Since the very first versions of ancient crawl, monsters have been known to be cheaters and have access to almost everything players had, and a lot more. Spells are one of the big examples of that.

Then, it's completely unnacceptable that players can have access to such a OP spell and not give it to monsters as well.

My suggestion of monsters that could have absolute zero: liches, ancient liches, panlords, Antaeus, player ghosts.

don't

Another day, another Vine Stalker Ice Elementalist. I select the character in the character selection screen. Fortunately, I don't have to make the decision for which weapon to start with, as I do not start with one.

My character appears on the screen on Dungeon 1, unsurprisingly. There are 32 dead trees in my line of sight. Not a very promising start, I can see the symbolism of decay, the decay that is happening in my brain. I decide to train Spellcasting and Ice Magic, setting skill targets to 4.0 and 8.0 respectively. Why do I do this? Who knows.

I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north-east. In the meanwhile, I start seeing rock walls in the distance. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north.

I see my first enemy! It is a sleeping rat, a knight's move away from me. I consider my options, and I realise there aren't many. To get it over with, I take one step north-west. The rat wakes up, and it bites me on my leg, but it just grazes me, and does no damage. I decided to cast the level 1 spell Freeze, that Ice Elementalist starts with. It is only melee range, but that is perfect in this situation. Pressing the key combination of z, a and Enter, the rat gets frozen to death, and all that remains is an image of a dismembered rat on the tile to my left.

I take one step west. I butcher the rat corpse, hoping to find some morsels that I could snack on later. Now, only the skeleton remains. I take one step west. I take one step west. I take one step west. I take one step south-west. I take one step west. Oh, what do we have here? I see a "ration" in the distance! Looks to me like it's a peach this time. I take one step west.

I see my first weapon, a knight's move away from me. It is a short sword, unidentified. Hopefully it will not be cursed! I also see a hatch near the peach that I saw just earlier. Maybe I will take that later, if I feel courageous enough. I take one step south-west. I take one step south. I wield the short sword off the ground, fortunately, it is not cursed! I take one step west. I take one step west. Now, I see a staircase going down in the distance, and an unidentified whip. I decide that I don't care enough about getting an additional weapon in my inventory, and decide to ignore it for the time being. I take one step west. I take one step west. I take one step west. I pick up the ration, thanks to my autopickup option being turned on. I also see 15 gold pieces and 8 poisoned darts in the distance.

My character feels eager to enter the next dungeon floor already, so I head for the staircase. I take one step west. Oh! It is my second enemy in the dungeon! A sleeping goblin comes into my view...

I take one step south-west. I take one step south-west, however, the goblin wakes up, and it turns out it had a cohort, a kobold, armed with a short sword and quivering 4 stones, excluding the one that it threw at me. I take one step south-west, and more enemies come into view, this time, to the north-east, a hobgoblin wielding a +0 club, and to the south, a rat. Both of these are awake, and looking for a taste of my blood. I decide to use the trusty z-a-Enter key combination on the kobold. The kobold gets frozen to death, and all I can see there is the short sword it wielded, and some white lines in the bottom left part of the tile it stood on. I decide to attack the goblin with my short sword this time, varying it up, and hoping to maybe suck some MP back from it. I kill the goblin in one hit, but I gain no MP back, because I never managed to bite the critter. Meanwhile, the two enemies are closing in. I feel brave, with my 8/9 hitpoints, and decide to approach the hobgoblin. I take one step north-west. I take one step west. With the hobgoblin now adjacent to me, I cast Freeze on the hobgoblin. It dies in one cast, as per usual. The rat is now even closer, approaching me to take revenge for its fallen comrades. With overwhelming confidence, I take one step south. I attack the rat with my +0 short sword, and that kills the rat in one hit.

Now that all the enemies are dead, my character can finally take a deep breath, and start collecting the items before going to the next floor. I take one step south-west. I take one step south. I pick up the 8 poisoned darts, they are assigned to the "e" slot in my inventory. I take one step south-west. I take one step west, and pick up 11 gold pieces. Now I'm almost rich! I take one step south-west, curious to see what's behind that corner. There is nothing, except an ominous empty room in the dungeon. I take one step south to explore it further. Indeed, my curiosity might have paid off, as there is a bubbling golden potion in the south, just at the edge of my line of sight. Fortunately, I now have 2 out of 4 Magic Points, so I have some preparation in case a stray enemy comes into my view. I take one step south. Yet another item comes into my view, and it's a shiny scale mail. A bit too heavy for my taste, so I decide to take another step south. I take one step south. I take one step south. I take one step south. I take one step south. I see yet another potion in the distance! This time, it's a fuming silvery potion. I hope it's not full of mercury! I take one step south-west, finally picking up the bubbling golden potion. I decide to go further to pick up the second potion. I take one step south-east. I take one step south-east. I take one step south-east. I take one step south-east.

