Hi. New here. I like this game, well I did like the kind since playing Angband long ago. :)
Now I have already been playing DCSS too much, and I have gotten the impression there might be something “wrong” with the item generator.
If I play a race for the first time, I usally get decent artefacts and I get a long way down.
But if I play that race more often, I get less and less artefacts. (It also seems heavier monsters come higher up.)
F.i., one time I choose a Merfolk Monk with a spear, and I got to the lowest level of the Shoals, but I still had to manage with a 2+ spear (of venom). Even in the Shoals nobody dropped a trident and there was never a decent artifact. I was send to the abyss of course in the end. If you have to hit every moster 5 times to get it down, you don’t stand a change.
Now my question, it it possible that the item generator can be in any way dependant on your user profile, and what you have been before? It might just be me of course, but after scores of games I do have that impression. So often ot happens I don’t find enough items to make the character viable. :(
I’ve never noticed worse item drops as I repeatedly play a character multiple times. There are definitely good runs and bad runs though. I’ve been playing a Felid Enchanter (FeEn) a lot recently, and usually the drops are so poor I die early in the dungeon. But after maybe ~10 attempts I had an excellent run with gear that synergized very well with my play style.
The game’s code is open-source, so if you’re familiar with coding at all you can check it to see whether the game remembers past runs and uses this to tune drop rates. But I doubt that it does.
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You can play the same seed with a different character and (with the exception of god gifts, acquirement, things of that nature) you’ll get the same items. The seed itself is randomly choosen, the game doesn’t check what a seed would provide in advance.
You can’t stick too much to a plan. You have to work with what the random dungeon provides you! Weapons cross-train so that if you don’t find the type of weapon you want, you have a head-start on training to use another weapon. There’s a similar system with spells where spells use multiple schools to help you branch out.
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Yeah, Okay. I see…
I think the number of attempts wherein you will get nothing is way over the top.
But if you get some items and very carefully going ahead, only to get dropped three floors and be finished of.
C’mon! What is the fun of that?
If I could read the code I’d adapt the chances and build a version of the game for myself, but I can’t make anything of it.
Exploration traps/sourceless malevolence (shafts, alarms, teleports) are there to challenge your char, they are often one of the most dangerous points of the run. You can learn to deal with them, and in 99% cases they are not lethal. Early game shafts in particular are a bane of newer players, and can require quite a lot of finesse to survive.
Some things that might help you:
- be proactive in identifying and using your consumables;
- learn what your consumables do, only moonshine potions are completely useless, everything else can help you survive in some way;
- learn to love the wands you find, be willing to zap them often as your opener;
- train a bit of Stealth when you start a run (unless you are a heavy armour brute);
- be willing to let sleeping monsters sleep, especially if they are dangerous;
- be willing to run away from them, if they are awake;
- or use your buffs/god powers before engaging them;
- think about how much noise your fighting method produces and try to fight in explored parts of the floor;
- think about how you explore the floor after getting shafted, pick a direction that’ll help you establish a safe place to fight or that’ll likely to have an upstairs. Try to avoid wide open spaces.
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if you want to modify the game, it’s actually quite doable so long as you’re running Linux. To increase the frequency at which you get scrolls of acquirement (from where you can get all other items you might want) requires changing only 1 number in the source code. I could publish a branch with the feature quite quickly, probably.
But if you’re on Windows I expect you’d have trouble compiling the program. That’s likely to be more trouble that it’s worth.