I want more hitpoints

[luneya]

mage isn't even the worst offender here; other classes are. what happens when you play a warrior and you roll all 1s?

im talking specifically the first 4~5 character levels. NOT interested in CL50, 18/200 CON, statistics on the long run, but the playability of a BRAND NEW CHARACTER that fails his first 2,3 or 4 hp rolls. Surely you understand that escape / detect are NOT always an option when you have a brand new character.

Ooh but you should use lightning bolt which costs 4 SP and is a level 5 spell OBVIOUSLY DOES NOT FIT THE CASE.

im asking specifically and exclusively for the first 3 hp rolls. this will result in - for those here who love statistics - a massive unbalance of about 0~20HP at endgame, maybe 30 for warriors.

If you're a warrior rather than a mage, you're probably playing a race with a big enough hit die that rolling all 1s is even less likely than in the mage case. You also get +2 starting CON for being a warrior, and most likely have a race with additional CON bonuses. So getting hosed on HP isn't a worry. And the complaint that you'll still be 20-30 hp short at endgame in the worst case scenario is laughable, given that at that point you're taking damage and using heal potions for hundreds of hp at once.

Suggesting lightning bolt, I was thinking of bandits, native to DL 8 (my mistake). For the DL 2 cutpurses, and anything else you encounter in your first few levels as a mage, obviously you use magic missile instead. Escape is via scrolls of phase door, which are cheap enough that you can (and should) buy a lot of them with your starting gold. It wouldn't be crazy for a mage to select the birth option to receive extra gold instead of the standard start kit, and then spend the extra gold on buying more escapes. As for detection, basic detect monster is a first-level spell, and by the time you're deep enough to need it, you'll have enough character levels (and thus MP) that you can afford to detect constantly--at least if you go with a conventional strategy rather than the sort of extreme non-fighting powerdive that Pete Mack suggests. On the non-fighting strategy, you can afford the required detection by virtue of the fact that you're not fighting anything, and thus don't need to save mana.

[Pete Mack]

I understand your point. The point the rest of us are trying to make is that if you are struggling with the first three level ups, you are likely not playing to an effective strategy.
Things to consider:
* are you spending your initial cash wisely?
* are you regularly exhausting your mama, to the extent of risking your character?
* are you risking your character and wasting your starting purchases by spending too much time at low dungeon levels?
* are you choosing your fights wisely?

If you are having a particular kind of trouble at Cl 4 then you will still have the same trouble at CL30. An extra 4.5* HP points won't help you. Focusing on the special of the fist 3 character levels will tend to teach the wrong lesson.

* 3*(MHP+2)/4. 4.5HP is the mean HP boost for a HE mage, with a range of 0-12, or 3*(MHP-1)

[Sky]

mage isn't even the worst offender here; other classes are. what happens when you play a warrior and you roll all 1s?

im talking specifically the first 4~5 character levels. NOT interested in CL50, 18/200 CON, statistics on the long run, but the playability of a BRAND NEW CHARACTER that fails his first 2,3 or 4 hp rolls. Surely you understand that escape / detect are NOT always an option when you have a brand new character.

Ooh but you should use lightning bolt which costs 4 SP and is a level 5 spell OBVIOUSLY DOES NOT FIT THE CASE.

im asking specifically and exclusively for the first 3 hp rolls. this will result in - for those here who love statistics - a massive unbalance of about 0~20HP at endgame, maybe 30 for warriors.

[Pete Mack]

@sky --
Mage is THE hardest class for a novice player. You can't expect to melee anything for HP until around CL40 as a HE/Dunadan and you are struggling to get XP with spellcasting. Early Melee is only useful against extremely weak monsters and you are saving SP makes sense. (Later you will have more blows and it will work better.)

As a mage exercise, I strongly recommend trying to reach CL 20 with as few kills as possible. (10 kills per CL is a feasible but difficult target.) It means you will have to
(a) dive HARD (you'll likely be at dl 30 by Cl 17 or so.)
(b) actively hunt monsters with high EXP (or loot) to effort payoff. Being aware of these monsters is a critical part of the game.
(c) actively avoid almost everything else, unless they are in the way of a high value target. You may want to stair scum a little bit for levels with safe starting rooms.

After CL 20, this exercise gets harder to follow, because you start needing equipment, and loot requires kills.
Finally: NEVER hunt cutpurses for EXP. There are other targets with a vastly higher ROI for your time and effort.

Gnome mage is probably easiest for this exercise, though I played it with HE, where SI is free. In one game, I was having trouble maintaining pace until I met an out of depth Erinyes at DL34/CL18 and killed it for 5000 exp and 3 character levels.

Selected Monsters that pay for their native level
* Low-HP uniques (Bullroarer, Wormtongue, Lagduf etc. NOT the blue uniques and above, unless you're lucky with devices or archery.)
* kobold ranger
* dark elf
* Wolf/white wolf (you can snipe then with perfect safety from one square back in a door.)
* low level hounds. After your first pack, the payoff false off rapidly.
* Young and mature dragons
* low level 'U'
* Mumak

Here is an example:

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=19649

[wobbly]

I'll sometimes melee trash on a mage. The big clincher is str rather than hps. You need to be wearing armour, wielding a heavy weapon & carrying enough consumables to constantly phase & heal. It's generally slow & grindy, tends to only make sense on races where your stealth makes avoiding things as much of a pain as killing them.

[Derakon]

My take-home was that vanilla needs a hidden liferating HP modifier like *hengband that you only discover at CL30 or so.

