Forum:Nethack sans Elbereth

< Forum:Watercooler

The server that I play on (telnet://nethack.csh.rit.edu) has "Elbereth" compiled out, and has for several decades. I once disagreed with this, but after realizing that the scroll of scare monster does the same thing, I conceded that removing the Elbereth trick is more in tune with the spirit of the game, especially now that the trick is very well known.

My question is: how much do people think this prohibition changes the game itself? Almost all advice and strategies mention it as an option. nethackwiki considers Elbereth to be a legitimate part of the game, while Polypiling and Farming are considered minor infractions on the Cheating page.

Davek 05:55, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I certainly makes the game harder as the get-out-of-dangerous-situations-spamming tactic no longer works. I'd also say that farming is more of an offender than polypiling as you have to exploit NetHack's design deficiencies more to effectively farm.

The DevTeam seems to be a bit partial in regards to Elbereth as it is only a compile option since NetHack 3.0.0. Elbereth itself was already there in Hack 1.0.

Now, people generally don't really like it when you make the game harder. :-) IIRC in RGRN Spork got a lot of criticism because of making Elbereth less effective and people on IRC are even more vocative about that. I myself wouldn't mind removing Elbereth completely but I think the outcry of certain people would be too much trouble.

In UnNetHack, Elbereth got a little bit toned down, mostly for the unique monsters and it also contains Elbereth-tracking (using the patch from bilious). So if you play Elbereth-less, it will be shown in your dump. --Bhaak 08:51, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I was surprised how much of Elbereth can be replaced with movement tactics in my 12-conduct games. Of course, the game was making opponents for a level 3 wizard, while I was typically armed with several pet balrogs, a magic whistle, and a tooled horn. --Tjr 16:52, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

My TAEB AI (TAEB::AI::Planar) was told to use Elbereth only for healing, because I was curious to see how a bot designed to work out tactics for itself would function if it didn't have that option open to it. It also came up with all sorts of interesting tactics, mostly depending on movement. (Things like running in circles around mobs in order to split them up, which works quite well in the bigroom but only with intrinsic/extrinsic speed; and using floating eyes as obstacles.) I've come up with similar tactics myself, like making monsters peaceful in order to use them to hold back other monsters; something like a peaceful dwarf can hold back an entire mob of much more powerful monsters quite easily. Ais523 17:04, 3 February 2011 (UTC)