There should be a Sesame Street for adults, where complex/difficult concepts, like trigonometry or arbitration vs. going to court/trial, are broken down and explained by puppets.
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’)
#adorable #I have been listening to a fair bit of Red Panda Adventures lately #which is causing me to find these much more amusing than they have any right to be
#juxtaposition #I tried sticking PDF given a religious context into my brain’s de-acronyming widget #to see what would happen #and it spat out ‘People’s Democratic Faith’ #so there’s that
(I didn’t talk about finals here while they were happening because I was worried it would make it seem too viscerally, overwhelmingly real. But, now they’re over! I got an A in English; I don’t have the results for Java yet, but all of the exam questions were about very familiar stuff, so I feel really good about my answers.)
Tags:
#adventures in University Land #oh look an original post #we are going to the local Italian place tonight to celebrate
you know a fantasy character who would enthusiastically wear a pair of those weird toe-shoes?
Sam Vimes
Oh my god oh my god but imagine how excited he would be – He runs home one day from work, practically skipping – Sybil looks up from the dragon she’s checking and says “You look happy dear. Which lord has died now?” “Darling-” he replies, with the glint in his eye usually only found during rooftop chases, “Now even my little toes can tell what street I’m on”
Oh & he’d start wearing them to work and maybe some of the younger recruits would mock him but Carrot would overhear them and then before you know it it’s compulsory for every watchman to own and wear a pair of toe shoes on patrol
And the city criminals find it absolutely hilarious until they suddenly realise that watchman in toe-shoes are a whole lot quieter when sneaking up behind you on a cold, dark night than watchman in sandals.
And maybe some of the more delusional Ankhian aristocrats would start wearing them because they think they’re ‘in’ and it would really annoy Vimes because why would you need toe-shoes when all you do is sit around all day anyway? And one day he makes the mistake of complaining about non-watchman wearing them to Vetinari and so Vetinari gets his own pair made entirely in black and then suddenly the whole city is wearing them
And then one evening as they nod off in armchairs in front of the fire Vimes complains about this accidental fad he started to Sybil and she replies “Well, you are very powerful, dear” and all she gets in response is Vimes’ voice, muttered and slightly disgruntled, saying “No one should be that powerful”
