Tourist

From NetHackWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

The Tourist, abbreviated as Tou, is one of the roles available for a hero in NetHack. Their corresponding player monster is the @ tourist. From the guidebook:

Tourists start out with lots of gold (suitable for shopping with), a credit card, lots of food, some maps, and an expensive camera. Most monsters don't like being photographed.

Tourists are always humans, and always start as neutral.

Starting equipment

Each Tourist starts with the following equipment:[1]

The Tourist's default starting pet is a little dog or kitten with equal probability.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that the information below is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate it.

Per commit 9d910773, Tourists have a 5% chance of starting with a magic marker with 19-23 charges if they do not start with one of the other tools (an effective ~4.42% chance, when accounting for the other tool probabilities.)

Intrinsics

Tourists gain the following intrinsic properties upon reaching the given experience levels:[8]

Attributes

The Tourist's starting attributes are distributed as follows:[9]

Attributes Strength Dexterity Constitution Intelligence Wisdom Charisma Remaining
Minimum attributes 7 7 7 10 6 10 28
Distribution percentages 15% 15% 30% 10% 10% 20%
Mean w/ standard deviation (human) 11.60±1.99 11.31±1.94 15.28±2.10 12.89±1.65 8.89±1.66 15.29±1.86

Skills

Tourists have the following skills available to them:[10]

Tourist skills
Max Skills
Basic
Skilled
Expert

Tourists start with Basic skill in darts and no other weapon skills.[11] They use the intelligence stat to cast spells, and their special spell is charm monster.[12]

Special rules

Shopkeepers recognize Tourists that are below experience level 15 as suckers and charge them an extra 13 markup when buying, and only offer 13 the base price of sold items[13]—this does not stack with the same extra markup for heroes that are wearing a visible shirt or dunce cap.[14]

Tourists have a -1 penalty to casting emergency spells.[15]

Tourists only gain multishot bonus from training darts to Skilled level, though they do gain normal multishot bonuses for any projectiles trained to Expert skill (i.e. only daggers).[16]

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that the information below is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate it.

Tourists are the only role capable of reading a conical hat. Only 13 of conical hats have any lettering, but those that do read either "DUNCE" or "WIZZARD", unambiguously identifying the hat.

Tourists gain experience points for taking pictures of different monster species. The amount of experience awarded is equal to that gained by killing the monster for the first time (and does not negate gaining experience by actually killing the monster for the first time). Their starting pet, if any, is eligible to give them experience as well.

Tourists also gain experience points when they enter a new level for the first time, excluding the first dungeon level. The amount of experience is equal to the level difficulty at the time the level is entered.

These changes to experience have an impact on strategy: the Tourist early game may actually be more difficult since you gain levels faster and encounter more difficult monsters, which give you more experience and cause you to gain even more levels, often before you've found enough gear to deal with the increased threats. It may also make pacifist tourists more viable by providing a way to level up and get more hit points early in the game.

Rank titles

The status line displays one of the following ranks for the corresponding experience levels:[17]

  • XL 1-2: Rambler
  • XL 3-5: Sightseer
  • XL 6-9: Excursionist
  • XL 10-13: Peregrinator/Peregrinatrix
  • XL 14-17: Traveler
  • XL 18-21: Journeyer
  • XL 22-25: Voyager
  • XL 26-29: Explorer
  • XL 30: Adventurer

Gods

Main article: Religion

The Tourist pantheon is based on the pantheon of the Discworld.[18]

Quest

Main article: Tourist quest

The Tourist's quest sees them fighting the Master of Thieves for The Platinum Yendorian Express Card, an artifact credit card. The Platinum Yendorian Express Card grants magic resistance, telepathy and half spell damage while carried. Invoking the Card can charge objects like a scroll of charging, with an effect partly dependent on the Card's beatitude: Tourists can invoke the blessed Platinum Yendorian Express Card to charge objects in the same way as a blessed scroll of charging, and otherwise the artifact only charges as an uncursed scroll does.

