User:Phol ende wodan
Hi there, I'm Phol ende wodan, more commonly known as aosdict on NAO (stats, games, deaths, dumplogs, ttyrecs) (and also on hardfought.org) and on IRC as aosdict or aos. If you want to contact me, messaging me on IRC is a good bet, but you can also leave a message on my talk page and I'll probably see it soon after.
Design
I enjoy discussing NetHack game design, and frequently talk about it in the #hardfought channel on Freenode. My biggest ongoing project is listening to the design discussions that happen on IRC and sifting through them to find new ideas, or YANIs. I maintain several pages on this wiki cataloguing all the ones I know of:
- Huge archive of YANIs discussed on IRC
- Archive of YASIs from discussion on IRC, much less serious
- My personal YANIs, not discussed by multiple people
Over time, I've also written some lists/essays about problems I see in vanilla and how they could be addressed.
- Balance issues: a large list/essay describing balance problems in vanilla and possible solutions to them
- Frustration issues: a list of frustrating and not fun elements in vanilla
I've also gotten into the habit of writing long-form proposals that focus on overhauling one specific (but usually significant) part of the game.
- Proposal to rearrange monster letters and colors (complete)
- Proposal for quest level/monster/flavor redesign (complete)
- Proposal for a replacement of the combat system (mostly complete)
- Proposal to rebalance NetHack's skill system (incomplete)
- Proposal to add the Bard as a distinct and well-balanced role (incomplete)
And lastly, I have written up some comments on the proposals of others:
Playing NetHack
I primarily play vanilla 3.6 with a sprinkling of some variant play for Junethack. I have 20-30 vanilla ascensions in all 13 roles, most of which are on NAO, as well as one ascension each for UnNetHack (vampire wizard), GruntHack (dwarven valkyrie) and NetHack 4 (elven wizard). Probably need to get into FIQhack, Fourk, and dNetHack at some point, too.
