Should totally innevitalbe deaths be in the game or not?

[Derakon]

They can be unavoidable, but not unbeatable. I once managed to kill Fang right off the stairs, jumping to clvl 3 immediately.

This is nothing particularly spectacular. Melee-optimized characters can kill them in a straight-up fight at level 1; other classes can manage fine if they have a ranged weapon and a scroll of Phase Door (which you should be buying before entering the dungeon). They only have 25HP each, after all.

[Tatami]

You guys got it so easy. I've been playing hengband for a few months now and have lost more chars than I have in my entire angband career. I've been playing angband since just before 2.73.

[Ycombinator]

This is nothing particularly spectacular. Melee-optimized characters can kill them in a straight-up fight at level 1; other classes can manage fine if they have a ranged weapon and a scroll of Phase Door (which you should be buying before entering the dungeon). They only have 25HP each, after all.

That was precisely my point, that Grip and Fang by no means should be considered “unavoidable death”. Or maybe Nick was just humorous about it.

[Djabanete]

You guys got it so easy. I've been playing hengband for a few months now and have lost more chars than I have in my entire angband career. I've been playing angband since just before 2.73.

Hahah. Hengband is indeed a harsh mistress... that randomized speed thing can cause some truly horrible things to happen. Just gotta be extra super careful!

On topic, I think that auto-lighting the room that you first appear in on a level is not such a bad idea. However, it doesn't matter too much, because truly unavoidable deaths really only happen once in a blue moon. 99+% of the time, there was something you just should have done differently, and could have known to do differently.

[PowerDiver]

Buy 4 or more flasks of oil before descending.

Make that 6 or as many are for sale.

It takes more than that if you play something wimpy. I simply could not keep my dwarf mages alive [terrible throwing skill] when facing Maggot's dogs until I bought 3 ?bless or 3 !hero so I could actually hit them with thrown oil. Even planning this, it doesn't help if there are no buffs for sale in the stores when you start the game.

I still consider a pack of nexus hounds to be a non-0 chance of unavoidable death for warriors and priests and paladins who have no means to detect them. A very early morgul blade can be too, since waiting for pseudo before all wields is sufficiently likely to cause some chars to die so that doing so is courting death rather than avoiding it.

There are also the early mages or priests playing with birth_money when the stores have no spellbooks for sale. That sometimes lead to impossible situations.

I'm sure there are more. I can't always figure out what I should have done differently when I die. Presumably some fraction of those deaths count as unavoidable.

Also, there are limits to humans being careful. If you try to play so slowly that nothing is unavoidable, you can't avoid occasional carelessness leading to death.

I also lose the occasional char to a typo. That's also unavoidable, at least until someone makes fancy inscriptions so that I am prompted again when casting teleport self by typo. System crashes kill chars too, and the slower you go the more likely that will happen, so going slowly is courting that sort of char loss.

[the Invisible Stalker]

Anyone who has played Bridge will know the adage "If you make all your slams then you aren't bidding enough of them." Any good game encourages judicious risk taking. I think there should be a small, but non-zero, chance of unavoidable death for any character on any level. Otherwise the optimal strategy is a mindnumbingly boring playing style. I wouldn't even object to a 1 in 1000000 chance of meeting Vecna at 50'.

[Zikke]

I wouldn't mind meeting anybody at 50'. It's after I've invested time in my character that I'd be pissed about it.

[Philip]

I wouldn't even object to a 1 in 1000000 chance of meeting Vecna at 50'.

More realistic is meeting one of the Ringwraiths at any level up to let's say 5.
Frodo and friends did not go far on the expedition before they met a Ringwraith. Meeting them would be fun, and if you had enough money you could actually detect and avoid them through ?tel level, ?deep descent and maybe even ?tel if you were lucky. It would'nt be an unavoidable death, but almost certain. Rocks fall, everyone dies is bad. Uvatha the Horseman hits you. You die. is fun.

[Philip]

I wouldn't even object to a 1 in 1000000 chance of meeting Vecna at 50'.

Yeah, but for the sake of consistency, let's have Ringwraiths instead of Vecna.

[kaypy]

I would think we would be talking a generalized 'long tail' out-of-depth monster generation, rather than pulling up specific uniques. Like objects can currently be generated from any depth, if you manage a sufficiently unlikely set of random numbers....

[Atarlost]

Even with unavoidable deaths minimized there's a strong pro-diving bias in the game simply because of user error and the boredom of the early levels. There's no need to artificially introduce unavoidable deaths to prevent borgish play by humans.