Nethack is an ancient game and people are dissapointed how it never seems to change anymore, but there is a very good reason it has always been so popular. It’s rock solid. Everything seems to have been thinked through, and almost invariably when you spot something strange, it’s only that you can’t immediately see the good reason for it to be like that.

Playing the game

Playing Nethack. The gods in this game confuse me so much after spending years playing Adom. In Nethack, the gods get happier if you don’t ask favors and just wait — in Adom you offer stuff to add to and obvious hidden stat and praying then decreases that stat, with the messages letting you know roughly where your current standing is.

In Nethack, there are “major” and “minor” problems that the gods can help you with if you pray. What surprises me is that the gods are much more likely to help you with the major problems rather than the minor. If you think about it in terms of the god’s effort, you might think minor favors would be easier. But I guess in Nethack the gods see each favor as equally easy to perform, so they instead get annoyed when you ask for help when you should be able to manage on your own. It makes sense of course, but Nethack always has this weirdness to it because the devs think from first principles and ignore all standard video game logic.

I like the dog and cat pets in Nethack, although until recently I would often ditch them. It’s cool how they are so die-hard, yet not overpowered because you can’t get them to attack the opponents when you want them to (and they’ll try to attack peaceful monster like watchmen).

Hallucinating, I saw a monster called “b/tard”.

Decided to play nethack. Make a healer character. Look at the inventory and think this scalpel is probably a bad weapon. Walk into the next room and there a Sunsword artifact just lying there??? The character has no long sword skill, at least something makes sense.

Does this count as YASD: I came to a bones level where my character had converted the mine town altar and gotten killed by the priest. The room message was “You have an eerie feeling”. I killed the ghost and merely talked to the priest:

Talk? Here is what I have to say!” The priestess of Mercury swings her mace. The priestess of Mercury hits! The priestess of Mercury kicks!–More–

In the Sokoban caves, I got surround by monsters that I thought could deal with, but turns out those were not wolves blocking the only corridor out but wargs. Zapped a random wand at them, it was polymorph and now I’m faced against an ogre and a Balrog. Zaped again and it’s a grid bug plus fire elemental, something more manageable, but I still don’t have any tools to fight or escape. Wear my only unidentified ring and zap the polymorph at myself — the ring turns out to have been polymorph control! I quickly consult the wiki and decide to become a master mind flayer, which turns out to be a terrible choice since the tentacle attacks damaged myself when attacked against the elemental — makes sense of course. In the end I survived because my cloak of displacement (ranger starting equipment) helped to make a turn in a bigger room.

Playing nethack. Tried “protection racket” for the first time. Got to the mine town temple at character level 1. I open the door and there’s a leprechaun standing next to the altar. I was able to put it to sleep with wand and give all my money to the priest meanwhile. Later went and sold more of my stuff and got the AC to -4 without wearing proper body armor. Then I got greedy and went hunting for $50 more in the deeper levels. It was going fine actually, but then I stepped on a land mine and insta-died from my full 12 hp health :D Apparently great AC is useless if you don’t have enough hitpoints too.

Physical humor

Pondering how Nethack manages to be funny: A funny game like Fallout 2 gets virtually all of its humor from the writing and art (eg illustrations with the comic character). But Nethack has next to no dialogue and no art. Instead it has what I might call “referential humor” and “physical humor”. It’s packed with references to speculative fiction, computer science, physics in ways that alter gameplay and this definitely gives Nethack lot of its unique feel.

However, I’m more interested in the physical humor, or “slapstick”. It’s stuff like accidentally petrifying yourself on a cockatrice corpse when blind. Sure you press the button to pick it up, but how could you have produced the list of items on the ground without feeling around with your hands? Nethack gives you a witty text line giving this as explanation why you got petrified. An iron ball chained to your leg can pull you into a spiked pit along it, a monkey can steal boots off your feet and run away with them, a pet polymorphed into a Xorn will devour everything in a weapon shop and make the shopkeeper mad, throwing cream pies at opponents blinds them, tinning a troll corpse prevents it from reanimating, and so on. Nethack is full of stuff like this, which has led people to say “The devteam thinks of everything”.

In contrast, most roguelikes such as Adom have almost none of that physical humor. The funny stuff in Nethack comes allows rather creative but also often very unbalanced play. For example wielding a cockatrice corpse (with gloves) to instakill all your opponents is both funny and over-powered, as is polymorphing yourself. In Nethack monsters also use items (which they apparently have identified) And there’s lots of special behavior coded for that, like fleeing monsters zapping wand of digging down and jumping into the hole. In Adom you don’t even have holes that drop a level or level teleportation traps/scrolls, presumably because it would feel like cheating in that game which aspires to be “balanced”.

Dwarf Fortress also has a moderate amount of physical humor, but it seems to originate more from the emergent simulation rather than coded behavior. For example it’s funny when you fumble a water channeling project and flood you fortress, drowning a lot of your dwarves. Some of the humor it’s more directly coded, like the dwarves’ need for alcohol “to get through the day” and throwing tantrums.

I tried to think about presence of physical humor in other games and it seems it’s quite rare (in the types of games I play). Roguelikes are probably most suitable for it because of their non-modality — when all the code for the game is for supporting the one core mode of the game, it seems easier to add the connections and exceptions that create the humor. In other words, the same rich base that allows for emergence also can allow for physical humor.

Development continues

I read about the architecture in Nethack recently on a roguelike subreddit, where one guy is still actively developing Nethack, calling it Nethack 4 I think. They had all kinds of tools for deterministic running of the system and a continuous save system (something similar to how video encoding uses keyframes and incremental diffs to it) that allowed them to reconstruct any issue easily. Also they could even prevent the game from crashing in the first place by having the player take a single step back after detecting a crash.

Just as a mathematician seeks elegant expressions over fuzzy generalities, NetHack eschews graphics in favor of perfectly crafted, well-defined ASCII characters. While other games are dated by their interfaces, NetHack is preserved in ascetic purity