ever going to pay off.
Somewhere in there, we had our first child, and between work, childrearing, and the rest of life, I forgot how to enjoy myself. I tried reading more, watching movies, playing games on the switch, etc, but all those things felt like I was trying to have fun, and not like having fun.
So, about a month ago I re-downloaded angband for the first time in ten years. (Some background: I got moria on a shareware disk around 1994, and then the next month got angband, and have regarded the game fondly ever since.) I re-read TooMuchAbstraction's let's play, and it gave me some ideas about how I could up my game.
I rolled a hobbit ranger and had a blast with the new spells... infinite StM makes setting up traps a breeze, the entire dungeon book is a game-changer, and all the spells dovetail amazingly with what I remember about the ranger class from back in the old days. (I never did get very far back then, but I always did best as a ranger...) Plus, I got a couple killer drops: wormtongue, with its +1 moves (that's a great change, BTW; separating moves from speed), a Lothlorien and a bow of the bard that I ended up swapping back and forth, some pretty early +10 speed... all ended when I tried clearing out a false wall vault on DL64 and got a "The pit fiend breathes chaos. You die."
When that happened, it was already midnight, but after taking a breather for five minutes, I went right back at it. I rolled up a rogue, and played him on and off for the next two weeks. The class "clicked" for me around DL40, and from then on I couldn't wait to play again each night. I started coming up with stories for him and planning my goals for each session during the day, and pretty soon I hit DL100 for the first time in my life.
I'll save the rest—bug reports, pull requests, stories—for elsewhere, but in the meantime, I wanted to say: thank you all. To the maintainers, for keeping this project going after 40ish years; the posters, for sharing their hints and AARs and everything; and to the lurkers and everyone else, for playing the game and justifying the continuation of this community over all these years.
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