Forum:(Sporkhack) Inexplicable YASD
Just now, something happened to me that has NEVER happened to me before - I died and I have no idea WHY or HOW.
Now, we all know that Nethack and its' variants have the habit of instakilling the player for the smallest of things, like turning a corner and getting blasted by black dragon or stepping into a dart trap and getting hit with lethal poison. But in this case, I do not understand how the game mechanics could possibly allow a YASD to happen.
Anyway, here's what happened:
I played an elven Ranger and had just entered the area of the Ranger Quest, starting off by aggroing a peaceful centaur (thought they were hostile), easily mowing through them. I should probably mention that I'm completely unspoilerd with regards to the Ranger and have never attempted this quest before. I then tried to enter the forest grove, but the only entrance I could was too small to pass through with the equipment I carried, so I tried to burn the tree in my way with the last charge of my Fire wand, only to find out that these trees reflect beams. No real damage done, so I continued to slaughter the Centaurs in the area. One of them used a scroll of create monster and generated a whole ton of other centaurs. Still, no problem. My armor class was low enough and I did fairly well at dispatching enemies with daggers. I kept close attention at the combat messages to make sure the game didn't throw any curve-balls. At this point, the enemies failed to even scratch me, even the occasional blast from a wand of striking didn't do anything (dwarven mithril coat), but then it happened:
I got this weird message I've never seen before, I quote:
"Elf, all your powers will be lost."
No idea what triggered it either, so I got worried and began to retreat, so I could zap my wand of enlightment to see if I could figure out whether this affected me in any way. Then right at the next turn I got killed. By a wand of striking. Instantly. At full HP. Even stranger, my HP weren't reduced to zero, rather the HP display was GONE.
I have no idea how this is even possible and can only assume that this is something Sporkhack-specific, since the the wiki doesn't have anything on this and the entrance area looked very different from what is depicted there.
I'm almost certain that it wasn't a wand of death that killed me, it said wand of striking. There also was no visible beam either, so that wouldn't be consistent with a WoD.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to read the dumplog or retrieve the message history, which might shed some light on this.
