Floating in the abyss with Dungeon Crawl

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and have had a lot less time to sit in front of a computer and game for any length of time. Luckily, I have my Asus Eee — the latest electronic device to beg its way into my heart — and Dungeon Crawl.
Way way WAY back in 1980 or so, there was a game on UNH’s DEC-10 server called “rogue“. It was resplendent in glorious 80×24 text graphics, but was buggy and crashed a lot. Still, there was something lurking in those randomly created dungeons that I wanted to play more. After I moved out to California, I discovered Hack, a re-imagining of Rogue, and Net-Hack, an open source, collaborative version of Hack; and I played that for years and made some minor contributions of my own (mostly new traps, IIRC).
When I started getting into Linux, Nethack was one of the first programs I put on it. But the magic had gone. The game was still insanely difficult — like all variations on Rogue, you had just one life, and when you died, you were gone, all save files deleted, a tombstone placed, and your ghost set wandering through the dungeon to ambush future explorers.
While Nethack was a fun sandbox to play in, I preferred the more game-like Moria and Larn. Yeah, back in the 80s, these were a HUGE genre that survives today in games like Diablo II, Mythos, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and Dark Cloud.
Anyway, I was looking for a more modern Rogue-like, and I happened upon Linley’s Dungeon Crawl. This had dozens of races and classes and the same sort of evil genius and unlimited creativity as Nethack (well, not quite up to Nethack. In Nethack, the saying was that the devs had thought of EVERYTHING.)
I’d played with Dungeon Crawl awhile, but was frustrated by always getting really invested in my character, and then having it die, deep in the dungeon, meaning not only would I have to restart from the beginning, I’d have to fight my previous character once I got to that level. As well as any random (NPC) adventurers who also were exploring the dungeons.
That was pretty much the same thing all over again when I went to the Bronx last weekend to see my niece’s dance recital. I’d start down the dungeon, carefully testing the various potions, scrolls and armors along the way (you have no knowledge of the effects or magics on anything until you try it and hopefully can figure out what it does. Sometimes even trying it doesn’t help). I left a dozen characters dead at various spots in the dungeon. Since there were so many classes and races, I just let the game give me one randomly. It eventually rolled me up as a Merfolk Stalker.
Merfolk are water people who can swim fast, but whose tails turn into legs when they reach land. Given the trouble of traveling and fighting in Crawl’s subterranean lakes and rivers, they have a natural advantage. Stalkers are stealth-based characters similar to Thieves and Assassins, except their stealth powers are supplemented by a certain skill in poison magics.
Since none of the stealth classes can really take a hit, the best opening attack possible is an arrow through the heart of a resting or unaware creature. When that opening attack is a magically-summoned poison sting, even if the surprise attack doesn’t get them, the poison might.
That uber character made it to level 8. Stealth doesn’t matter much when you have half a dozen monsters running after you, many casting spells.