Strategy

Tourists are often agreed to be the most difficult role due to several drawbacks: they have low starting HP, no melee weapons and very few combat aids; their darts provide their only trained combat skill, and they are limited to Basic in many other skills; and their only "armor" is a Hawaiian shirt that will only become useful down the line. With all of this in mind, a Tourist that survives the trials of the early game can become incredibly powerful in the later stages, and can attain many advantages later in the game.

Magic mapping scrolls are a useful navigation boon early on, and more can be written upon finding a magic marker, while the expensive camera is one of the best scaring and blinding tools available, and the high amount of starting food can include useful items such as lembas wafers and spinach tins. The starting darts are good early ranged weapons that can be poisoned for additional damage, and can bridge to and potentially supplement any melee weapon the Tourist elects to use: the role is a "jack of all trades" with access to all weapon skills except club. Finally, the Platinum Yendorian Express Card is one of the best quest artifacts in the game and one of the best artifacts overall.

Character creation

The only choice available when generating a Tourist is their gender, which is generally inconsequential outside of consorting with foocubi: the Quest's goal level for Tourists contains four guaranteed incubi, but only two succubi. Players who want to raise their level and energy as high as possible for spellcasting purposes will probably want their Tourist to be female. A Tourist that finds an amulet of change or a ring of polymorph control can use up the foocubi of one gender, then switch and start consorting with the other. Female Tourists possess a slight advantage in their ability to lay eggs when polymorphed into an oviparous form, but this at best allows for a free dragon pet or two.

Early game

The Tourist's early game must be played with extreme caution, and they will need to rely a lot on their extra healing potions and found items. Their credit card can open locked doors and chests, though a lock pick or key is preferable if you can find one. If possible, use the starting pet or a found pet in order to curse-test each weapon and piece of armor you come across, and exchange worn armor for lighter armor of comparable AC where possible to keep as much carrying capacity free as possible. The starting Hawaiian shirt may be worth removing, since it grants no base AC or magic cancellation on its own, and is most useful to enchant as a lightweight source of AC after you have found magic resistance or another means to protect it from being destroyed (e.g. by a polymorph trap or the destroy armor monster spell).

The initial stock of 21-40 +2 darts should be viewed as a bridge to a better weapon: each dart on average lasts for 4 throws, so Tourists will get about 84&-160 dart throws before the supply is exhausted. Unless you find a weapon that is enchanted or one that has high damage (such as a dwarvish mattock or two-handed sword), it is much safer to bless your darts and use them against hostile monsters in the very early stages, reserving the preferred melee weapon(s) for non-threats like lichens, fog clouds and grid bugs. An early shop of almost any kind is a boon, since Tourists typically start out with enough gold for most of the good items in armor and weapon shops, and their charisma is often high enough to offset the price markup for "dupes"—be sure to account for the buying and selling modifiers when performing price identification. High starting charisma and above-average intelligence also makes consorting with foocubi a somewhat less risky option in the early stages.

An early Tourist faces stiff issues with to-hit, due to lack of weapon skills and the -4 to-hit penalty for Unskilled weapon use, and rushing to gain experience levels may cause them to be quickly overwhelmed. This also makes the usual strategies of heading directly for Minetown or Sokoban dangerous, since they will be much more reliant on pet assistance and quick wits than most heroes to procure armor this way—a slower descent in general might be worthwhile to explore levels for vaults to clear of gold, as well as items to sell and/or utilize, and around experience level 5 a Tourist should be more capable of using their melee weapon in order to quickly train it to Basic.

The expensive camera is one of the most useful items a Tourist starts with, as it can temporarily or permanently blind monsters when applied, and has a high (but not remotely guaranteed) chance of scaring them as well—if the hero lacks a towel or blindfold, they can blind themselves with the camera for using telepathy or else avoiding gaze attacks (often from a floating eye you want as a telepathy source). Keep in mind that if you are using Elbereth, blind monsters will not respond to the engraving! The starting food can last a Tourist quite a while in terms of nutrition, and can also tame or pacify domestic animals to avoid fights, especially since most of them are faster than the hero and can deal surprising damage.