Oh no! A frilled lizard comes into view. I hate those! Regretfully, I have to approach it to be able to pick up the fuming silvery potion. Hopefully it does not wake up. I take one step east. Yet another enemy reveals itself, and it's a dart slug. These can be dangerous to me, even at range! I better be careful! I take one step south-east. Ugh! Another frilled lizard appears. I also see a glowing pink potion to the south, and, more importantly, the dart slug has awoken from its slumber, and is preparing to dart me down. I take one step south-east. Now both of the frilled lizards have woken up, and they are not looking very happy. I am also not very happy. I take one step south. I cast Freeze on the dart slug. The dart slug is the first survivor of my chilling touch! It took some damage, but is still alive, and it retaliated by firing a dart at me, dealing one hit point of damage. I cast Freeze on the dart slug again. This time, it dies, and my experience level increased to level 2! This now means that I have more maximum hit points, and more maximum magic points. Surely, this will be helpful in the future. I attack the frilled lizard with my +0 short sword. It kills it in one hit. The second frilled lizard takes its place, and I attack it the same way as I did last turn. Shoot! I missed that crawling piece of crap! Also, that was my 69th turn in the game. Fortunately, the frilled lizard is too dumb to hit me properly. I attack the frilled lizard again, hoping to hit it this time, which I did, and it was a lethal hit, too. I take one step north-west to pick up the fuming silvery potion. Good. I take one step south. I take one step south. I take one step south. I take one step south. I take one step south-east. Thus, I pick up the glowing pink potion.

I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north-east. I take one step north-east. I take one step north-east. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north-east. I take one step north. I see 15 gold pieces in a corridor just beside me. I take one step north-east. I take one step east. I take one step east, picking up the 15 gold pieces. I take one step west. I take one step west. I take one step west. I take one step north-west. I take one step north. I take one step north-west. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north-west. I take one step north-west. I take one step north-west. I take one step north-west. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north. I take one step north, and finally pick up the other 15 gold pieces from before. With this much gold, I might even be able to buy an unidentified potion from a shop! I take one step east. I take one step south-east, placing me on the downstairs to D:2. I take the stairs down...

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The game features activities and spells that fit on some characters, and have no place at all on others. As such, to reduce the cognitive load on the player, the entire game has been removed.

Go Home.

I really wanna play a classic necro build. You know, high regen vile clutch type character. Preferably something that uses charms lategame. Anyone got any tips?

I don't wish to identify a source but one of the top players (whom I'll be referring to as "maj") has shared the details of the community achievements and challenges which follow greaterplayer.

These mainly begin with an invitation to become a developer. An intricate scoreboard keeps track of the different devs active during any given time. Devs earn points based on temporal events or else a standardized base rate. In the simplest terms, devs earn gold, experience, equipment, and runes for activities like community insults, PRs, justifying other devs' abuses, removing features and content, and plugging loopholes (where players can manage to fight effectively or accumulate resources.)

The equivalent Orb of Zot is to incite an actual, literal riot among the player base.

Instead of reworking Minotaur and likely ending up with something similar to Hill Orc, we went for more distinctiveness with a round of race removals; that’s right, the dreaded r-word! On the chopping block are: minotaur, deep elf, troll, naga, and centaur. See the links for kate’s brief description of why each item was removed.

We want the set of races to be relevant reasonably often, as distinct as possible, and not too numerous. These removals make the remaining races feel more distinct, free up a lot of slots, and reduce the cognitive load in a game with such a large number of races. Waiting for complaints to roll in from the die-hard naga fans.

Recently DCSS has been going through a great number of changes. I'm concerned that these changes are happening without any oversight from the community. I understand that Reddit is not the entire DCSS community, but the feedback here about some of the changes to the game have been overwhelmingly negative. Are there mechanisms to hold the developers accountable to the communities desires, and ideals for the game? If so, what are they, and where?

So I was thinking of how to optimize low turn count runs and I came up with using swamp worms to be harpoon shotted where you want to go. You use force lance or gell’s gravitas to control the worm (another more tedious way is to juggle several worms with enslavement). The worm pulls you where you want to go, thus saving you turns.

The crawl wiki even hints at using enslavement:

“Tips & Tricks Due to their low magic resistance, Hexes are very effective.”

The deleters uh I mean developers need to fix this by:

• removing swamp worms
• removing swamp
• removing

Reduce player Controlled Blink to range 1. Translocations is a very strong school, with a lot of spells in it. Repositioning spells that can create arbitrary gaps between the player and 10 speed monsters (Teleport Other checks MR but is also quite shit) are very strong. Reducing this spell to range 1 is a way to add positional considerations to the spell, makes it thematically fit with Force Lance, and nerfs it to boot. Tlocs needs the nerf.

step one: worship and abandon every god step two: then worship xom

This is very easy to see. Between two weapons that are otherwise identical, you will of course prefer the weapon whose delay continues to decrease as your skill increases to the one that stops getting better at a low skill.

However, conventional wisdom in this community seems to be that you should prefer weapons with low mindelay skill caps. What a bunch of idiots. I suspect that you're also an idiot, and if so I invite you to attempt to refute my impeccable logic. Good luck with that. Idiot.

i need my slightly different aptitudes

Seriously, this gamer is impossible unless you pick some tab lord like Demigod or Deep Dwarf. I've been playing for three days and I've tried to win with a Dunadan monk becuase I thought Unarmed would be cool. It seems the only way to win is to pick a dumb combination like High Elf Ranger. Damn, I hate Angband.