Swear This Game is Needlessly Stupid Sometimes

[GordonOverkill]

"The Fourth" meets Kranach as his third encounter, avoids the battle by misklicking and meets him again as his fourth encounter. After 522 turns and almost 7 days the quest is finished successfully.

Just by the way, this guy just left the Drakalor Chain after successfully closing the ChAoS gAtE. Fiiiiinally after all those years my first Candle-born winner :-) "The First" did quite well, too. Died to Nuurag Vaarn a few weeks ago.

[auricbond]

I think it's an interesting question as to how luck versus skill based the game is. I think early game survival is the most luck based. Once you build up your id'd equipment your options for escaping danger open up, and its your experience with the game that saves your skin. That's not to say that it can't occasionally throw unwinnable situations at you, but even then you can argue that you should have waited in an easier dungeon until you had better means.

I do call bullshit on the black altars though. I'm not even sure if it relies on your own LOS or theirs. I've survived single turns on black altars when an enemy appeared in my view, but I once lost a promising character doing a mass pick-up off of the altar while nothing was in view only to be greeted by a game over screen. Locked doors aren't always an answer either as some enemies can smash them. Should it be more 'fair' or is this just a price of being chaotic?

Perhaps the most random element for me is the survival of characters that start with low pv. Now I actually prefer high dv to high pv if I had to choose one, but I know the value of pv on the early game. Mere giant rats and orcs can take off half health and stun your 1 pv mindcrafter, and what if the rng refuses to throw some decent pv items your way? I don't view it as a challenge so much as a lottery.

[Silfir]

An important tool to help survive the initial phase of low PV is true berserking - if you can't avoid damage entirely, make sure the fights are over quickly. It's also important to milk ranged combat for all it's worth, as well as any abilities the character does have. There's an element of luck to the very earliest phase of the game with low-PV characters, as you described, but the rest is 99% skill.

[divij]

i remember a game...i was in the air temple and yuuglaash summoned ghost kings on my ass....i was a drakeling elementalist so i got the f*** out of there. i couldnt ignore the lvl since i needed the air orb and i couldnt tp to kite them around. 2 of them had gotten track of me e1 though i was invis. i had the RCT (raven) which was trained to lvl 7 with strong thrower talent acquired...but still i couldnt connect on those damn GKs and i knew that 1 hit from them would kill me np. so i remembered i had a RoDs and wished for speed!! killed yuuglaash and went str8 to the downstairs. by the time i came up i was strong enuf to handle them.....
moral of the story : Winning adom is winning the early game since mid-to-late game depends entirely on your skill lvl! early game the 1st door could be trapped and you die or the 1st room could be mixed tension room or rats could give you fever...you never know

[Soirana]

i couldnt ignore the lvl since i needed the air orb...
by the time i came up i was strong enuf to handle them.....

For example I think one can go down level on boozed fireballs in fire temple, kill grues on d48 and then be able to handle air temple.

Most of unsurvivable situations I've ever seen comes too some sort of strategic decision/risk management option sometime before. With good and patient [although ultimately boring] play and gameplan ~99% chars could win.
[if one gets few levels via encounters/bandit village - traps are moistly not issue, if one darts for Jharod sickness is passably dealable and so on]

[mjz15]

For the unskilled player, dying over and over again to situations you can't handle can definately FEEL like having bad luck, All, The, Fucking, Time.

Here's an example. I've played Backgammon against computers for some time, and sometimes it feels like the computer gets lucky rolls all the time. In fact, all Backgammon software designers get regularly accused of rigging the program so that the computer gets lucky rolls. The truth is of course that none of these programs are rigged. There is always an element of luck in Backgammon, but in the long run an experienced player will always beat an inexperienced player, simply because they are more skilled. To the unskilled player it seems like bad luck, but this is because he doesn't know what he is doing wrong, or that he doesn't even realize he is doing ANYTHING wrong in the first place.

The same can be said for ADOM. Unskilled players will constantly die, and it will feel unfair, it will feel like RNG threw something at you that you simply couldn't handle, and it happens over, and over, and over again, but a lot of these situations could be handled with more skill and knowledge. If you don't realize that you're doing ANYTHING wrong, it feels like Big Bad RNG is out to get you and you never get a lucky break. How many times have I scoffed the game sourly when died to something that seemed ridiculously unlucky, and afterwards see that I somehow did have the "You are lucky" intrinsic.

To make a long story short: reason for failure in ANY type of game that is not 100% luck based should always be sought in yourself, not in the game itself.