Rogue: Death, Genocide, and Data Compilation

I’ve just recently started up a new D&D campaign using video chat, so that’s eaten up a decent amount of my time in the last few days.  As such, I haven’t done much gaming aside from the odd bit of Rogue.  I’d like to be able to say that I’ve gotten better at it, but I’m not all that sure that Rogue is a game that you can get better at.  Sure, eventually you learn to stop doing a bunch of dumb things, but eventually that plateaus and you’re pretty much at the mercy of the game’s RNG and the inventory that it bestows upon you.

Since my last post, I’ve lost another 23 adventurers, for a grand total of 53.  Of those 23, nine have been lost on the 1st level before leveling up.  Five have been lost in the mid-levels, usually to Centaurs.  Four of those failures happened in the teen levels.  Twice I’ve had the game freeze up, and been forced to reboot; on one of those I was on level 19, which was particularly tooth-gnashing.  Once I died on level 3 because I forgot to eat, and a Giant Ant killed me after I had fainted from hunger.  My best game so far saw me descending all the way to level 20, but I was predictably killed after being confused by an Umber Hulk.  On the last game I had, I was about to be killed by a Centaur, so in desperation I used a polymorph wand on it.  It turned into a Purple Worm, which killed me even faster.

I haven’t discovered much else in the way of magic items, except for this one amazing find:

A Scroll of Genocide!  With this item, you can wipe any one type of monster completely from the dungeon for that game.  I knew these scrolls existed in later roguelikes, but I had no idea that they were in Rogue itself.  They must be a pretty rare drop, I’ve only ever found one of them in 53 games.  Anyway, I didn’t hesitate too much to nominate Umber Hulks as my target of genocide.  Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to progress much deeper than level 10 in that game, so I never got to reap the benefit of my mass-killing.  It was still pretty satisfying though.

One thing I’ve continued to do is collect data on what levels the various monsters appear on.  Today I compared my data to that extracted from the code by Ahab over at Data Driven Gamer, and filled in the gaps for the monsters I hadn’t encountered yet.  The ranges I came up with matched those posted by Ahab almost exactly.  I took those numbers, and made a list that goes level by level, showing what monsters can appear.  It’s a little bit like cheating, but from earlier games of Rogue I already had a fair idea of what the monsters were.

I’m hoping that the information above can help me to plan out my runs a bit better.  Already I can see that the strength-draining Giant Ants are gone at level 13, and the armour-draining Rust Monsters are gone at level 19.  Looking at that list, it appears to me that level 13 is the safest place to grind for experience.  It’s after the Giant Ants, but before the level-draining Wraiths, which can make advancement almost impossible.  The major nuisances on level 13 are Rust Monsters, but even when wearing no armour you have a good chance of surviving against the monsters there.  Next time I find a Ring of Slow Digestion I’m going to park on that level and earn as much XP as possible until my food reserves run low.  Hopefully, that will be my key to victory, or at least a run that gets me deeper than level 20.