Unless they've changed it, the life rating in those games is just a statistical measurement of how close to the average your hit die rolls are. Vanilla, like PSCHZA (let's face it, that's at most as silly a name as PosCHengband ), rolls all your hit dice in advance and guarantees that at the end of the game you won't be more than, IIRC, 20-25% away from the average. Rerolling your life rating is just rerolling those hit dice.

So, good news! It's already there, the game just never tells it to you.

Sky, lightning bolt is a level-5 spell for mages, and thus eminently suitable for use against Cutpurses. So I'm afraid I don't understand what you were trying to say.

[Sky]

do you even remember what level is lightning bolt?

[debo]

My take-home message from this thread is that it's good to hear multiple points of view, and that no-one should assume their play style is universal.

My take-home was that vanilla needs a hidden liferating HP modifier like *hengband that you only discover at CL30 or so.

[luneya]

My take-home message from this thread is that it's good to hear multiple points of view, and that no-one should assume their play style is universal.

Yep. But some things ought to be universal. I'm more of a fighty player than a powerdiver, but even I don't melee cutpurses as a mage. That's what lightning bolt is for. If you are out of mana, retreat until that's no longer the case and then zap. Maybe use melee to finish them off once they're nearly dead, but otherwise a mage shouldn't be meleeing stuff unless it's ridiculously weak (at level 30, feel free to melee all the cutpurses you want ).

I wouldn't go to the extreme of "don't wield anything but stat sticks," though. A whip or dagger isn't heavy enough for the weight to matter, and it'll give you something better than fists for desperation or coup de grace scenarios. My mage weapon of choice until I find a really good stat stick is a 'Thanc--don't be tempted to melee with it, just think of it as an extra rod of foo bolt that doesn't take up an inventory slot.

[Nick]

My take-home message from this thread is that it's good to hear multiple points of view, and that no-one should assume their play style is universal.

[Philip]

Paradoxically, a half-troll mage doesn't really have to do the whole melee thing though, since Regen means they don't run out of spell points, so there's pretty much never a good reason to melee.

[kandrc]

when you are meleeing cutpurses for XP

Not only should you not be meleeing cutpurses for XP, you should not be meleeing *anything* for any reason. You shouldn't have a weapon wielded unless it supplies and important benefit; to me that means int, speed, stealth, ESP, SI, or regeneration (I will not wield a weapon for FA; I don't think it's important enough). When playing mages, I squelch all good weapons right away. I squelch all Slay and branded weapons as I find them. I check all *Slay*, Gondolin, and artifact weapons for the abilities on the above list and choose a stat stick among them (defender, HA and Westernesse, and even Gondolin are usually garbage by the time I find one) based on (approximately):

big speed > ESP > big int > medium speed > medium int > big stealth > small speed > SI > regen > small int > small stealth.

If I've got a set of otherwise equal choices, I choose the lightest one, regardless of dice or enchantments.

Only very light armors are used until strength is up, with again int, speed, stealth, and abilities being priority. It is common for me to have a ~cl28 mage with herioc+ stealth, +8 speed (from two rings of escaping), no Rbase, and 50% more SP than HP on DL 98.

About a year ago I attempted a level-clearing ironman mage, where level clearing means not only fully exploring every level, but killing everything. To be clear, I think that winning such a game would require far more luck than skill. I don't recall exactly how far I got, but I know that I killed Kavlax with magic missiles at roughly his native death, and it was a Great Wyrm in a vault that took me out. Never did I rely on melee.

If you want to melee with a mage, play a half-troll. Thanks to their high strength and big hit dice, they are surprisingly among the better mage races, and due to their very low starting int and high strength and con, they play very differently in the early and mid games.

[Philip]

If you want to melee cutpurses, I suggest you play a warrior, who are designed for melee, or a rogue, who are apparently superior, or a ranger, who can at least conserve ammo that way, or a paladin or a priest, who have no other options. And even on most of those I'd go with ranged attacks. If I have lost sight of angband by doing this, clearly I never played the game, given how I never did that, even starting out.

I would also not melee cutpurses for XP on any character, but I can see how a new player would. I suggest making cash theft permanent again to discourage this behavior.

[Sky]

you do this every time.

step 1: ignore the complaints of novice players.

step 2: complain that new people do not pick up angband.

ermagherd V is too easy lets nerf everything. 40 to 60 hp DOES matter, when you are meleeing cutpurses for XP. If you are not meleeing cutpurses, then you have lost touch with what it is like to play angband - not the first time this happens in a game.

[Derakon]

Because the reality of the game is that it takes 3 minutes to get to CL4 and that hp score will affect you for hours and hours. If you roll a mage and you have 20hp instead of 60hp, everyone will restart. Math doesnt count when the player experience dictates otherwise.

a) you're not going to get a 40HP differential with your mage. Let's say we have a mage with a d8 hit die (average 4.5HP/level) and no CON bonus; if we're looking at a 60HP mage, they're about level 13 (start with 8 HP at level 1, then 52 / 4.5 = 11.55). To instead have only 20HP at level 13, you'd have to roll a 1 on your hit die literally every level, at odds of 1 in 8^12 or about 1 in 69 billion.

b) the kinds of HP differentials you actually get in gameplay (i.e. instead of your statistically impossible strawman) are irrelevant to mages because all that really matters is that they die instantly to any remotely relevant threat. Whether you have 40 or 60 HP at dlvl 20 doesn't really make a difference.

c) stop worrying about whether you're getting a fair game and just play the game. Roll with the punches the RNG gives you. It's more fun that way. Are you going to reroll until you get "good enough" treasures in your first dungeon dive? That has way more of an impact on your survivability than getting fewer HP than you "should" have.