User:Delbow/Tengu
I'm copying this here because I don't trust my ability to find it in the 'froup again, and I must have it somewhere. It's not mine, but it's poetic and it's genius and I'm *keeping* it, dammit.
"Murphoid" <Murphoid@gmail.com> writes: > [ got teleportitis; how to get rid of it? ]
> Ok, So what's this unrecomended option no one will tell me about?
At night, gremlins have a chance of stealing random intrinsics. Letting them do that intentionally is typically a poor option, because by the time you encounter a gremlin, you've likely got lots of other intrinsics you really want to keep.
Ladies and gentlemen of rec.games.roguelike.nethack,
Eat tengu.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, eating tengu would be it. The long-term benefits of tengu-eating have been proven by experienced tournament-decorated players, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own pigheaded, ignorant biases and prejudices. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of the early game. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of the early game until you're on the fifteenth level of Gehennom with no magic mapping and bored out of your skill. But trust me, in 25000 moves, you'll look back at how excited you were about finding a +2 orcish helmet on Dlvl 1.
Don't worry about Astral. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to kill an Olag-hai behind a boulder by throwing rocks at it. The real troubles in your game are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you when you're in the middle of a summoning storm and some Herzou with a bullwhip swipes the someone-else's-quest-artifact that's your only source of MR. Do one thing every day that annoys your god.
[a]pply flutes.
Don't be reckless with cockatrice corpses. Don't put up with soldiers who pick them up and swing them at you.
Make poison resistance an early priority.
Don't waste your time on score. Sometimes you end up on the list, sometimes you don't. The race is long and, in the end, it's only among the players bored enough to hang out all bloody day killing the endgame riders over and over. Remember conducts you kept. Forget the YASDs. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old scorelists. Throw away your old bones files.
Push boulders around on Soko until your strength is reasonable.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what class, race, gender or alignment you want to play. The most interesting people I know just let the game pick, or use a script to try random combinations they've not yet ascended. Hoard plenty of K-rations. Make good use of your starting pet. You'll miss him when he's gone. Maybe you'll get crowned, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll raid Ludios, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll put on a ring of conflict in the middle of the room with your Quest Leader for the pure hell of it. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either (unless you blew up your bag of holding). Your choices are half chance. So are everybody's else's, except for Marvin's.
Enjoy your controlled self-polys. Use them every way you can. Don't be afraid of the variety of really cheap abuses you can pull this way. Eating rings and amulets is the best pre-run gimmick since altar squatting.
Run knights, even if you keep getting called "Caitiff!" for attacking a creature that smacked you just previously.
Read the Guidebook and do what it damn well says. You think the Dev Team wrote that just to hear the sounds of their own keyboards?
Don't read unID-ed scrolls. What, are you trying to die on purpose?
Get to know the sources. You never know when you'll be playing on a box with no 'net connection and no local copy of the source tree. The code is your best link to the Dev Team and will amuse you as much as the game itself.
Understand that silly front-ends come and go, but nethack is really all about textmode. Work hard to learn hjklyubn, because you'll be prepared when you want to play on a laptop, or a BTC-5100 mini, or edit a file in vi.
Play Angband once, but quit before you convince yourself you actually like all style and no substance. Play Larn once, because that's probably all it'll take for you to win. If anyone tries to get you to play an MMORPG, hit them in the noise-hole with a thick InterLISP manual.
Accept certain inalienable truths. Ants are fast and spawn in groups. Nymphs wake up at inopportune times. The watch captain is always in your way when you want to move northwest. You, too will die YASD. And when you do, you'll fantasize about how easy the end game would have been with that -53 AC you had, and wonder why it had to be on a no-bones level.
Respect Izchak.
Don't expect anyone on the 'froup to agree with you. Maybe you think that disenchanters are annoying. Maybe you think the sky is blue. But don't be surprised when you get flamed for saying it.
Don't #adjust your inventory too much or you'll end up with a cockatrice corpse as "y". Be patient with other Usenet posters and remember that there's a living person behind the words on the screen. Unless they're some mouth-breathing cretin who didn't bother to try something in wizmode before spouting off about it.
But trust me on the tengus.
(Attribution, dammit: Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune)
