Re: Barbarian, early game strategy

On 2009-08-02, ranger <nethack@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Derek Ray wrote:
Remind me again why he needs to be so
super-duper careful in the early game?
We're helping a newbie who has had trouble getting anywhere in the early
game. I submit that in nethack, your death follows from your first error.

Demonstrably false. People have blown up bags of holding with all their
tools in them and still ascended.

Nethack is far more of an error-forgiving game than you portray it to be.

I can sometimes trace my YASDs back to a mistake made thousands of turns
before.

I'm inclined to just say "twaddle", but I'll let you provide a specific
example of this first, and then say "twaddle" about the example.

There are so many instant-save items available to the player that by the
time one has accumulated "thousands of turns", one should have some, if
not all of them. And failure to accumulate instant-save items, while
possible, is hardly a mistake -- it's bad luck.

In the most extreme cases, Elbereth can be written with your fingers and
give you a 70% chance. Imagining that any given death was triggered
thousands of turns ago is both overthinking the situation _and_ being
narrow-minded about your opportunities.

I do agree that B's are more resiliant to player mistakes than most
other classes, but this is nethack. I encourage very careful,
meticulous play.

Careful play is good. But overcareful play is bad -- especially since
it has a tendency to require the player to worry about too many things
at once.

One of the keys to successfully ascending is to learn both what you need
to worry about ... and what you _don't_ need to worry about, and leaving
your brain free to deal with the former.

--
Derek

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