Farvel, Taarna the Valkyrie

Monday, April 26th, 2010 @ 11:52 pm | Games

I’m now officially a week behind in posting my fantasy novel to my other blog. I’ve got a little work to do on the next chapter and I delayed because I got distracted by…Nethack.

When I interviewed at Pandemic Studios in 2003 they asked me what my favorite games were. At the time, my answer was; Halo, Homeworld, Starcraft, some other game I can now not remember, and Nethack. Of all of them, Nethack was the only one that raised an eyebrow. “Why Nethack?”

“Well, because I’ve been playing it for 10 years and I’ve never beat it, and I still find new amazing things.” That was 7 years ago, so when I busted it out last week it’d been 17 years since I started playing.

I dust it off about once every two years, I’d say. Every once in a while some new group of friends will discover the game and I’ll start playing again. When I first started there was no Web. My friend Craig gave me the game on a 3.5″ disk. He got it at UCI. We played it a lot back then and the game was a very social experience.

It’s a D&D simulator. Specifically, it’s an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons simulator, replicating the rules from about 1986. It’s so much a D&D simulator that I think probably if you’ve never played AD&D most of it would be at best impenetrable, and probably unplayably confusing. My friends and I, having cut our teeth on AD&D, found it completely transparent. Lots of rules that would make no sense to a modern player aren’t explained. Why does your strength stat, and only strength, count up to 18 and then stop at 18, counting up from 1 to 100 (18/01, 18/02…18/98, 18/99) before it hits 19? And from there it goes back to normal, 20, 21, 22, etc….Hell, the actual game AD&D doesn’t explain that.

It’s not a pure AD&D simulation, in that it adds a lot of classes like…well, Valkyries and Cavemen and Tourists. But overwhelmingly the rules are the rules of AD&D, and the monsters are mostly from AD&D and those monsters that aren’t originally from AD&D appear in Nethack in accord with their role in AD&D. I bring this up because NetHack gets a lot of press, often appearing in Best Games Of All Time lists, but these articles often gloss over how much of NetHack is just single-player AD&D.

So I think if you’re much younger than I am, it’s a game of mostly nonsense. If you don’t have the urge to sit down and play AD&D with yourself and no graphics, then you’ll probably never try Nethack. And these days if you want a game that uses ASCII graphics and an absurd level of detail and interactivity, there’s Dwarf Fortress.

Indeed it was my friend Tim’s Dwarf Fortress illustrations that prompted me to dust off NetHack. My best friend plays DF and talks about it, and I enjoy hearing about his games, but DF is not my kind of game. Apart from the absurd learning curve, and the programmer’s decision to focus on detail at the expense of playability, I don’t really go for games without a goal. I’m aware that part of the fun of DF is making your own goals, but that’s not what I go to video games for.

So with all the Dwarf Fortress talk I was reminded of NetHack and I clicked on the little Nethack icon in my quickstart tray, which has been sitting there since 2000 when I swatch from Mac to PC. I discovered that whenever I last played, probably 2008, I’d had a pretty good game going. So I continued with that game to see how far I could get.

The goal of NetHack is to Ascend, which in this context means become a God. To do this, you must collect some Plot Coupons and deliver them to your God. The last of these items is the Amulet of Yendor. You begin the game as a level 1 character of your choice, in the first level of the dungeon. You must explore something like 60 dungeon levels, kill thousands of monsters, deal with shopkeepers and angry gods, and on your journey you’re accompanied by a pet! A little doggie or kitty who will attack monsters for you, and have their own special behavior, leveling up as you do.

I first started playing in the mid-90s and back then the best way to learn about the game was from your friends who were also playing. That’s what I mean when I say the game was a social experience. When your friends played, you played. When they stopped, you tended to stop. It’s not multiplayer, but it was the act of sharing discoveries, of cooperative learning, that was fun.

Somewhere around 1996-97 I got on the internet and there was a newsgroup on Usenet devoted to Nethack, and this spurred a lot of new playing. I learned, for instance, that the easiest class to Ascend with was the Valkyrie. So every time I started a new game, I played a Valkyrie and thinking of cool warrior women, I named her Taarna, after the ridiculous chick at the end of Heavy Metal.

It’s not unusual for a game of Nethack to last 20 minutes. You step on a Falling Rock Trap at 1st level without a metal helmet on, you could die. You can die of starvation, a very common way for new players to eat it. The sheer number and variety of ways you could die is astonishing.

So Taarna the Valkyrie died hundreds, thousands of times. Turned to stone by Medusa, killed by a falling drawbridge, eating a cockatrice corpse (they turn you to stone!), accidentally genociding herself. Accidentally attacking her pet dog, Cookie, after she’d successfully used a wand of polymorph to turn Cookie into a six-armed Marilith demon, but then she ate the corpse of a Fungus, started hallucinating, and thought Cookie was a dinosaur. Cookie didn’t like that. She objected. Six times, every round she objected, right in my face.

Eventually you learn how to survive without starving to death (anything your pet eats is safe for you to eat), then you learn how to survive the Gnomish Mines and get the Luckstone at the bottom (luck is important in this game. Don’t play during a new moon! I mean a real new moon here in the real world. Nethack knows what time and date it is. Also, not a good idea to play during the witching hour.) The process, without a wiki or something to help you, can be incredibly long and frustrating, but rewarding when you do well.

