I used to play ADoM a whole lot. I liked it, but I am a notorious scummer (no, not save scummer). If I can add slightly to my character's power in a safe but repetitive way and entirely within the rules of the game? I will. ADoM is absolutely
rife with opportunities like this. Herb scumming, ant scumming, gremlin scumming, and lots of less extreme methods. So I used to do that a lot. Then my character would become insanely powerful and I'd die to overconfidence. My best ADoM character ever was a level 43 High Elven Archer who walked through a "threat room" of Titans in an open cave while Berserk. He'd walked past them countless of times (they were on a travel route somewhere) without taking more than 10-20 damage altogether, but this time I forgot to switch away from Berserk. So he was dead. And I thought back on all the hours I'd been herb-scumming, the elaborate set-up to pick-pocket PoGAs off of dying gremlins, and I realised something profound.
I had hated every minute of it. Every single mind-numbing risk-less power-increasing minute I had been bored out of my skull but going through with it anyway because I wanted to have the best possible character. I looked upon the prospect of doing all that again and playing less overconfidently, and I just shook my head. I quit playing ADoM right there. Because I know myself well enough that I know beyond a doubt that if I have the opportunity to risk-freely increase the power of a semi-successful character? I will do so.
But a few weeks afterward I hungered for a roguelike again. I played around with Nethack, but found it too inexplicable and silly. I toyed around with Angband, but the non-persistent levels and lack of a serious food clock made me think that the ADoM scumming I had engaged in was only the very small tip of a very large iceberg I would get to explore if I stayed with Angband.
Then I played Crawl. What's this? I'm actually having food problems. I'm forced to dive deeper. There's no selling to shop so there's no mind-numbing treks through the dungeons hauling items of questionable value around. There aren't any infinitely-spawning creatures that you can get drops off of.
And most importantly, I never grow overconfident. No matter how high my character's AC is, or how many HP they have, in the worst case scenario death is one single mistake away. What's better, it has this neat patch that makes going from place to place in the dungeon a snap. And now it can track stashes, so I can search for an item I know I've seen while in-game, and go directly to it via the travel function.
And you can't scum in it. Well, you can, but all scumming choices are no-nonsense, strategic, long-term, early choices. When you start a character that is a Mummy the second time, you know beyond a doubt what you're going in for. If you start worshipping Nemelex the second time, you know what you're going in for. You learn Alter Self while being a Sif Munite, you know exactly what you're doing. You're doing this to scum, and only for that. But outside of these limited (and none of them are really risk free, save the Mummy ToD HoG ET situation, but that already requires a start-of-game choice that "I'm going to scum this game") situations, it's not a scummable game. The beauty of this is that people like me, who can't help themselves from scumming, can make large-scale
strategic choices that disable them from the scumming path without feeling that they are, right then, gimping their character.
And it's fun. It's heaps of fun when you manage to pull off an escape from a seemingly impossible situation. When you meet an UH on DL5 and you get that first UH-heralding message, you stop up. The game makes you
think. Teleports take time to kick in, so if you want to teleport you must decide so
now. Blinking is fast but a limited resource. Controlled blinking even more so. ToD is a high-level escape spell that won't get you out of melee. All these are actual choices, instead of what you have in many other roguelikes, where whenever you are in a dangerous situation you just go "ah, I have 1-round fail-free teleport with precise control. I can get out of this, no prob. Only a mistype can kill me now."
Okay, yes, Crawl has some arbitrary deaths. However, most of them come within DL 1-3. Ghosts don't
, so you learn from that. And other DL1-3 kills are easily recoverable through starting a new character - Crawl is so fast-paced that early game deaths are more like speed bumps than setbacks.
Then you have your arbitrary later-game deaths. Yellow wasps. Swamp Confusion. Elf Annihilators. But whatever one of these you encounter, you can learn one simple lesson from it: If you see a monster with a new letter or an old letter with a new colour, run the hell away. Come back at full HP, full MP and with all your diverse protective items with you. Bring extra scrolls of blinking. And learn what it can do as safely as possible.
In fact, if Craw teaches one critical roguelike skill, it is: Run the hell away.
On a
completely unrelated note:
You might want to take a look at Incursion to see what's coming up in the roguelike world. Take a peek at the manual and "White paper" to see what it's striving to accomplish.
;)
