• ZizzoTheInfinite

Zizzo the Infinite

"Your Wiki-fu is not strong, Grasshopper. Go now and meditate."

"Yes, sensei."

Okay, okay, I suppose I should put a little more than that here… I'm a rather long-time ToME player (since ca. December 2002, according to my notes). I maintain various spoilers, utilities and patches for ToME, some of which are listed in the SpoilerArchive. I've got way too many characters going, and for a few of them I've written (or am writing) DitLs (some copied over from the old forum).

How I Play ToME

• Favorite races/classes: Uh, have you seen my character roster? Let me put it to you this way: Imagine asking a parent, "Which child is your favorite?"

• Wins: Three: an Alchemist, a DeathMold LostSoul Sorceror, and a Master-Q-wearing dragon-summoning Ent Symbiant. I can tell you're duly impressed… [At least now I've finished off the last of my old v2.1.2 characters, so I can finally retire my old ToME 2.1.2 binary.]

• Best character: Ooh, another toughie. My farthest-advanced character, unsurprisingly, is my Alchemist—but for most fun, I've gotta go with Bjorn…

• Favorite finds: First Scroll of Artifact Creation, back in 2.1.2 with my Ent Symbiant.

• ASCII vs. tiles: Tiles if I think I might acquire an audience; ASCII otherwise.

• Game habits:

  • I tend to be very methodical. With only rare exceptions, I try to completely explore each level and walk every level of the dungeon all the way down. That will probably change when I get a character other than my Alchemist to Angband.

  • Most people here seem either to take no or few random quests, or to go all out and take all 98; I strive for a happy medium and do 49.

  • I usually skip some of the side dungeons (Old Forest, Rhun, Helcaraxe, Erebor, Paths of the Dead), unless I'm looking for dungeon towns or am trying my luck with randart drops from dungeon guardians. As an exception, with Monk characters I usually do Old Forest instead of Orc Cave, since Monks can't use any of the guaranteed artifacts in Orc Cave (unless he's also worshipping Manwe, in which case I have to do Orc Cave for the piety…).

  • I don't level up in the swamps or mountains near Bree or in the terrain near the Angband entrance (with the sole exception of my Alchemist, who did succumb to the Potion-of-Detonations trick). I do, on the other hand, always do the Thieves quest right away, even before going into the Barrow Downs.
  • I never use always-small-levels, or Zang/Cth/joke monsters. I do use point-based stat allocation.

  • I am a packrat. Oh, brother, am I a packrat. The period around v2.2.6 when the Mathom-house could only hold two pages of stuff was very trying for me…

  • For all but the simplest (skill-wise) classes like Sorceror or Swordmaster (and sometimes even for those) I fully plan out my skill point usage in advance with my tome-skiller script (and as always, We Apologize for the Shameless Plug™ ).

  • My automatizer file and my macro collection are the stuff of legend…

• Bad game habits:

  • I tend to leave the side quests way too long, to the point that they're trivially easy, and the reward isn't worth the bother.

  • I sometimes don't do things that might increase my life expectancy. I rarely if ever carry around empty bottles to fill at fountains, for instance, and I refuse on principle to walk around in circles carrying a dragon corpse to regain my Eru piety. And I don't care how much it would boost my survival odds, I am not buying Undead form for my Yeek Hermit Sorceror; it's grossly out of character, and he thinks Necromancy is disgusting anyway.

• Stupidest death: I still don't know what I was thinking taking Summoning from Mr. F. Fingers with my Maia Hermit Sorceror—but I do remember that I was so proud of that first Green Thunderlord totem…

• Window layout: Six windows (four of them actually ToME windows… ), arranged thusly: main game window center left, recent messages and monster/object recall top, visible monsters bottom right, an xterm bottom left for entering character journal entries or editing DitLs, and a tomespoil Tk window center right for all my spoilery needs. Oh, and for some characters, an xmessage reminder, for stuff I need to remember between sessions (as many characters as I've got going, "between sessions" for a given character can be quite a while…).

Assorted utilities

• /JToMESpoiler: A collection of spoiler utilities written in Java.

• /Autoparse: An attempt to make automatizer files human-readable.

Chatter

KhymChanur: I just added your inventory/equipment automizer patch to ToME 3. It needed a little fiddling, since some of the internals have changed from 2.x to 3.0.0, but otherwise it worked perfectly fine.

ZizzoTheInfinite: Glad to be of assistance. And I'm not surprised it needed some changing. [examines v3alpha3 auto.lua] Wow, this looks a lot more elaborate than what ToME2 has (notably apparently including the ability to create a destroy rule that destroyes unidentified objects, something I've been considering hacking into ToME2's automatizer). Is there anything on the Wiki or the forums describing what this new automatizer will be capable of?

KhymChanur: No description yet. I'm waiting for it to go beta first, since I add new capabilities when the mood strikes me. And I still haven't added the capability to not auto-destroy Beastmaster quest corpses yet, which is something I've been wanting to do.

NeilStevens: Hey, I've been reading over some of your character stories lately. Good stuff. Really spices up the wiki.

• ZizzoTheInfinite: *blush* Thanks.

I wonder, though, do you keep these kinds of personalities in mind as you play, or is this something you whip up later? Given your particularly slow play style, I wouldn't be surprised if you HAD to add personality to keep it interesting, heh.

ZizzoTheInfinite: Well, for my DitL characters, I'm doing the write-up as I play (I think the window-layout image above shows that in action), so the character personalities come in there, mostly as running commentary. Generally the personalities don't affect minute-to-minute tactics so much as they do the higher-level strategy, like taking the Spiders quest early with Gathraka. [Well, actually, now that I think about it, I do recall Gathraka shaming me into taking on one or two greater vaults that I might have skipped with other characters. And I don't expect her to let me get away with hit-n-running the Maeglin quest like I did with Bjorn and Trilogy.]

And as for keeping it interesting, if I get bored, I can always switch to one of my twenty-odd other characters…

PatashuPatashu: Any chance you can't just provide your automatizer in xml format? :X I can't figure out all the perl and patching stuff.

ZizzoTheInfinite: How ‘bout one better: a replacement auto.lua file that can read my automatizer file directly?

RogerBarnett: Quick question, may I have your permission to include a copy of your ToME fanfiction "Acceptance" in the roguelike fanworks archive at http://roguelike.calamarain.net ? You would of course be credited as the author and a link back to here would be provided.

ZizzoTheInfinite: Go right ahead.

NeilStevens: How did you get here so fast? I hope it's because you're on the mailing list, heh.

ZizzoTheInfinite: Nah, just coincidence. I had a new segment for Ruk that I wanted to put up, and I arrived mid-upgrade, so I just kept checking back in every so often until things looked stable enough for me to start editing stuff.

Oh, speaking of which, I noticed in my editing that the URL syntax for linking to Wiki subpages has changed (in particular, spaces now get mapped to _ rather than _20, and things like / and , don't get encoded anymore). The corresponding FAQ entry will probably need to be updated to reflect the change.

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