Diary of a Mediocre Crawl Player

For many years I have had a love/hate relationship with Crawl, a simple text based RPG.

I love it because it is a very elegant RPG system, with a lot of interesting monsters, rules and levels, and it reminds me of a very big brother of the original Rogue, which I spent many hours playing as a youth.

I hate it because it is a vicious and cruel game, where you have but a single life and no option to save. Well, you can save the game, but that also quits the game, and when your character dies, all the saved game information is deleted. It also contains a fair amount of "spoilers" - information that is required to survive during gameplay that you cannot discover until after you have been killed by not knowing it. Basically, in order to survive many of the situations in Crawl, you must first have encountered those situations in order to know what not to do. For example, almost every Crawl player has had a early character die due to eating kobold meat, as the only way to learn that kobold meat is poisonous is to eat it.

As the name of this blog states, I am not a very good Crawl player, even when I know the information required. I read about people who complete the game on a regular basis and it amazes me, as so few of my characters make it past level 5 of the dungeon. And that is one of the problems with getting better at Crawl. The majority of the experts long ago mastered the lower levels and can no longer provide any useful information to people struggling with the early part of the game. They are too concerned with the late game, or with crazy character combinations that make the game even more difficult. Any information they provide is often in the form of commandments, with absolutely no rationale as to why that information is important. (My favorite - when asked what is the simplest character to play, most reply with a Troll Berserker, but then add the caveat, "provided you know when to Beserk," and then add no more information. I won't tell you how many of my Troll Berserkers have died in the low levels, attempting to figure out when I should go Beserk.)

So, the goal of this blog is to document my Crawl games in order to allow myself and others to critique them and discover the techniques required to successfully complete a game of Crawl. In order to provide a point of reference, I am going to always play the same character - Bob the Mountain Dwarf Hunter. I like the ranged ability of the Hunter class, as it allows you to defeat enemies from afar, which is a great help. However, even ranged characters end up in hand to hand combat, and Mountain Dwarfs are sturdy and good with an axe. I am also going to play the latest version of the Stone Soup build (v 0.4.4), as I really love the automation features of Stone Soup, which limit the amount of pointless movement commands I have to make.

My primary goal is not to defeat the game, but to simply obtain a single rune. I plan to go for the rune in the Swamp, as I have actually made it to the level with that rune in the past, so I know that I should be able to do it, and at least in the original Crawl, it was the easiest rune to obtain. As a secondary goal, I want a large percentage of my characters to make it to level 10 of the dungeon, so that it doesn't take me as many attempts to get the rune.

I am going to try and play one game each day, though there will be many times where that is not possible. As long as I end up playing around one game each day, I will be happy.