Okay, maybe the game doesn’t hate me, but I have my doubts. There’s nasty, and then there’s over-the-top.
I’ve been shuttling between 11 and 12, and on one visit to level 11, a vault was created. These are always packed with a variety of monsters, usually a fair number of tough ones with a sprinking of wimps. And I got a unique, Boldor, King of The Yeeks.
So far, so good. It looked doable, with care. Well, it did until I saw the Cherub. Sounds cute, right? Yeah, sure. It was a little out of depth. Just a little, because this critter usually hangs out on level 33. It could also resist just about anything I might throw its way.
Still, the Cherub was way down in the bottom left corner, with a stone wall in front of it. So I decided to give the vault a try. Very, very, carefully.
That involved a lot of dancing around to get monsters out of the room no more than one or two at a time. Edging up near the door, then back again, standing in place, and so on. Fortunately, the entire area around the vault was a corridor, so I wouldn’t be mobbed.
It was long, sweaty work. Boldor got out and gave me a bad time for awhile. His spells failed against my resistances, but he would call for friends. So I had a line of critters in front of me, and then one behind me. The snotlings were trivial, but the kamikaze yeeks were another matter. No way to avoid the damage when they blew up.
Boldor liked to blink around, too. Then he made the mistake of blinking in front of me, and I finally beat him down. Whew! Got rid of all his friends next. And then everything went to pieces.
The gremlins came.
You want fast breeding? These things, which look like frogs, just don’t quit. I killed over a hundred of them. For awhile it looked like I might be making progress. There were just seven in front of me, although a small bunch were in the vault room, too.
I killed one gremlin. There were still seven. I killed another. Still seven. Being in a corridor, I could only get one at a time; had there been more room, an area spell might have helped.
And there were still all those other monsters in the vault room. It was just too much. But I’d been at this a long time, and wasn’t about to give up. So I used the debug command to zap out every monster on the level. Poof!
Of course, I didn’t get any experience for the vaporized monsters, but I’d already picked up plenty from Boldor and the others. And I wasn’t sorry to see that Cherub disappear, either.
At least now I could check out the goodies. That took a long time, too. Because almost every square in the vault was trapped. I kid you not. I was moving one step at a time, spending several turns (search was on, of course) in one place to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
Fortunately, Darry has a “destroy traps” spell, so getting rid of them was easy. Even so, it was a very slow process, and he doesn’t have a lot of mana, so there were times I had to wait for it to regenerate.
The sad part was, all that effort, and I didn’t find one item I could use. I grabbed the better stuff, and sold it all. Well, I did keep the *slay* dragon cutlass, but only as a souvenir.
Yeah, I think the game hates me.
A game that hates me??
Huh, this game reminds me of all the trips that I took my party (or at least tried) from the Adventure’s Guild to the Blacksmith Shop just to buy weapons in Bard’s Tale 1 without dying. Say about a dozen or so times.
And in those days it was VERY easy to forget where you were since the game had NO overhead map, no automapping, no nothing. Not even a compass until you learn the spell that gave you a magic compass.
Mordern gamers don’t know how easy they have as compared with their ’80’s couterparts.
i think dale needs some more fine tuning. i get these 4 ads on the page to display this thread
Yeah Presto, I rememebr those trips, too. Especially the first one, at night. Finally made it to the door, and the place was closed. Ran back to the guild, and spent a long time waiting for dawn.
Ag, I pulled all the urls from your message. WP automatically made them live links, which we certainly don’t need. Also, you should have posted this just in the “Weirdness has Come” comments.
By the way, I saw them, too. Obviously, some more tweaking needs to be done here.
More doom and gloom time!
Aliens RPG cancelled.
Obsidian lays off 20!
Yep, there’s no upper limit set for OOD monsters or treasure in *bands. That’s a feature and not a bug.
I can’t remember: are there scrolls of genocide or mass genocide in Zangband? As I recall, gremlins are good candidates for those scrolls.
Mert, yeah, I figured it was a feature. Haven’t come across any genocide scrolls, although there is such a spell in the Death realm. So I guess there are scrolls like that in the game.
Reading up on genocide, I saw you take damage for each critter vaporized. I don’t think i’d be too eager to use such a scroll ;)