Guard
@ guard 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 14 |
| Attacks |
Weapon 4d10 |
| Base level | 12 |
| Base experience | 284 |
| Speed | 12 |
| Base AC | 10 |
| Base MR | 40 |
| Alignment | 10 (lawful) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 0 (Not randomly generated) |
| Genocidable | No |
| Weight | 1450 |
| Nutritional value | 400 |
| Size | Medium |
| Resistances | None |
| Resistances conveyed |
None |
|
A guard:
| |
| Reference | monst.c#line2377 |
The guard is an exceedingly rare human monster in NetHack that will only appear occasionally if a player is in one of Croesus's many vaults. They are very similar to Yendorian Army soldiers, and can even be bribed.
Reviving guard corpses will produce a human zombie instead.
Generation
As previously indicated, guards are not randomly generated, and only appear if the player waits around while within a vault, creating an opening in the vault or solid rock for them to stand in. There is no set limit on how many guards a vault may generate, though only one will appear at a time.
Guards follow the same generation mechanisms as soldiers and watchmen for armor and weapons.
Interacting with guards
If you are visibly present in a vault when the guard appears, they will ask you for your name. If you reply with Croesus, Kroisos or Creosote, they will believe you and disappear; this incurs a small alignment penalty for lying if you are lawful, unless it is also your actual name. Attempting this after killing the actual Croesus will cause them to turn hostile.
Otherwise, they will demand you drop all of your gold and follow them out of the vault; this includes any gold you have in open inventory and in containers within your inventory, so stashing cannot fool them. Once they see you have no gold, they will open a passage from the vault to a nearby corridor in the dungeon and wait for you to follow them out; both the guard and passage will vanish once you safely reach the corridor. Items left inside the passage will be embedded in stone; any monsters caught in the disappearing passage will be moved to a random location on the current level.
If you attack the guard, attempt to escape by some other means, or take too long to comply, they will become hostile. If a guard dies in the passageway they create, it will close immediately; their corpse and possessions will be left embedded in rock, along with you if you were also in the passage.
If you are in a polymorphed state from eating a mimic corpse when a guard appears, they will not notice you and leave, puzzled; doing so while hallucinating produces a different message, but otherwise has the same effect. Polymorphing into a form that can hide under items produces the same message. If you are unable to speak from paralysis, unconsciousness, being in the middle of engraving, or else being in a form that prevents speaking, they will also leave. The guard will not notice you if you are invisible when they enter, and will leave when you move away from them.
Strategy
As fighters, guards are on par with Yendorian Army captains in terms of difficulty: they move at the same speed as an unhasted hero, with potentially decent AC and a weapon attack that can hit for up to 40 base damage, incidentally the same as Croesus's attack. The rub of this is that, as described above, guards are very easy to avoid fighting, and are usually not worth bothering anyway.
Their presence can be useful for players who happen upon a vault completely by accident and have no other means of escape. After dropping their gold and following the guard out, they can grab a means of digging (e.g. a mattock) and go back to the vault to retrieve the gold. Once players can reliably make their way in and out of vaults, especially via controlled teleports, the guard is little more than a minor obstacle, and a quick lie will get them out of your hair. Some players name their lawful character Croesus (or one of the acceptable variants) to avoid the alignment penalty for lying; even for other lawful characters the penalty is small, and in most cases can be easily remedied.
Note that a guard really only cares about whether or not you have gold in your inventory and bags, not what happened to the gold in the vault; as long as you are not carrying any gold yourself, they will escort you out. If you pick up the gold again, they will demand you drop it and turn hostile if you do not comply quickly; however, you can freely teleport it away or throw it outside of the vault instead without angering them. While guards can be bribed, since they are already peaceful, this will likely turn them hostile; this is often a waste of gold even when successful, though it can be used in some corner cases, e.g. to pacify a hostile guard and avoid risking penalties for murder.
Lawful and neutral vault-hunters who have dealt with Croesus and cleared Fort Ludios will want to avoid using Croesus's name or its variants when answering guards, since this will immediately turn the guard hostile; killing a guard counts as murder, even if the guard attacks you first. However, most characters at this point will have a means to quickly enter and leave vaults as they please, and can avoid dealing with guards in the first place, much less turning them hostile.
Chaotic characters are not penalized for murder, but will still suffer an alignment penalty for killing a monster designated "always peaceful". Most of the items a guard will have are generally not worthwhile, since there is usually no shortage of barracks and soldiers in a given game; any character that can defeat a guard is usually more than capable of handling those.
Should a player dealing with a guard somehow get stuck in a disappearing passageway, they can pray to escape; being stuck in a wall is considered a major trouble, and a successful prayer will have them teleported out. If teleportation somehow fails, the player will be granted temporary phasing for a few turns, which should be enough for them to make it back onto a safe square.
This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.
It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.4. Information on this page may be out of date.
Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-364}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.