Mid-game

Upon reaching 0 AC or better and obtaining a solid melee weapon, a Tourist has a reasonable chance at going after the luckstone in Mines' End and the prize at the end of Sokoban if they have not yet done so. If you have not found an altar to sacrifice at, converting or even attempting to create one (by dropping a ring of polymorph into a sink) is likely worthwhile so you can raise your luck and obtain a decent artifact weapon or two. Almost all artifact weapons are of use to a Tourist at this stage, with Mjollnir, Magicbane, Fire Brand, Frost Brand, and Vorpal Blade being among the more desirable—a 'mundane' weapon like a long sword or silver saber is also more than enough if you can enchant them significantly, even in the absence of artifact options. A Tourist with enough good weapons at this stage may consider exploring two weapon combat, and a stack of blessed and enchanted darts is a solid ranged option, especially if they still have the starting stack to work with.

Tourists improving their AC will usually favor metallic armor, unless they are highly dedicated to spellcasting or else are the beneficiary of an early wish for dragon scale mail: while their base spellcasting penalty is actually fairly lenient, any worn metallic armor cuts success rates significantly, and you are not guaranteed to find a full set or armor that is both entirely non-metallic and lets you maintain a favorable AC. Even for Tourists that do, their skill set favors non-combat spells and their energy growth does not support frequent casting. Regardless, Tourists seeking to adopt spellcasting may still want to learn a couple of low-power spells, particularly divination spells, to cast intermittently and train outside of combat.

An example of typical armor for a mid-game Tourist is an elven or dwarvish mithril-coat, iron shoes, a dwarvish iron helm or orcish helm, an elven cloak or dwarvish cloak, and a set of leather gloves, with perhaps one or two pieces of magical armor mixed in at any of the slots—a Tourist with magic resistance or another safeguard against armor destruction can also safely enchant the shirt they started the game with (or any better shirt they find along the way).

The Tourist quest is a major source of loot: there are many shops, barracks and graveyards, gold and various items can be found in the locate level's zoos, several items are generated with giant spiders and other arachnids at level creation, and the centaurs, captains and other fighters encountered in the filler levels will carry armor, weapons and useful consumables of their own—altogether, you will very likely find a couple of silver sabers or other quality weapons alongside one or more ascension kit items while rounding out your equipment. As a result, it may be worth postponing the use of the two guaranteed thrones within the branch until it has been entirely looted, so that you can save any throne wishes to complete whatever remains of your desired kit.

The Platinum Yendorian Express Card is a stellar enough artifact that it is usually worth completing the quest and obtaining it as soon as possible. If you are still short on levels to enter the quest, you can try luring any wraiths out from the home level, or else consorting with foocubi, to obtain the last few levels required; reflection or another means of dealing with potentially-deadly wands is recommended as well. The Master of Thieves can be easily felled with a stack of poisoned darts (e.g. the starting set of darts, should you still have them), and is vulnerable to various other forms of magic even after gaining immunity to magic missiles and wands of death from the quest artifact.

For patient and especially tricky Tourists who lucked into a horn of plenty early on, if your game's smoky potion is one of sickness, acid, fruit juice, or booze, the horn is a source of potentially infinite wishes: you can simply barricade themselves in a corner of a no-teleport area such as Sokoban or the Quest, and wait a few hundred turns in between invokes to recharge the horn indefinitely, and food is naturally no issue. While the chance to get a smoky wish decreases significantly the more you get, this is an easy and relatively risk-free method to grab an extra wish or two to fill out your kit, or obtain an important item you may need to make the mid-game more manageable before the spike in power after clearing the castle. Even players without the specific smoky potions can farm horns of plenty for many potions to dilute into holy water, royal jelly to increase strength, and efficient comestibles like lembas wafers.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that the information below is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate it.

As part of a general buff to quest leaders, the Master of Thieves has been made stronger, and thus his difficulty relative to other quest nemeses has increased.

Late game

A Tourist should have their weapons, dragon scale mail and other armor of choice well-enchanted by the time they venture into Gehennom. Though the role is a "jack of all trades" in terms of weapons, it lacks Expert skill or even Skilled in most of the typical end-game weapon choices; conversely, most artifacts are solid enough that Basic skill with high enchantment will more than suffice, and their two-weapon ability and Expert skills are good enough to solidly avoid "master of none" status. A Tourist can also safely utilize a shield of reflection if they are not as concerned about frequent spellcasting or damage output.

