SATAP: Punished Atheist
Greg Nagel
So this is my 18th ascension, but my first one with a conduct more
interesting than genoless. The conduct is to play the entire game
punished, as an atheist. At this, I failed miserably, but I found a
way to make it more fun.
To get punished right away, you can either pray a bunch of times and
hope you aren't killed, or be a wizard and start with the scroll. So
to do it atheist, I picked elf wiz. Minus the scum to get the scroll,
I had about 10 failed attempts, none made it past sokoban. One time I
found two amulets of life saving and still died. It was really bad;
like I was doing my first ascension again.
But also like in my very first ascension, I got phenomenal luck.
1) I started out with worthless equipment, with the exception of a
magic marker. Rings of searching and shock resistance, wand of
striking, drum, scrolls and pots only good for blanking. I did get
hungerless casting. From experience, early game atheist wizard is
incredibly hungry (especially when burdened) so I didn't even risk
wearing the rings.
2) When you're punished and drag the ball on the ground, it takes two
turns for each step, which is more than it takes being burdened, so it
makes sense to carry the ball. A ball weighs 480; compare that to the
maximum unencumbered carrying capacity of 1000. Being an elven wizard,
I could just get out of burdened if I dropped all my worthless
starting items, but I knew I'd be burdened again pretty soon, so I
just stayed burdened. You can of course drop the ball when you get
into combat, but I didn't do that because when you drop the ball, it
becomes very difficult to run away.
The other part of carrying the ball is that you have to wield it when
going downstairs to avoid possibly fatal damage on the first few
levels. In fact, it can deal quite a lot of damage for a wizard at any
level, so just I made the ball my main weapon. As a weapon it's very
good: d25 damage, which is more than twice the damage of a unihorn,
and since it's not a weapon, it doesn't suffer the -4 to-hit penalty
for being restricted.
3) Dungeon level 2, I found a general store. Had some tripe (for
looting), an expensive clear potion (holy water), an alchemy smock,
and... a 500 wand. I bought an id scroll and found it was a Wand of
Wishing (0:1). Time to phone the rest of the game in.
I tried to write a scroll of charging, but could only blank one scroll
and failed. So I got the essentials: 2 charging, +3 SDSM, +3 GoP, +3
speed boots, reserving the last wish in case I needed a BoH from soko
or a marker. Again lucky, I got both scrolls and all the enchantments.
With a +1 orcish helm, I was at -13 AC. With the GoP, I was able to
stay unencumbered.
4) But I had decided against an amulet of life saving so I took the
game slow. Looted the store and another one a bit lower down.
Inventory management is a pain with that ball, but that put a halt to
my food problem. Then I dove for sokoban, picking up poison resistance
and a luckstone along the way. Soko had a lucky BoH, and a wand of
cancellation for blanking. Good because I didn't want to get the ball
rusty in a pool.
5) I found a coaligned unicorn on the way back up, but I'd taken some
luck penalties in soko and only had 2 gems. So I headed for the mines,
killed the minetown guards and raised my fist to the coaligned temple.
Nothing spectacular; filled out my tool collection. Still not enough
gems, so I cleared out mine's end. Found some spellbooks. Ate a tengu
and got tp control, and found a teleport ring.
6) So I maxed luck, made it back to my stash above the mines and got a
lucky full id, so I didn't have to blank anything potentially good.
That ball gets in the way so much when working with a stash. Anyway, I
got the books detect monster, detect treasure and magic mapping, 3
spells I would have written. Filled it out with identify and magic
missile. By this time I had skilled in divination.
I wished up a second marker. I got unlucky with them: failed writing
two genocide scrolls, so I could only geno my standard Lh;. Didn't get
much armor.
7) On the way down I used detect treasure to speed to the quest, and
quaffed 3 of my gain level pots to get to level 15. Grabbed the eye,
and now I had enough power to magic map the rest of the way down.