Sometime in the early 2000s I found out how to get Mjollnir, the hammer of Thor, and then later discovered that if you’ve got Gauntlets of Power, increasing your strength to 25, and you’re a Valkyrie, you can throw Mjollnir, kill your enemies from a distance, and it will magically return to your hands. Very, very useful.

Of course there’s a chance, 1%, that your hammer will fall on the ground instead of returning to your hands. And the one time that happened to Taarna, she was killing creatures across a moat, and Mjollnir fell in the water. If she tried to recover it, she would drown.

That’s ok, Nethack is a turn-based game, which means when you get yourself in trouble (“Why is there a ball-and-chain shackled to my leg?”) you can stop, for days if need be, and research a solution. In this case, the solution was to zap a Wand of Cold across the water, freezing it, walk out onto the ice where I last saw Mjollnir, and dig down with a pick-axe. Easy!

So I played and played, a few days here, a week or two there. Once a year, once every two years. But eventually it seemed like I’d learned as much as I could learn and wasn’t doing any better. Sooner or later, a Master-lich would suck out my brains, leaving Taarna too stupid to remember how to use her weapons. Or a Vampire would drain her levels back so far I might as well start over. Or a Rust Monster would corrode her enchanted armor to the point where she might as well be naked. Or some monster would drain her strength to the point where she was too feeble to carry anything. It was a tough life, being Taarna the Valkyrie.

I thought I’d never Ascend. I know only a handful of people who ever have. It’s not easy. But with all the talk of Dwarf Fortress and me discovering an old game in progress that was going pretty well, I vowed to Ascend. I literally thought “I don’t want to die without having beat Nethack.” It’s a point of gamer pride.

Happily, there’s now a NetHack wiki which has all the information you used to be able to find in various online sources, plus a lot of commentary and strategy and it’s all linked up making it very easy to cross reference and find what you need. As a result, I discovered a lot of stuff, basic stuff, I never knew. I’d always known, for instance, that eating the fresh corpse of a Floating Eye would give you permanent Telepathy (aka the Telepathy “intrinsic“) but I never realized A: how many OTHER things you could eat that would give you permanent resistances, making the game WAY easier to survive and B: how easy it was. Eat an Elf corpse, you’re now immune to sleep. It’s almost always guaranteed.

I also learned how easy it is to get Excalibur. Far easier than Mjollnir. Armed with this new knowledge, I started a new game last week, and decided to play until I Ascended. Something I’d never done in almost 20 years of play.

With the wiki helping me, it was actually pretty easy. Sure, I got myself into a few jams, but I was resourceful enough to get out of them. There are a lot of things you’re guaranteed to get, if only you know where they are. There’s the guaranteed luckstone, super important. There’s always a unicorn on a certain level, unicorn horns cure just about anything. There’s a bag of holding so you don’t get overburdened. Just don’t screw up and put on bag of holding into another (KABLOOM!!).

About 3/4th of the way to the bottom of the dungeon and the temple of Moloch, I knew I was going to ascend. I had a solution for just about everything and, armed with knowledge from the wiki and my collection of tools to solve problems, I couldn’t think of a way the game could stop me. It probably took about 20 hours in total, spread over several days.

Last night, I started to get excited and impatient, a dangerous combination. I successfully made it to the bottom of the dungeon, with all the plot coupons, a ridiculous low AC, every intrinsic, and I killed the archpriest of Moloch and stole the Amulet of Yendor back.

Taarna then ran all the way back to the first level of the dungeon, reacquiring her lost pets on the way. Well, Cookie and The Brain made it. Pinky the Cat got turned into a Green Dragon by an Elf Lord wielding a wand of polymorph and I think she starved to death. Dragons need way more food than Pinkycats. But for quite a while, I had a pet dragon!

When I exited the dungeon and entered the Astral Planes, looking for my God, I stopped consulting the wiki. I wanted a spoiler-free ending and I was happy I did so. I’d never seen any of this content before and while the game sorta breaks down at these levels–the sheer amount of spam you get alerting you to the activities of dozens of other monsters all attacking each other and you renders the game nearly unplayable and I consider it a bug–it was also fantastic to see the Elemental Planes, fight three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (you are the fourth horseman, War), and make it to the final level.

In the end, surrounded by angels and priests of evil gods, Taarna the Valkyrie clawed and pulled herself to the Altar of Tyr, and offered up the Amulet. For which, I received the final message;

An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance. The voice of Tyr booms out: “Congratulations, mortal! In return of thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!” You ascend to the status of Demigoddess.

And then the final screens, summarizing Taarna’s final game. After almost 20 years, I have beaten NetHack. I’m not sure I would describe the game as “fun,” in the sense that I don’t find World of Warcraft fun, in spite of having played both for hundreds of hours. But I find it rewarding. It’s neat to discover some new form of interactivity, to discover the developers thought of everything, that’s very neat, and levelling up is very rewarding but to me, rewarding and fun are two different experiences and two different motivators. Nethack was rewarding. And I feel a great deal of pride, silly, I know, but there it is. Pride in having finally ascended. Probably I’ll stop playing now. Put the game to bed. Taarna, certainly, is retired now and forever.

Farvel, Taarna the Valkyrie.