The silver saber in particular is one of the better primary or secondary weapons, even without the silver damage against major demons and vampires—meanwhile, daggers and darts are a Tourist's best projectiles, with the latter being preferable since they can be poisoned to use against non-resistant targets (which are more rare but still present at this stage) and do not penalize multishot. Spellcasting Tourists can pair a robe with gray dragon scale mail and either an amulet of reflection or a shield of reflection (which can be taken off as necessary)—their magic skill set lets them make use of incredibly powerful spells, such as identify to learn enchantments and charges, magic mapping for efficient Gehennom clearing, and charm monster to obtain exotic pets, de-fuse tense combat situations and get especially nasty monsters off their back.

For artifacts, a Tourist's saber skill allows them to potentially utilize the superb Grayswandir, and a highly-enchanted Magicbane is respectable even without the high frequency of effects that the artifact gives at much lower enchantments. Frost Brand remains highly useful as for most other roles, and Mjollnir is also very much an end game-capable artifact, even though it falls off against shock-resistant aligned priests and angelic beings.

The Platinum Yendorian Express Card lets a Tourist charge wands, tools and certain rings to their heart's content, significantly reducing ink usage from magic markers and inventory space dedicated to spares of various items—this includes saving wishes on scrolls of charging and using scrolls on wands of wishing themselves. Even then, it is still worth keeping multiples of mission-critical wands such as digging, death, and teleportation, since repeated charging increases the odds of a wand exploding, possibly rotating the more common wands as they are charged; managing your wand stock properly can make them last through the rest of the game.

For other chargeable items, increase damage and protection rings are worth amassing multiples of to charge one to +5 or higher, and a high-enchantment ring of increase damage pairs well with two-weapon combat and/or multishot darts. A horn of plenty can be recharged constantly to lower the amount of food a Tourist has to carry, while expensive cameras can scare many monsters up to and including even the Riders. Various other magical tools such as magic flutes, magic harps, fire horns and frost horns can easily find a place in a Tourist's kit post-quest, as can more "mundane" tools such as tinning kits to make obtaining and replacing intrinsics easier (e.g. quantum mechanic tins in case they lose speed in Orcus-town).

History

The Tourist is one of the first roles introduced in Hack 1.0.

Origin

The Tourist is heavily inspired by Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, where Twoflower (the role's quest leader) is one of the main characters who manages to thrive in the hectic Discworld through sheer wits (or just as often lack of) and adaptability. Other influences include Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a "travel guide for the hapless fantasy tourist" that spoofs sword-and-sorcery novels by reinterpreting them as carefully orchestrated guided tours, with the main protagonist as the "tourist".

Variants

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, Tourists can also be doppelgangers or hobbits.

Tourists are given Whisperfeet as their first sacrifice gift, generate with much more gold and food, and are the only role to not have any techniques associated with them.

SporkHack

SporkHack offers a wider selection of races for various roles. An orc Tourist is an interesting choice that starts with potions of sickness; dipping the starting darts into one offers an instant kill attack from the second move.

UnNetHack

In UnNetHack, items in shops are automatically identified when playing as a Tourist, regardless of whether the player has seen them before or not. Similarly, selling unidentified items will automatically identify them. Enchantments and BUC status are not identified.

FIQHack

In FIQHack, tourists ID shop items in the same manner as UnNetHack. Additionally, a Tourist may be a gnome. Tourists start with all of their optional equipment. The magic marker that a tourist starts with is always 0:0.

SlashTHEM

In SlashTHEM, Tourists can be doppelgangers, hobbits or incantifiers.

Encyclopedia entry

The road from Ankh-Morpork to Chrim is high, white and winding, a thirty-league stretch of potholes and half-buried rocks that spirals around mountains and dips into cool green valleys of citrus trees, crosses liana-webbed gorges on creaking rope bridges and is generally more picturesque than useful.
Picturesque. That was a new word to Rincewind the wizard (BMgc, Unseen University [failed]). It was one of a number he had picked up since leaving the charred ruins of Ankh-Morpork. Quaint was another one. Picturesque meant -- he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word -- that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown.
Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant "idiot".

[ The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett ]

References