Once back at home, I installed Crawl on my Linux desktop and got serious about it. The FIRST thing I did was to cheat. I wrote a script that would back up save files so Crawl wouldn’t be able to delete them when I died. That wouldn’t make me a god in game (demi-god, btw, is a possible character race), nor make me magically able to kill things I couldn’t kill (like hydras…), but at least I might be able to see the game.
Then I got busy with Tipa, the Halfling Stalker.
Gameplay in Crawl is wide-open. Just because I started out as a Stalker didn’t limit me in any way as to what I could learn. And in fact, learning different combat styles and magics is key to succeeding, since stealth becomes less and less useful as you descend, and you need to do more and more dps to survive fights. Tipa, at level 15, is on the verge of learning the ultimate Stalker ability, Invisibility, which should allow me to assassinate, or at least heavily wound, many monsters on my first hit. But I also have a certain ability in ice magics, and a wide variety of skills to let me better get through the dungeon — including an incredibly handy spell that reveals every secret door in a dungeon level. Knowing where to find safe havens where I can duck into, slam the door shut behind me and rest up to full health (or to wait off poison and sickness) is great.
Even with the save game cheat, winning would be impossible but for a special amulet I found. Linley keeps you moving through Dungeon Crawl by forcing you to always be seeking food. Just moving around makes you hungrier. Casting spells (and Stalkers are a poison magic based class) makes you hungrier, FAILING to cast a spell makes you even HUNGRIER, and there is very little food in the dungeon (sometimes you come across food-rich places like strawberry groves… tended by swarms of killer bees, of course). If you relied only on that, you wouldn’t get past the first five levels. If you are VERY hungry, you can cut up a corpse of a monster and eat that to take the edge off. Unfortunately, many monsters are not good to eat, and can poison you or make you sick, at which time you usually die.
I found an Amulet of the Gourmand, though. This lets you eat dead things without being hungry, and somewhat widens the kinds of creatures you devour. So I am never hungry for long. I can just eat my next kill. This lets me pick up more magics because though learning new spells makes me very hungry, new food is waiting around every corner. My ring of poison resistance helps a lot, too. The Amulet comes with a warning, though, that eating too much monster flesh using its power may come back to haunt me. Because using magic of any sort can change you.
I briefly had horns after an experiment with a potion I found. It cut my strength, but made me more dexterous and with the horns, I could do a head-butt attack occasionally. Unfortunately, further potion experiments cured that mutation.
I also have a love-hate relationship with my god, Zin. He is a good god who hates necromancy, so I have avoided learning those sorts of skills. He loves it when I give him all my stuff, so when I pass by his altar, I sacrifice all my magic items I am not using to him. And he loves me killing the undead, so I do that when I can, dedicating the kills to him. I am now an Elder in the Church of Zin, and he has granted me the powers of repel undead, minor healing, and plague. If I anger him, though, he will take all those away, and has. There’s a whole school of summoning magic, which calls animals and monsters to your aid. Letting any of these summoned creatures die — angers Zin, and you get put right on his shit list. Using magics to charm a hostile monster is fine with Zin, but if that charmed monsters dies… you get put on Zin’s shit list. Everything you do, you have to ask — will this anger Zin? Or will he reward me for it? I once spent hours performing penance for Zin after I summoned a bunch of bats and one got in the way and I accidentally killed it. So mostly I don’t use summons or charms these days unless I really have to. The ghosts of my dead selves I meet occasionally don’t care. Tipa’s Ghost typically summons at least a dozen monsters to harass me while she stands off at a distance and hurls poisoned darts at me. Man, I’m an annoying mob.
I’m still nowhere near done. Typical of open source games, people take the game, add even yet more stuff to it, and merge that back into the original. I have been thrown into the Abyss, descended into the Lair of Beasts, found hidden temples, a swamp filled with slime, been trapped in the Snake Pits, chased through the Orc Mines, and am currently exploring someplace called The Vaults.
Modern RPGs don’t have one tenth the complexity and depth of Dungeon Crawl. They also don’t have text graphics. Modern games are graphically astounding but have lost a LOT of of the play value of these RPGs from the 80s and 90s. This is the root of my frustration with modern-day MMOs. Way too much focus on making beautiful screenshots. Almost no focus on letting you stretch the boundaries and go your own way. A game like WoW forces you into such a narrow track — every class has pretty much one best way to kill something — that there’s no surprise people get bored so quickly.
I realize I may never finish Dungeon Crawl. I have tried before and never have been able to finish it (or Nethack). I may and probably will come up against a challenge I just can’t meet. Maybe I’ll have to go back through the dungeon looking for more items and magics to help, and maybe even they won’t be enough. But shouldn’t RPGs, even MMORPGs, be more about the journey than the end? Racing through content to get to the GOOD stuff is the mark of a game without imagination. The game should be as fun and rewarding at level 10 as at level 100. If old, free, text-based RPGs can do it, why not games with hundreds of millions of dollars behind it, like WoW?
There’s really no excuse.

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