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

[Therem Harth]

There is. The '.' key will make your character keep walking (down a twisting corridor, through a room, whatever) until disturbed. This should probably be documented better though.

[Vogrim]

I think it's time to locker this game, considering I just lost a level 26 mage because I held down the right arrow button for too long on a level that I thought was empty. I would suggest that the programmers implement something to prevent those types of deaths, but I'm sure a dozen fanboys will jump to defend that "aspect" of the game as well.

[Pete Mack]

@Vogrim --

A couple points.
1. If you're facing the Lernean Hydra without Poison resist, you've pretty much got the hang of the game. Yeah, it's a real pain in the ass to be 20 hours invested into a character to lose it to a lack of knowlege.
2. On the other hand, if you are playing with less than perfect knowlege, you have to be careful: either make sure you aren't vulnerable to instadeath (this means rPois or 800+ HP, rNether, or 550+ HP, and 500+HP at depth > dl 50 in any case.)
3. Even the most experienced players lose strong characters from time to time, though not usually to the Lernean Hydra. The usual suspects are the Tarrasque (how I hate it!), Azriel, Vecna, And Carcharoth. (Famous last words: he breathed nether for How Much?)
4. True roguelikes are a game where you have to plan for the worst: that is you will eventually die. In this respect, angband does't qualify: a careful player can essentially always win. (The original rogue has something like a 50% death rate even for optimal play.) This means,
a) don't invest too much effort in any one character and
b) take strategic risks, while minimizing tactical risks. This is the key to enjoying the game, in my opinion. Start a new character, (e.g., a High-Elf rogue) and focus on winning. That is: get to dl 100 as fast as possible, and thenkill Morgoth.

Yeah you took a brutal loss on this character, but in the end, it's still just another dead character. In fact, you are extremely close to your first true win.

[Lord Fell]

I was just thinking about my first win... and this was so long ago that I honestly can't remember if it was Moria or Angband that that this win was achieved. So, I was "just a kid" at the time, I'd done enough power diving and serious playing that I knew the score.

I still wasn't someone who'd actually check the Monster Memory for every creature I came across. I didn't want to burden myself down with Probing staffs or rods. But, I did clue in that there were a lot of different resistances, and I'd better have them all. I descended quite slowly, hauled and sold as much loot as humanly possible, and by the time I faced off against Morgoth (oh, wait. It must have been Angband) my gear was immaculate, and virtually all the uniques he might summon were dead. I went through Morgoth like a chainsaw through a kitten (or so I remember it).

What I think this means, is that you can beat the game with patience and grinding even if you don't entirely know what you're doing... at least as long as you learn the most basic rules.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.