Aucbvax.5826 net.games.rogue utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!hamachi Sun Jan 17 03:24:00 1982 Rogue Grab-Bag These comments concern Rogue verson 4.7 1. Rogue still screws-up the score file on occasion. 2. Dragons seem to have unlimited fire-breathing. 3. Magic missiles: What good are they? Do they have any special qualities? As far as I can tell the only advantage is that if they miss, they don't wake up the monster. Instead, the missile vanishes. 4. Lots of monsters seem to be able to carry things. Unless I am mistaken, a jackal was carrying something. 5. Vampires now have the ability to reduce hit points. Unlike wraiths, they do not take away experience. Cancellation works on them. 6. Ken Arnold had promised that long swords would be better than maces. This seems to be true. 7. Treasure rooms are a big win. More often than not I am able to kill-off all of the monsters guarding the treasure. It is a good way to find a lot of magic stuff quickly. 8. There seem to be theme games. Is it merely probability, or could it be that the probabilities of finding different things is set randomly at startup time? I just got done playing an armor theme game, where most of the things I found were armor. 9. Strength now goes above 18 as integers 19, 20, etc. There seems to be no limit. Excessive strength as always seems to work wonders. 10. Ken eliminated the 1 in 100 chance of getting extra strength. I suspect that there is some hidden parameter which still gives an advantage. 11. My newest strategy seems to vary between trying everything out as soon as I get it, to hoarding everything. Surprisingly, it seems to win to try out everything to identify things. 12. When in Umber Hulk territory (below level 18) I use a modified strategy which says to find the exit and go down as soon as possible. 13. I have definitely seen a rust monster on level 8. It was one of the monsters guarding a treasure room, so this may be a special feature of treasure rooms. Guard your plate mail. 14. You can find out if a scroll is 'scare monster' by trying to lure a monster over the scroll. There is a time (food) penalty involved, so it should only be done with caution. 15. Dodging back and forth behind a sleeping monster in order to rest while fighting another monster works well. A good technique is to get at least 30 hit points, and then polymorph a purple worm which is easiest to kill for the hit points you get, and then play the sleeping monster ploy. 16. Since dragons only try to chase you if there is no gold for them to cover, it might be wise not to pick up any gold while in dragon country (level 21) until the room has been certified free of dragons. 17. I have found that thrown arrows kill low-level monsters quite effectively. Especially in the early going I like to attack monsters by throwing arrows at them, while continuing to wield my trusty mace or whatever. 18. Trolls wander. There also seem to be more of them. 19. The feature which lets you follow corridors while running is a real win. It saves extremely large numbers of keystrokes. 20. Rogue addiction. Why do people do it? I would welcome some discussion on this subject. 21. There seems to be an easy way to cheat if your system has 'gcore', a program which takes core dumps of running processes. With a little work, all of the secrets come out. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.