User:Chris/game resources

When designing new monsters for your variant, it is helpful to keep in mind the various resource pools that the character has.

Strategic Resources

Strategic resources can't be recovered very quickly, and therefore loss of one of these resources affects the player's strategy. In theory, nethack has lots of different strategic resources, though most of them are either rarely damaged, trivially fixed, or are prevented by one of the mandatory resistances.

Common Targets

• HP: The main combat resource. Most monsters reduce HP, even if they also target one of the character's other resources. At low levels, HP recovers fairly slowly, so a tough fight can leave the character injured for the next hundred turns or so. At high levels, the HP regeneration rate is so high that HP becomes more of a tactical resource.
• Experience level: Because the existing drain life attack is resisted by Magic cancellation, and because a single drained level is easy to recover, in practice this is not a very significant form of damage.
• Inventory items
• Ability scores: Note that ability score damage can be trivially fixed with a unicorn horn (for this reason, some variants remove this power from unicorn horns). In theory, many vanilla monsters target ability scores. However, most such attacks are poison attacks, and poison resistance is mandatory due to the threat of poison instadeaths.
• BCU of gear: This is one of the main late-game clocks. The player has a (moderately) finite supply of holy water, after which the character's weapon, luckstone, and bag of holding become liabilities.
• Erosion of gear: Because this is capped at -3, and because late-game gear tends to be naturally resistant, erosion is not really a factor in the late-game.

Uncommon Targets

• Max HP
• Enchantment of gear
• Character memory
• Grease on gear: Because this protects against YASD from drowning attacks and brainless-ness, many players consider grease extremely important.
• Lizard corpses/Potions of acid
• Nutrition
• Intrinsics

Unused Targets

These resources exist, and at least some of them could be targeted by attacks, but no vanilla monster directly targets them.

• Luck
• Prayer timeout
• Wishes: This is more of a meta-resource, and it would be hard to target directly, but leftover wishes can be an important source of flexibility for a late-game character.
• Life saving: Technically a resource, but many players don't use Amulets of Life Saving
• Intrinsic AC
• Intrinsic to-hit
• Intrinsic damage
• Encumbrance
• Spell memory