Profile

Greetings, my name is Aaron J. Anderson. I have a history of playing *bands going back many years to probably Moria. Usually I'd play them like crazy for a month or two, and then not play for a year or two, but I'd always come back. Most recently I was playing Hengband/Entroband, a very difficult variant in my opinion. Tome has much more complexity, but I think Entroband is definitely harder. Tome isn't really balanced enough for my tastes, but it has so many damned possibilities and complexity, that I'm having a ball with it right now.

You can email me at stilez@gmail.com if you wish.

Ethics and sundries

I tend to follow Lord Dimwit's ethics suggestions, always have on my own before I ever read them. I just have a small caveat. If something sounds fun, I do try/play it once, to "experience" it. :) On one character, (which I actually suicided in disgust a bit afterwards) for example, I stole rings of speed indefinitely to find good randart rings. My rules are reasonably simple.

  1. Do not ever use the randart rings that grant more than +3 attacks.
  2. Don't abuse the summoning bug. It's both boring and it seems VERY broken. For example, I will use symbiosis, but never use it to summon stuff.
  3. I never use backups of save files. I DO, however, experiment sometimes on characters I never intend to play in wiz mode seeing what stuff does. I decided it saves time killing characters off to learn some things. I tend to do that before playing a new type of character.
  4. I don't clear shops inventories by steal, ever (after my one try to see what it was like). If I'm at a wimpy enough level that that ring of speed or amulet of weaponmastery would help, and I don't have the cash, I might try to steal it.

Hmm, some things I do do that are questionable to some.

  1. I will scum for artifacts or certain types of items in the late mid game to try to get endgame type equipment. By that I mean things like doing a vision type effect on a level and seeing what is there. And if nothing looks interesting (and I'm in that mode) I'll go up or down stairs and repeat. I don't do it throughout the game, but there are certain spots where you really want a particular type of item, or something to that effect.
  2. I'm never in a hurry to win (unless that is a theme I set for myself). I like my characters to get powerful. So I'll kill stuff over and over just to try to find interesting/good/neat items. I don't do that with the longsword of dawn (after I tried it on one character shamelessly), but I'll kill stuff the old fashioned way.
  3. If I have a theme in mind for a character that involves a FF skill in particular, I'll often suicide if I can't get both a FF quest that gives me that reward in the first half of BD. Just suicide, and repeat the character until I start off with 1 skill and .3 multiplier in a specific skill.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but I basically follow my gut on what feels like cheating or abusing bugs -- and don't do them.

Characters

I have two winners so far in tome, 1 of them an ultimate winner, if that's what it's called when you kill melkor.

This was my first non-lost-soul character, maybe the 3rd or 4th version of him. He was your basic swordmaster (at least to start out), and with him I discovered I loved getting mindcraft from FF on warrior types. Obvious I suppose, but this was my first character (that lived far) who I played with FF quests. I just screwed around with Lostsouls to start off.

I didn't realize that a ton of people consider deathmold to be very cheesy when I tried him out. Just the idea of 25 stealth and 4 ring slots and misc stuff made me want to try it out. He was great fun, and obviously very powerful. I overused genocide in the void/nether realm, but it was my first time ever there and I wanted to win. Especially since I decided during it that I wasn't going to be void diving on too many more characters. I found it incredibly boring and tedious. It wasn't FUN like most of the game to me. The only high points were fighting Tik' and Melkor. I'll probably avoid deathmolds for a while, I mostly got my fill, and it is a BIT cheesy if you get mimicry as early as you can. Beginning is still annoying, but once you hit midgame you just fly.

I had really wanted to try barehanded fighting out, it looked interesting. I decided to throw antimagic in, as I had never played with it other than as a lostsoul. I don't think I'll ever play antimagic again without being able to wield a darksword, as it doesn't seem powerful enough. I imagine this is also the only character of mine who will wear the One Ring, which I did just to do it once. He was kind of a boring and annoying character, but I won with him. :)

I actually abused some of my ethics on this character. I shop-steal-scummed and used the lothlorien quest for endless skeletons. But I had fun, and I wanted to see what an archer could really do. Well they can do a heck of a lot. Once I got powerful I just destroyed everything that got in my way. Was doing 3k per bolt with *slays* and piercing through 3 things, to hit 4 in a row. I haven't retired yet, I might do the void. I just don't find the void very fun.

Chatter

Psst, the proper way to do numbered lists on the wiki is to use a space before and a period after (1.), not hash marks(#1), like this (and note that you can just write 1. 1. 1. over and over, and the numbering will take care of itself, very handy in case you have to add or remove an item):

  1. List
  2. Items
  3. Here

JohnGilmore:Wonderful job adding missing skill spoilers. You might want to go back and label you comments as yours - I noticed at least one place where you said "I" but it's not clear who "I" is. It's clear enough now when nobody else has edited the page, but it'll be very obscure later. I learned some things here - I might have to try the stunning blows/divine aim combo. I've also never really understood how swordmaster/weaponmastery relate, and the bit about the barehanded combat skill was quite informative. I think maybe I'll go add a table to it.

I find that my primary interest (the hook that keeps me going) is finding out about how the game works. Because of that, I've won only once, and that with totally shameless save-scumming. Mostly because I get bored in mid-game soon after maxing my level. No more growth, no more new skills/abilities to try, and the artifacts/items are blah, so what's the point?

MrConceit: Thanks! I decided I disliked going to 2-3 different pages to find info, and I figured others might feel the same way, so I started filling in some of the stuff missing. I'll probably do more when I'm bored in the next week or two. I got most of the technical info from Killerbunnies of course, with his permission. And I agree with you that most of the fun is in finding out how things work, plus trying different combos of things. I just finished doing an antimagic monk (who was a pain), who wielded the One Ring, because I hadn't done that before. Thanks for adding that table, it is MUCH more readable. Ok, I went back and added in a link to this homepage in most instances where I said "I" in those spoiler files. I didn't bother if I never referenced myself. Thanks for the advice.

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MrConceit (last edited 2006-12-09 21:09:58 by adsl-68-255-29-89)