8) And that's where I blew it. Ran into a rust monster and fiddled
around with meleeing it. It ate my freaking chain. Conduct broken. I
was about to ragequit, but then I saw I still had some ink left in a
marker. So I wrote 2 punishment scrolls and dropped my old (thoroughly
rusty very corroded) iron ball. Each additional punishment you read
adds 160 (a third of the original) to the weight (320 if cursed, but
this was uncursed). From this point on, I was permanently burdened.
9) At Medusa, I was considering throwing the iron ball around to get
through, but I remembered I had the normal jump spell, and used that.
The castle was a breeze. I was low on AC, so I played the passtune a
bit and took out the remaining with magic missile. Both barracks were
locked, so I took my time and cleared out all the sides, then magic
missiled the soldiers to get their food.
10) I wished up a life saving and a couple markers (one of them from
my first and only smoky pot), getting AC -25 and genoing RTr. I didn't
want rust monsters or rock moles to eat my chains. And I just loathe
trolls. But I completely forgot about xorns.
11) After going through the stuff at the back of the castle, I jumped
to near the end of the trapdoor hallway, running into a ki-rin at the
end. It, of course, summoned nasties, pinning me between it and a
minotaur, with xorns on the sides and tough stuff on either side of
them. I was well-protected, but burdened. So I pulled out a 2 full
healing and my wishing wand, and wished up a wand of death. I ended up
needing both those potions, but got out of it without too much
trouble.
12) When I dropped down into the valley, I noticed my chain was gone.
I didn't think of it at the time, but I bet it was one of those xorns.
Shoot. Anyway, this time I triple-punished myself. Now I had to juggle
to stay out of stressed.
13) So I mapped my way through gehennom, getting down to Jubilex. Fell
in a puddle and dropped a bunch of stuff. Had grease and cloth armor
though, so didn't lose anything. So I froze over the water, and the
surrounding tiles, and dug down to get at my stuff. Fell through, and
noticed I had lost my chain. Yes, the game dropped my ball into the
puddle, and I didn't think to pull it out before freezing it over,
which broke my chain. Conduct broken a third time. So I quadruple-
punished myself. The ball now weighed 960, 60 more than an ice box.
This put me into stressed, so I got out of there; read a cursed tp and
went back up to my stash above the mines.
14) Here, I alchemized a bunch of full healing, quaffing the excess to
put me up to about 200 hp. I managed to reorganize my stuff so that I
could barely get into burdened.
I was out of cursed tp scrolls (and completely forgot I could use the
eye or confused tp scrolls) and wanted to curse my last pot of gain
level for the sanctum. Since I didn't find unholy water randomly, I
had to make some. The standard method is to read confused remove
curse. (Wiztesting told me that confused remove curse will not
unpunish you.) But the remove curse scrolls that I did not blank I had
left scattered about the dungeon. I was pretty low on any sort of
water (and markers and didn't want to spend more wishes), but I
managed to dip some fruit juice and booze in a fountain and get a
small stack of water. Then I dipped that stack in every fountain until
far past the quest. Finally, when I hit a level with a remove curse
scroll, I tried the fountains first and got my water cursed.
15) Now I had about 18 cursed tp scrolls (the only wasted space in my
inventory, but I wanted lots of extra for retries at the sanctum). So
I thought I'd skip to the chase and went all the way to the bottom
level, rooting out the vibrating square. I tped up and hit a fake wiz
tower, but it was the amulet one. Then I decided I didn't want to do
Orcus-town on the way up, so I tped back to Jubilex and made my way
down. I was having some hunger problems (even with slow digestion)
because I needed food for all my teleports and couldn't carry very
much food.
16) Managed to get Orcus' wand with 3 charges left. Did Vlad's and
named my corroded ball Vladbane. At some point I wished up a ring of
levitation and also a magic marker for some extra charging scrolls. (I
use a lot of these at the endgame for power and wands.) And some
genocide scrolls in case insects or snakes got in my way too much. I
had polymorph and polymorph control rings, but I wanted to keep the
polyselfless conduct.
17) Entered the tower, and tped up. Rodney went down in one zap. TPed
down to the bottom, did the invocation and dropped the book of the
dead to get back into burdened. I didn't get a tp directly into the
temple, but I used secret door detection, revealing I was only a few
steps from the door. High priest went down easy. I got the amulet and
quaffed out.
