User:JMarieStanton

Hi, I'm James Marie Stanton! (I'm female, in case you're wondering. James is a family name.) I play on NAO sometimes, (JMarieStanton on NAO (stats, games, deaths, dumplogs, ttyrecs)), and before they axed the version I was good at, I was getting ready to try the quest.

I have three adorable baby brothers, and a dog named Hobo Jack (who also shows up on NAO!)

Favorite roles:

• Valkyrie (human and lawful)

• Wizard (human, female and chaotic)

• Archaeologist (human, female and lawful)

My favorite version is 3.4.3, but I've tried 3.6.1 on NAO and I kinda hate it.

Best game so far:

Well, this one time, I had everything going for me. I was a lawful human valk with terrific items and leveled up to 11, and I managed to get some Dwarvish mithril and burn two enchant scrolls on it, and together with my starting shield, I had (I think) -7 AC, plus a ring of reflection, cloak of displacement, and intrinsic telepathy. It was incredible. I felt invincible. I plowed through the upper mines, made a well-protected stash in a locked room in Minetown, and went back up to start working on the main dungeon.

I picked up some incredible items from a double bones level and another bones level immediately under it, iirc, and managed to uncurse a bag of holding that had a bunch of money, two wands of striking with charges, and some gems left in it from some other NAO player. So I went back up and cleaned out Minetown better, and moved a lot of useful stuff from my stash into my bag. Then I just went all-out, bought most of the useful stuff from the shops and stashed it.

The next evening, I logged back in. I returned to the main dungeon and thought I'd clear out sokoban. I used the walkthrough because I suck at puzzles, according to my old excel teacher. Anyways, I ran the first two puzzles pretty quickly, and then I had a relatively long fight just outside the big room with the upstair at the end of Sokoban 2. There were a bunch of winter wolf cubs, a grey unicorn, and some orcs, and they all came pouring out at me. I sent their souls to Niflheimr, so to speak, and got the unihorn. I was ecstatic! Soon I'd be ready for the quest, and I'd never even seen past dlvl. 10 before!

Even when you feel invincible, one mistake is all it takes to really ruin your game. I made two in the space of ten seconds.

I hit "99s" to recover some health. (Don't judge me. A guy chewed me out on the forum for using that, but it's what my ex-boyfriend taught me, the one who got me hooked on Nethack in the first place. He had multiple zen ascensions and at least one foodless ascensions, so I think he knew what he was talking about.)

Then I made my first mistake. I ate a (now stale) winter wolf cup corpse, hoping to get cold resistance. This was stupid on a number of levels, because innate cold resistance is one of perks of being a Valkyrie, plus, I knew as soon as I did it that the corpse was now probably 120+- turns old.

And then I made my second mistake, by not using the unihorn! I thought a character of my level could shrug off food poisoning. And so I hit "99s" again!

Große Fehler, junge Walküre, große Fehler...

But I learned my lesson, and I've since had a number of games where I made decent Sokoban runs before dying. I'm really thinking about doing a serious, carefully planned run soon and trying to make it to the quest.

I also play:

• Slashem

• dNethack

• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (though I like each progressive version less.)

• Moria and Angband

• Larn (historic roguelike. Later versions are hard to come by these days, but drop me a line and I'll get you a stable copy.)