For me the funnest way to play nethack was with a copy of the source nearby. It's cheating of course, but it is the fun sort of cheating. I always thought of it like being a monk or wizard, journeying forth armed with the hidden secrets of the world.
I never did beat the game, but My most memorable experience was once when I was messing around in wizard mode(a sort debug/creative mode to try things out in) and summoned a high level demon for grins and giggles, which promptly killed me. I did not think much of it at the time. but nethack, when you die, writes a bones file with what you had on what level and what killed you. it normally lets you find what killed you and a chance to get your stuff back. But now my nethack install is tainted with Juiblex, the faceless evil, on dungeon level level 2. I probable could have fixed it but it made the game hilarious, every play through containing a mad dash through level 2 and fervent usually unanswered prayers that the infernal thing would not follow you to the next level.
In my opinion, source diving and using spoilers aren't cheating, if only because the games are so thoroughly randomized. You can know everything about your inventory, but one misstep and you're toast. Any ascension is as much a matter of luck as it is of skill.
> Juiblex, the faceless evil, on dungeon level level 2.
LOL! Wands of polymorph can result in interesting monsters showing up in early-level bones files. Nothing like waltzing down to level 3 and getting digested by a purple worm named Spud...
> Any ascension is as much a matter of luck as it is of skill.
There are people who can consistently ascend on nearly every run, if they pick a favorable class.
It requires extremely careful play and encyclopedic knowledge of all the little tricks to avoid danger. There are a lot of them in the game, and so long as you remember that the game is turn-based and that so long as you are careful, you can almost always just leave if things look hairy.
I played Nethack a lot during school. The only obstacles to ascending any character were my free time, patience, ability to stay focused, and occassionally the unfavorable early-game RNG.
When I was a student, a lot of people played on one guy’s machine. I got lucky with a polymorph trap and by dog became a Xorn. Inevitably I died and that bones file became the absolute bane of the other player’s existence.
Someone finally beat it and then, of course, conscripted me to spend the next half hour trying to remember what exactly I’d dropped.
> Any ascension is as much a matter of luck as it is of skill.
Is it? Admittedly, I've only fooled around with NetHack occasionally, but from observing good players it was my impression that with encyclopedic knowledge of the game, ascending can be done pretty consistently, barring some _incredibly_ unlucky happenstance or attention-related carelessness.
I watched an extremely cool talk in college where a professor showed off some of the functionality of gdb by hooking it up to a running copy of Nethack and using it for various cheating. It was a bit over my head at the time but still felt pretty magical.
I never did beat the game, but My most memorable experience was once when I was messing around in wizard mode(a sort debug/creative mode to try things out in) and summoned a high level demon for grins and giggles, which promptly killed me. I did not think much of it at the time. but nethack, when you die, writes a bones file with what you had on what level and what killed you. it normally lets you find what killed you and a chance to get your stuff back. But now my nethack install is tainted with Juiblex, the faceless evil, on dungeon level level 2. I probable could have fixed it but it made the game hilarious, every play through containing a mad dash through level 2 and fervent usually unanswered prayers that the infernal thing would not follow you to the next level.