18) Being chaotic, the mysterious force wasn't too bad. Switched to K-
rations at my castle stash. Made it past Medusa and ran into a magic
trap, which gave the message "You feel like someone is helping you."
Oh god. Conduct broken again. Quintuple punishment. The ball now
weighed 1120. Naked, it would put me well into burdened. I couldn't
possibly fit an ascension kit into less than stressed. So I made my
way into the planes.
19) It was surprising how easy the elemental planes were. Air should
have been worst, but with conflict, I only got engulfed by one
elemental. I found the water portal much faster than I normally do.
20) At astral, I detected monsters to see death on the left,
pestilence in the middle, famine to the right. I chose pestilence,
using the candelabrum and expert jump to get through as quickly as
possible. I had some trouble with the rider itself, seeing as angels,
immune to death rays, were in the same tp path as pestilence's corpse.
Had to kill the rider 3 times. But after that, lucky once again, I got
an aligned altar.
Dumplog: http://alt.org/nethack/userdata/h/hangar/dumplog/1301072849.nh343.txt
-hangar
Jistan Idiot
> Hi!
>
> So this is my 18th ascension, but my first one with a conduct more
> interesting than genoless. The conduct is to play the entire game
> punished, as an atheist. At this, I failed miserably, but I found a
> way to make it more fun.
You're insane aren't ya?
> 19) It was surprising how easy the elemental planes were. Air should
> have been worst, but with conflict, I only got engulfed by one
> elemental. I found the water portal much faster than I normally do.
>
I some times wonder how I did some of my ascensions without conflict.
A blessed ring of conflict is always high on the priority list.
>
> Dumplog:http://alt.org/nethack/userdata/h/hangar/dumplog/1301072849.nh343.txt
>
Wow! Congratulations on that one.
JoaoSantos
> Hi!
>
> So this is my 18th ascension, but my first one with a conduct more
> interesting than genoless. The conduct is to play the entire game
> punished, as an atheist. At this, I failed miserably, but I found a
> way to make it more fun.
Interesting read.
Congrats!
solidsnail
GaryOlson
> punished, as an atheist. At this, I failed miserably, but I found a
> way to make it more fun.
>
>"You feel like someone is helping you."
>Oh god. Conduct broken again. Quintuple punishment. The ball now
>weighed 1120.
I understand people (me included) enjoy the masochism which is Nethack
and the never ending art of YAAD.
This Punished conduct is an art form of self flagellation and abuse to
which I concede even the Zen conduct is but an immature art.
Congratulations. Please don't tell the people who run the annual
tournament.
Gary
karadoc
it's easy to accidentally break the chain, and every time the chain
breaks the challenge gets harder! I like it.
Unfortunately, I'm not skilled enough to seriously attempt something
like that. I struggle to stay unburdened at the best of times, and
'atheist' is probably my best ascension conduct so far - without any
fancy extra stuff.
Incidentally, yesterday I wanted to look at the results/info for the
2010 tournament, but I couldn't find it. The 2010 link at
http://nethack.devnull.net/ doesn't seem to work. Are the results
actually online somewhere?
hh...@thinksystem.net
> Hi!
>
> So this is my 18th ascension, but my first one with a conduct more
> interesting than genoless. The conduct is to play the entire game
> punished, as an atheist. At this, I failed miserably, but I found a
> way to make it more fun.
Congratulations!
I understand why you say that you failed, but the fact that you re-
punished yourself multiple times makes this more of an extra-hard
version of the trick in my view.
When I put the trick in the list (number 35.3.4, for those interested)
I didn't give it a lot of careful thought. But, I was under the
impression that you have to be un-punished to be able to do the quest
(to descend from the Home level). Hmmm ... oh, I think that was
because I was assuming that the only way to get punished at the start
of the game was to annoy your god with too many prayers. I didn't
consider starting with scroll of punishment. The scroll adds the ball
and chain, but it doesn't actually affect your standing with your god,
does it? I guess this could open up subcategories of the punishment
trick, but I doubt there is enough interest in them, so I think I will
leave the list as it is for now.
