Straitjacket
| [ straitjacket | |
|---|---|
| Appearance | long-sleeved jacket |
| Slot | body armor |
| Base size | medium |
| Body armor type | heavy |
| AC | 0 |
| DR | 1 |
| MC | 2 |
| Magical item? | no |
| Properties |
|
| Base price | 10 zm |
| Default weight | 15 |
| Base material | cloth |
A straitjacket is a type of body armor that appears in dNetHack, notdNetHack and notdNetHack. It is medium-sized with a base material of cloth, and appears as a long-sleeved jacket when unidentified.
Generation
Madpeople start each game with a worn cursed straitjacket.
Straitjackets are not randomly generated, though they can be wished for or found in bones.
The monsters inhabiting the cells of the floors above the Madman quest home level are generated with straitjackets during level creation.
The Stranger has a unique monster spell known as "incarcerate", which has a 2⁄3 chance of creating a cursed straitjacket to trap the hero in if the hero is humanoid in shape and not wearing any body armor.
Player monster madmen and madwomen that are not slated for good equipment or created on the Astral Plane are generated with a straitjacket.
Description
While worn, a straitjacket covers the upper body and arms, and grants 0 base AC, 1 base DR, and grants MC2. As heavy armor, it does not grant any dexterity bonuses. Wearing or removing a straitjacket takes no actions.
A worn cursed straitjacket has several adverse effects:
- The use of the hero's hands are prevented similar to that of a cursed two-handed weapon, and any actions that use the upper limbs–e.g., the default melee attack, casting spells, wearing and removing armor and other objects, and opening doors–are completely prevented.
- A hero in a cursed straitjacket can only attack in melee by kicking if their current form allows it, and thus cannot attack at all if anything would prevent kicking, such as standing in shallow water or being at stressed levels of encumbrance or worse.
- A hero in a straitjacket cannot take deep breaths, and any breath weapon that they may have is weakened—the number of damage dice and their size is halved (rounded up), and the range is reduced to 3-5 squares compared to the usual 7-13).
Weldproofing does not prevent any of these effects, as the straitjacket is stuck to itself rather than the character's body.
Strategy
Though it confers some minimal non-zero level of protection and uniquely covers the arms as well as the upper body, straitjackets should not be worn as armor due to the significant drawbacks of a worn one becoming cursed.
Madpeople
Similar to the Convict in most NetHack variants (including the dNetHack series), removing the cursed straitjacket is one of the primary tasks for a starting Madperson—various standard methods of curse removal and removing armor are viable to this end, though some may be less practical than others depending on the circumstances:
- Successful prayer can uncurse the jacket, as your god considers this a major trouble. Unfortunately, Madpeople start the game with an angry god, and must appease them prior to seeking any form of help from their deity.
- A scroll of remove curse or an effigy will uncurse the jacket.
- A scroll of destroy armor can destroy the jacket. Be sure to remove any other worn armor prior to reading a scroll that you have either identified as destroy armor or suspect to be destroy armor.
- Some shopkeepers offer curse removal as a service, though with your arms restrained gaining access to the shop often requires waiting for an intelligent monster to open the door.
- A nymph that seduces you can remove the jacket as normal, and an encounter with a foocubus allows them to remove the jacket as well.
- Amusingly, a nymph that steals or picks up a cursed straitjacket may proceed to wear the straitjacket and trap herself in it, preventing further theft attacks.
- Yuki-onna heroes are immune to seduction from other nymphs, though they can still initiate encounters with foocubi. In notdNetHack, yuki-onna also have the added hurdle of a worn ring of protection from shape changers: they cannot shift to their snow cloud form without removing the ring, which in turn requires removing the jacket.
- Polymorph into a form of a different physical size can destroy the straitjacket or shrink the hero out of it.
- A magic trap has a 4.8% chance of applying a remove curse effect, which can uncurse the straitjacket.
The Stranger
The Stranger's incarcerate monster spell can only trap the hero in a cursed straitjacket if they are humanoid and not wearing body armor: to this end, if the hero has body armor, the spell can also randomly select worn armor and turn it yellow, with metallic armor transmuted to gold if possible; if the spell targets armor that is already yellow, it is stolen and warped directly into the Stranger's inventory, potentially opening you up to being trapped in the straitjacket.
Though the incarcerate spell can be potentially game-ruining, it has an effective 1⁄27 chance of occurring per casting: it will take at least five castings of the spell (if not several more) for the Stranger to stick a straitjacket onto a hero that was fully equipped with non-yellow gear prior to the fight. A sufficiently-prepared hero should be able to escape and make it to a cache of replacement armor in the absolute worst case.
Origin
A straitjacket (or strait-jacket) is a garment shaped like a jacket, with long sleeves that surpass the tips of the wearer's fingers and are intended to aid in the wearer's confinement: Once the wearer slides their arms into the sleeves, the person restraining the wearer crosses the sleeves against the chest and ties the ends of the sleeves to the back of the jacket, ensuring the arms are close to the chest with as little movement as possible. The straitjacket comes from the Georgian era of medicine, where physical restraint was used both as treatment for mental illness and to pacify patients in understaffed asylums (which in turn inspired the Madman role).
The effectiveness of a straitjacket as a restraint makes it of special interest to escapologists, whose ranks included the famous Harry Houdini, and it features as a staple prop in stage magic.
