I forgot to describe what happened with the Scrupulously Ethical Rogue, didn’t I.
I skipped the Castle. Just because the soldiers would try to kill me on sight doesn’t justify killing them, and that goes double if I can just not let them see me. The Wand of Wishing would give four to seven wishes, and I could easily take it without having to kill any enemies, but that wand belongs to someone. Got to leave it.
And wishes are fairly plentiful anyway, in Slash’EM. I of course spent one on a spellbook of create monster, because those monsters would rather exist than not exist.
In Gehennom, I was constantly surrounded by various demons trying to kill me. By the time you get that far, no single monster is much of a threat, so self-defense doesn’t come into it. I was constantly Googling for information on demon types in NethHack (or DnD, since they imported those species), checking for which ones are barbaric but people and which ones come under the BtVS Vampire Exception.
Important tools: Elbereth, a tooled horn, and a wand of teleportation. Without that kind of thing, it’s really hard to get enemies or monsters that you don’t want to kill to move out of your way on a maze level. What I ended up doing was turning into a xorn so I could walk through walls and the mazes wouldn’t apply to me. (The fact that I stayed as a xorn had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I forgot turning into large monsters would wreck my armor. It was on purpose, definitely.)
Killing the Wizard of Yendor is completely justifiable. He wants the player character dead and is capable of doing it, and besides, he’ll get better. Death ray.
I ended up losing. The problem with being a xorn is that you don’t have very many hit points, so between the High Priest of Moloch and two Wizards of Yendor it goes down very fast.
That means the game was probably net-negative utility. I killed a lot of monsters, many of whom were sentient. I lost track of how many hostile gnomes and hobbits and goblins I killed by accident, even, just from pushing the wrong button. And since I lost, I didn’t get to deliver the MacGuffin to the Utility Monster. Except…
At one point, I sat on a throne. I was offered the chance to exterminate any one type of monster. I took it. Slash’EM contains tsetse flies, so those are an available choice. With those dead African sleeping sickness has no remaining vector, saving over nine thousand lives per year. (Too bad “mosquito” wasn’t an option.)
As usual, the moral is to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation. I promise I did not go in to the game with that in mind.
Tags:
#Nethack #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(‘as usual the moral is to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation’)
Brinens and Things 