Ridiculous death due, in my opinion, to flawed design.

[Adley]

Angband isn't a game that holds your hand and leads you down a pre-determined path

To be precise, Angband is a world who holds your hand till you need your hand to be held, at which point it throws you in the trouble.

[tigpup]

Dry your eyes and re-roll; or choose another game.

If you can't take the 'ridiculous' (aka: stupid) deaths, then you're not equipped to play this game.

It is difficult. It will frustrate you. It murders your preciousss little characters. It makes you need to post on forums. It makes you angry. These are good things.

Every death is so unfair, so 'ridiculous', so maddening... then... only then do you start to learn.

So - now you know about the LH. Soon you will learn of more things that will kill you when you make a stupid mistake. And, you will die again. This is a good thing. Every time you kill a monster you learn nothing. Every time one kills you, you learn and you will remember.

There are 101 ways to cheat at this game, use them if you must; many are helpful.

But, none as are useful as finding new and interesting ways to die stupidly.

Bon chance.

[Timo Pietilä]

Dry your eyes and re-roll; or choose another game.

If you can't take the 'ridiculous' (aka: stupid) deaths, then you're not equipped to play this game.

It is difficult. It will frustrate you. It murders your preciousss little characters. It makes you need to post on forums. It makes you angry. These are good things.

Every death is so unfair, so 'ridiculous', so maddening... then... only then do you start to learn.

So - now you know about the LH. Soon you will learn of more things that will kill you when you make a stupid mistake. And, you will die again. This is a good thing. Every time you kill a monster you learn nothing. Every time one kills you, you learn and you will remember.

There are 101 ways to cheat at this game, use them if you must; many are helpful.

But, none as are useful as finding new and interesting ways to die stupidly.

Bon chance.

This is a d*mn good post. Someone put this into Angband FAQ. Maybe even in Angband help files in "general"-section under headline "How fair is this game?". Start with "So you died". Maybe change "So - now you know about the LH" to "So - now you know more about the monster that killed you" so that it gets a bit more general.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Agreed, it's an excellent post. This is a game of endurance and patience.

[Lord Fell]

You know, when I was button mashing, because I assumed that even a Kobold Rogue should be able to wade through a pack of jackals (single file) and died... that was totally stupid in a "yeah, that was my fault" kind of way.

[Magnate]

I wonder if there isn't something we can do to make the game more "approachable" for the new player? It would probably involve a LOT of work with Help Files, User Interface, and a revamp of the Options file.

All this is underway, but consider this: angband is maintained by volunteers who do it for fun. Very few of us consider updating help files to be fun. In addition to the fun aspect, we like to feel helpful and enjoy providing what people want: very few players ask for updates to the help files as they would rather have bugs fixed or features added.

We are closer than we have been for a long time: I am trying to force myself to update the help files for the next release, as they are SO old and someone (fizzix IIRC) went to the trouble of posting an updated set here a couple of months ago. Takk and others are continuing to improve the UI so that driving the game is easier and more intuitive (though that doesn't address instadeaths of course). Similarly takk has embarked on cleaning up of options and pref files which is long overdue and will help make the new player's experience better (so with luck s/he won't mind the occasional instadeath).

I am definitely going to take tigpup's post and put it in the help system.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Y'know, thinking about 'game fairness' and the difference between older games and more recent ones...

I'm reminded of the old SSI D&D games. The end-game encounters were...insame, in many of them, especially those which concluded the series. In Pools of Darkness, IIRC, you START with

Round 0:
--one of your characters is nailed by a Harm...which reduces him from 300 hit points to...3.

Round 1:
--colossal phase spiders who can also cast Disintegrate...about 10
--demons with melee damage shields (you hit them for 50 damage, you take 50 in return) and breath weapons...another 15 or so
--ancient dragons
--and a demon with a beheading attack

And you'd better know that, after this, you have to heal BEFORE terminating this combat...cuz next up:

You lose ALL REMAINING SPELLS on all characters.

Then it's round 2: beholders, regular and undead. IIRC, around a dozen of em. Spread out.

THEN it's round 3, with, IIRC, another dozen ancient dragons.

It's just plain *ugly*. It can easily take 3, 4, 5 tries to get through it...hope you have backup saves.

That was pretty common with a lot of the SSI games. The endgame fights were *epic* because they had to be. When you finally won, it was....ohhh wow. There *definitely* was no inevitability; even if you knew all the required tricks, and what-all was gonna happen, and you'd loaded up from the start, AND exploited certain...features...that final triple fight would probably beat you about 1/3 of the time IIRC. And it was *cool* that we LOST...at least, as long as we had a reasonably recent backup.

And, cripes, that's all you gotta do. If you don't like permadeath, make a backup every so often. Don't whine for some abstract notion of 'fair' which just is more about your ignorance, not about truly fair or unfair play.

[HallucinationMushroom]

Ahh, warm and fuzzy feeling. I still have my journals and code wheels from those gold box games. I played those the same time I got my feet wet with Moria. I actually replayed Pool of Radiance about a year ago and had a blast.
Lux Shestni Samosud! Haha. I managed not to lure out heroes from the temple and slay them for their +1 items that go-around.

[ChodTheWacko]

Hey, here's an idea -

I only read 3 pages, but I think the main source of Vogrim's anger is the combo of heavy hours into an character and being completely unprepared for the concept of instadeath. I can understand that.

So how about this for an idea:

A new dlvl 1 monster - A gravity mold.
It doesn't move. It doesn't wake up unless you attack it.
But if you attack it, it breathes force and instakills you.

It will very quickly introduce the idea of 'I should not go randomly attacking things' to newbies,
and be trivial to avoid for people who recognize it.

- Frank

[kaypy]

Hey, here's an idea -
A new dlvl 1 monster - A gravity mold.
It doesn't move. It doesn't wake up unless you attack it.

Is there any way to ensure that?

The screamer mushroom patch lets out a piercing shriek.
The gravity mold wakes up.
The gravity mold obliterates you.

Assuming you can work around that, I would also make it unique- no point in cluttering the entire dungeon with them.

edit: Or a unique that fakes being a very very out of depth death mold?

[Derakon]

ToME 2 has Moldoux, a unique mold that shows up only on dungeon level 1 and summons a Great Wyrm of Power when you kill it. It eventually got moved to the "silly monsters" list (a list of monsters that can be toggled off in the birth options) after many complaints from veteran players who accidentally killed it.

There has to be a better way to teach players that Angband can be cruel and arbitrary.

[Nomad]

I vote for making rods of probing an early game item the equivalent of trap detection, and maybe having something in the early levels that it's not sensible (but not instantly fatal) for newbies to pick a fight with. Maybe a mold that can touch to teleport level or something.

[fph]

having something in the early levels that it's not sensible (but not instantly fatal) for newbies to pick a fight with. Maybe a mold that can touch to teleport level or something.

Like a jelly that reduces your strength, or one that has an acidic attack which lowers your AC?

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Nah. As someone pointed out, he wasn't a noob any more. His mistake was thinking that his notion of proper game design, was a universal law.

[Nomad]

Like a jelly that reduces your strength, or one that has an acidic attack which lowers your AC?

Heh. Very good point!

I think, actually, the game has a lot more newbie learning curve built in than we give it credit for. You just get so used to navigating the early dangers that you forget that they ever caught you out, but really, the whole way through Angband is one long trial-and-error chain of, "Find new thing, prod new thing, see if you die horribly." It's just that the more you learn, the more that learning hurts, because you get to sit back and happily navigate through sixty levels of stuff you recognise before you get your chance to prod something new.