(And, for anyone interested, the complete list of Stupid Ascension
Tricks is at http://www.thinksystem.net/nethack, and the "SATAP" in
the subject is Stupid Ascension Trick Ascension Post.)
I am quite impressed with the effort. I have done a number of the
tedious tricks that make for long games, but I haven't done many that
I think would be as annoying as this must have been.
--
-Harold Hill
Pat Rankin
wrote:
[...]
> When I put the trick in the list (number 35.3.4, for those interested)
> I didn't give it a lot of careful thought. But, I was under the
> impression that you have to be un-punished to be able to do the quest
> (to descend from the Home level). Hmmm ... oh, I think that was
> because I was assuming that the only way to get punished at the start
> of the game was to annoy your god with too many prayers. I didn't
The quest leader only cares that you have your original
alignment and that its magnitude is at least "pious". That is
easy to attain even when your god is angry with you. So being
punished via scroll is no different, as far as the quest goes.
And you pretty much can't pray if you want to avoid having the
punishment be removed, so divine anger is mostly moot for this
stupid ascension trick. I suppose it takes away the temptation
to risk a prayer for making holy water, but other than that I
don't think it matters.
Spon
> actually online somewhere?
There's a load of stuff at http://nethack.eu/devnull that looks
complete to me, except that I don't think it has any data from the
challenges (which is a pity because I think that's the best part of
the tournament!)
spontiff
Janis Papanagnou
> [...] The conduct is to play the entire game punished, as an atheist.
Great! 8-)
> At this, I failed miserably, but I found a way to make it more fun.
Probably for some values of "failed"; but given that it gets harder
with every new punishment certainly overcompensates that.
> 1) I started out with worthless equipment, with the exception of a
> magic marker. Rings of searching and shock resistance, wand of
> striking, drum, scrolls and pots only good for blanking.
I think those are very helpful rather than worthless, especially in
the early game, and especially the drum. Also the ring of searching;
if you fear the hunger, then only wear it to quickly find secret
passages and doors.
> I did get
> hungerless casting. From experience, early game atheist wizard is
> incredibly hungry (especially when burdened) so I didn't even risk
> wearing the rings.
> The other part of carrying the ball is that you have to wield it when
> going downstairs to avoid possibly fatal damage on the first few
> levels. In fact, it can deal quite a lot of damage for a wizard at any
> level, so just I made the ball my main weapon. As a weapon it's very
> good: d25 damage, which is more than twice the damage of a unihorn,
> and since it's not a weapon, it doesn't suffer the -4 to-hit penalty
> for being restricted.
Did you use the iron ball as weapon for the entire game?
> Good because I didn't want to get the ball rusty in a pool.
> 8) And that's where I blew it. Ran into a rust monster and fiddled
> around with meleeing it. It ate my freaking chain. Conduct broken. I
> was about to ragequit, but then I saw I still had some ink left in a
> marker. So I wrote 2 punishment scrolls and dropped my old (thoroughly
> rusty very corroded) iron ball.
Would a corroded ball have done (slightly) less damage? (A negligible
effect, I suppose.)
> Each additional punishment you read
> adds 160 (a third of the original) to the weight (320 if cursed, but
> this was uncursed). From this point on, I was permanently burdened.
That's hard! (I didn't knew that there's a malus added.)
> 11) After going through the stuff at the back of the castle, I jumped
> to near the end of the trapdoor hallway, running into a ki-rin at the
> end. It, of course, summoned nasties, pinning me between it and a
> minotaur, with xorns on the sides and tough stuff on either side of
> them. I was well-protected, but burdened. So I pulled out a 2 full
> healing and my wishing wand, and wished up a wand of death. I ended up
> needing both those potions, but got out of it without too much
> trouble.
Didn't you have a wand of teleportation at that time to just teleport
that line of monsters easily away?
> [..] Conduct broken again. Quintuple punishment. The ball now
> weighed 1120. Naked, it would put me well into burdened. I couldn't
> possibly fit an ascension kit into less than stressed. [...]
Oh, dear!
Your posting was fascinating to read. :-)
Janis