User:Crawldragon

Konichi wa! I am a samurai on a quest to genocide all nymphs following a recent incident in the Gnomish Mines. If you wish to join me on my quest, or simply to say hi, please feel free to speak to me via this scroll of... magic... something. I don't know. I'm also programming a patch, so I might ask around for programming help. - Crawldragon (talk) 05:08, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

If I seem to you to be pedantic about grammar, it's only because I'm a bit of a bibliophile, which is largely the reason I love NetHack so much :-)

I have never ascended...

Memoirs

My NetHack experience is full of YASDs and lessons learned the hard way, and I thought it would be funny to catalog some of the more memorable ones.

• I once encountered a staircase in a shop and for some reason had a moment where I was going "I wonder where that leads?" This is how I learned that mimics can turn into >s.

• I had an argument once with a friend over whether or not monks can destroy boulders by kicking them. I swear I got this to work once. Just to show him, I created a new monk character and started kicking the first boulder I saw. This is how I learned it's possible to die by kicking something...

• ...and yes, I have died by kicking walls searching for hidden passages...

• ...but I would say my most embarrassing character death has to be the one where I kicked a pony corpse trying to move my knight's fallen steed away from a staircase so I could find it later. This was before the days when NAO could highlight hidden staircases. I don't know why I thought a level one knight of all things would be able to move something as large as a horse by kicking it, but I didn't want to bother with carrying it and I figured it was worth a shot.

• When I learned that it was a bad idea to genocide @, for some reason I took this as a challenge. While playing as a dwarf with showrace turned on, I got a scroll of genocide and decided to see if a player dwarf still counted as @. Apparently it does.

• Sometimes bones files do strange things. On one occasion I died in combat a few levels in. Story of my life. Then later I found the bones level with my ghost, my stray pet, and my loot. Then I was promptly killed by a combination of a pet I couldn't re-tame (due to a lack of snacks) and a fresh swarm of new monsters. Then I loaded up a new character and found the same bones level again, this time with two identical ghosts (at this point in my hacking I only ever played as an archaeologist), two identical cats, and two headstones. Then I died again, and the long story short is I had a bones file containing three ghosts, three identical cats, and three headstones with loot just begging to be plundered. I decided to just run to the next level rather than get killed again by my past lives.

• This one is less embarrassing and more just a case of Yet Another Funny Message. On one occasion I was stuck in a pit and being assaulted by a pony. Since I wasn't in a position to kill a pony this early in the game, I decided to try taming it, but the only viable option I had was a habanero pepper (at the time my custom fruit). Surely the last thing you would want to do to calm a frightened horse is feed it a hot pepper, right?

The pony devours a habanero.

• Today (05:08, 20 October 2014 (UTC)) I was playing a Samurai, one of my favorite classes in the game, and basically murdering my way through the Gnomish Mines. Suddenly I stepped on a magic trap, and was simultaneously seduced by two nymphs at the same time. One stole a third of my inventory and the other stole another third, leaving me with no armor and almost none of the two dozen items I'd been carrying. Royally cheesed off, I went on a rampage through that level of the mines looking for a wood nymph and a mountain nymph, with no ranged weapon (of course they stole that) and no light source. This is what I get for not buying anything from Izchak, because every time one of the little fiends got within my line of sight they immediately stole something else off of me and teleported away. Eventually I managed to punch the wood nymph to death. The mountain nymph, on the other hand, still had some annoying left in her, and she kept teleporting away even after I had emptied my inventory into a box to keep from being robbed. Finally, I got sick of it and grabbed a wand of wishing (thank the DevTeam for explore mode) and genocided all nymphs. It was not a glorious victory, but it was a very satisfying one. Nothing annoys me more than enemies that steal things and then teleport away.

More to come as I think of them.