Finishing ADOM... unspoiled?

[auricbond]

Corpse effects, yeah right, you'll get an immense list, add to that they don't always stick, differ from status etc I tried a bit but after too much negatives instead went to not eating corpses which meant I often starved to death instead....

Agreed. Vast majority of corpse effects are bad. The ones that aren't still usually cause a net loss (only situationally helpful, and generally in a scummy/exploitative sense), or the result is unpredictable. Only a very few corpses should you eat unconditionally for the bonuses.

The game's depth to an extent can be considered a good thing since it (artificially?) increases the game's longevity, but honestly, there are other games and life is SHORT, should I be playing this when I'm 70? You can eventually pull off a victory just by playing a lot, getting lucky and/or choosing a class/race combo that is newbie friendly, but if you want to actually make your playthroughs more about strategy than luck, you need the knowledge that only spoiling, scumming, or a collosal amount of time investment can provide you , there's no other short-cut.

I do sometimes wonder if Thomas has unconsciously balanced the game toward spoiled players, as a community has built around that and its where the lion's share of feedback and observations come from. Two words I associated with gamma 8 were "easy" (relative to other adom versions, not other games of course) and "fun"...

[pblack]

It might be possible indeed. But you have to be a certain style of player. One that gets his enjoyment from doing just that. Figuring puzzles out.

I can see the charm in that for sure. But I do not know many gamers who like that.

Speaking for myself:

Save-scumming and Guidebook taught me the ropes to be able to tackle the game today. And I still use the wiki/Guidebook since I do not have such a massive memory to know all the tiny details. I would've wanted to be a little less spoiled by the guidebook if I could go back in time, I guess. But when I first discovered ADOM I was in a big PnP RPG rush and I devoured the entire guidebook from start to finish like it was a rulebook. For me it was the decisive event that led me to want to play a roguelike for the first time since just wrapping my brain around ASCII graphics was too much for someone of my generation at that time.

[Laukku]

There were two awesome threads at giantitp.com where they attempted to play ADOM completely unspoiled. They never got much past Dwarftown IIRC.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...y-through-ADOM!

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...ertain-tension

[Rick]

I think I'm pretty new to this game, compared to someone else here at least, I've start to REALLY play the game a couple of years ago.. completely unspoiled. I saw ADOM first time in the '90s but never gone deep in the game til now.

I had completely no idea of what I was going to do It took several deaths just to see the west part of the map, I remember how I've found the SMC and didn't understand why it always killed me...I remember it took a lot of games to understand that I can talk with the druid first...but (c)hatting with everything is what i use to do in this kind of games...
I killed that carpenter thousands of times, I never thought something different, for what reason anyway? He's mad and angry and his pointing toward you!
But the real problem was to survive, before to understand why, and with this the forum and wiki came in help...a lot. Before this I never really reach CoC, not deep anyway, never past exp.level 10, I was going around in the land aimlessy and use to enter that damn ToEF without a reason, just to explore and die there. Never knew about Rings os Ice, I use to go in with a tool with the "fireproof" prefix on the name, I use to wear rings called "fire protection", and anything else and I use to see my stuff burning at some point before the top. Very funny moments. I didn't really knew what was on the top.
I think sooner or later I could have finish the game normally (maybe very later) but there's a lot of things I could never ever figure out by myself. But mistery is what make this kind of games so amazing..

[GordonOverkill]

Just by the way, the wax-thing for the banshee is kinda obvious for anybody interested in Greek mythology. That's exactly what Odysseus' crew did to protect themselves from the deadly voices of the sirens.

[Rick]

Just by the way, the wax-thing for the banshee is kinda obvious for anybody interested in Greek mythology. That's exactly what Odysseus' crew did to protect themselves from the deadly voices of the sirens.

Just want to say Hi Gordon, you are one of those who gave me the hints to proceed, I saw your videos before meet the forum, especially the run for the ultra win was epic! I'm watching it again now that I am trying Ultra....
I think the hard part to understand is what to do with the trinity of chaos, and that you need to be corrupted, if you are unspoiled...still I think that regular win is possible, Ultra win is way too much complicate to gain without spoilers....

[sweetnothing]

* if you know that you can [U]se it, but of course it would take years to find this command in the manual and [U]se every item in the inventory.

[persy]

Me and my friend played a lot of adom back when we were 13-14 years old completely unspoiled having only game manual, and thus go things I recall:
- Banshee thing was pretty clear, when you don't have internet you read the manual and 'clear ears' command draws a lot of unhealthy attention =)
- we never bothered with herb growth rules, but we figured out what every herb do except for moss, probably due to not paying much attention to b/u/c statuses (After a LOT of Moria 'cursed' was a synonim to 'unable to take of' in our heads)
- asking Thundarr about 'portal' was obvious, because it clearly says "dwarven portal"
- we did not find out that you can cure carpenter, thus we didn't know you can get healing without killing Jharod
- we knew about HMV, but smc looked too scary to mess with, so we supposed that the whole thing is for late game, "time is working against you" was way to cryptic for us, heh)
- we successfully did Blup quest but never got the reward for it
- we did High King tomb, pyramid and dwarven graveyard and none of those seemed especially hard. On the other hand rift, darkforge and bugville were off-limit, I think, we've never managed to kill a single steel golem
- we did the water temple and the furthest we've ever got was the firewall. We suspected that it has to do something with TOEF, but we couldn't handled it due to fire damage. We've tried stacking intrinsic resistance with one from items, but never with 2. (Because insight would say about intrinsic 'also gained from items').
- we didn't know how to crown, we have probably even got to 'extremely close' but idea of praying when you are not endangered eluded us :-) Thus we've never saw immunities or non-guaranteed artifact. I once got a surge of power Serpent's Bite, but got wasted by it's guardian - named chaos spawn (or whatever dark green 'C' is)
- the only usage to 'dip' command we found was uncursing wearable equipment with holy water, somehow we never thought about blessed items doing better than their uncursed counterpats. And poisoning weapons, I definitely remember killing whole Cranach party with lvl1 human assassin and telling myself 'Ok, assassins are good at murdering people'

- we were sticking to bad classes. My friend mostly played elven mindcrafters, and I was sticking to elementalists because the idea of running out of spells kept me away from wizard :-E (that 'doesn't have to hunt for books' part form the manual really got me)
- we save-scummed to test things. Boy, I remember save-scumming reading scrolls of greater identification on every item

[sweetnothing]

It was very interesting to read. I wish I would have played more unspoiled, that would be much more interesting. Well...

[Scooter Fox]

I managed to completely fill my high score list before I found out you can enter locations.

I wasn't big on that whole manual reading thing.