Well, we have a success thread, why not a failure thread? Smithing Tinkering Hand to Hand (or whatever it's called, fists and feet) Communist Clockwork Knight QI Gong Demonologist I was all set up on gear, was at level 5 with two silver shields and all the supplies I'd need to make it through the dungeon...I had everything but...I aggro'd brax >_> trying to see all of a shop, accidentally caught him in a single tick of my rocket jump...needless to say with that burned I had no where to go and was dead shortly after. Last save, 3 hours ago...might as well have been permadeath, file is wiped and I'm going to have to start over...poor Commissar Jones Welp, share your failure stories everyone
I don't remember any of my own failures now, let alone builds I had then, but I do remember one very amusing failure of my friend. The basic story is, I was at his house then working on something else, and after we finished I sort of forced him to play DoD (no lasting damage resulted from said coercing, neither physical nor emotional) with a pack of mods I installed for his DoD a few minutes earlier for my amusement. He made himself a character, a mostly mage-ish build with some random stuff thrown into it, and started. The room he started in had two lockpicks on the ground in it (and the two standard vending machines) and three doors; to the left, to the right, and to the bottom. He opened the left doors, and there was Siegfried in a small room, already awake. So he closed the doors. He opened the right doors, and there was Bee Arthur in a large room but with narrow path, already awake. So he closed the rooms once again. And then he opened the bottom doors. To those familiar with the term, I can say that it was the "petting zoo". He lasted four more turns. I almost died of laughter back then.
I think my most recent epic failures are to be seen on the Wait Another GRPD Random thread, but I have one to share that I've always loved. We all know and love Alchemical Gas Canisters for clearing zoos, right? Well, I thought I was gonna do just that. I knew all about the whole "you don't aim this directly at an opponent" thing, so I was gonna be smart. I lined up a perfect channel and clicked on an empty space...only to have the canister land right next to me. WTF? I panicked and Knightly Leaped into the zoo (in retrospect, you know, away from would have been much better) -- and my Trap Sight Radius was just large enough to see a big-ass Great Pumpkinn giving me the finger out of the exact square I had aimed my canister at. SONOFA... He Rolled like an Armadillo.
Around when I started playing, I was on DL 3 while running an Axes/Dual Wielding/Communist build and was in a shop selling stuff. My standard procedure was to keep food, drink potions, and sell everything else. I was standing fairly near to Brax, drinking all of my potions when I saw an achievement pop up in the bottom left corner and then Brax begin to move closer to my character. I had evidently consumed a "Potion of Radiance" near him and aggro'd him, dying shortly after. Sometime after that, I was playing a Promethean Magic build and had made it to DL 5 or so. I wasn't super great about watching where I was walking and so I'd occasionally hit a couple of traps but they were shaken off easily. Well, as I was meandering around the dungeon I walked over a trap and saw an achievement pop up in the corner. One step later and a large chunk of my health was gone. Another step and more health gone. I didn't understand what had happened until I died (I triggered a thaumite nest trap). Fast forward a bit to this past weekend, and I was up against Dredmor for the second time running an Egyptian Magic build. Because I had taken Blood Magic and Ley Walker I never really had had a need for drinks as they were enough to sustain the mana consumption needs. I was running low in the battle with Dredmor, so I drank a random drink in my inventory and then suddenly all of my skills vanished, and this was what I saw: After figuring out what had happened (I had no idea that there was a chance to turn into a diggle upon drinking diggle nog - definitely an entertaining side effect) I retreated to the already explored room. As I was backing out, chunks of my health disappeared (the walls failed an Dredmor was free). I did succeed in killing Dredmor, but I thought it was amusing enough to post as an almost-failure story.
Some of us put numbers after the names of our characters, to indicate how many "predecessors" that build has had. I started a swords/bankster/pirate/burglar/tinker/investigator/perception character. An hour later, the number after the name was 21, thanks to liberal amounts of RNG screw (including but not limited to putting both Bee Arthur and Siegfried behind the first door at least ten times, and dropping zero useful items). Just to rub it in, not only did #22 manage to reach CL2, but immediately after doing so a fountain gifted him a Crownstar Addendum.
My most successful Permadeath character reached floor 10. But it wasn't a cakewalk getting him there. In floor 4, I accidentally quit without saving. My heart skipped a beat, and I scrambled to recover the lost file. I jumped through a million hoops to access the latest autosave, including but not limited to; tweaking the .exe so that it'd play without Steam cloud interfering, recovering the deleted files, and using a test build. I was determined to kill Dredmor. I would pull his ribcage apart and rip his still-beating black heart from his bony body, to let him see it seconds before his lich body gave in to the sweet embrace of the afterlife. All of my skills were maxed, my inventory was full of holy hand grenades and potions of new life and potions of eternal purity and all that you could imagine would be used in a Dredmor smackdown. (This was post-YHTNTEP but pre-CotW, of course.) I was on floor 10, incinerating fools with Gog's Spammable Pyre, having the time of my life, thinking of what to do in the next 5 floors in case I ran into an emergency. A friend sent me a Skype message, and I alt-tabbed... ...when I tabbed back in, my character was standing on a Pyre, with a chunk of his health gone. I held A, to make him walk off of it, which made him step out and back in continuously. Congratulations! You are dead. It's a common bug, but it filled me with seething fury and immense butthurtiness. I quit playing DoD for a long time afterwards.
My most memorable death happened on level 3. I was in a shop, busy sorting out my inventory when I looked at my Lutefisk Cube and remembered that some sort of paradox can be caused with it. First I put in some Lutefisk, which didn't work, but when I actually managed to cause a Lutefisk Paradox, three things happened in a very quick succession. The whole shop went up in flames which nearly killed me, Brax ran up to me all angry, and punched me in the face which did kill me.
It didn't kill me this time, but I'm pretty fail-consistent with mines. I came across a room, at it was laid out in one area something like this diagram, and the pink arrows show the path I genuinely took. Yeah, I trigged all of the traps. By walking on them. Because I have some sort of inability to react to traps in my way. In a game like Dredmor. ALL. THE. TIME. I'm genuinely not joking.
I get that a lot too. It usually happens when my Trap Sight is pretty much non-existent, which makes me extra aware of traps so that I take each step with great care. And then my concentration brakes for no reason and I walk across two mines.
There was one in the vendor to the right, but when I used it, it teleported me 1 tile from where I was standing. Then I tried to make another one, and I did, but it teleported me the wrong way again...
Right, so after giving up the GRPD competition I came up with a build and decided to try it: Big Game Hunter Ley Walker Golemancy Egyptian Magic Magical Law Archaeology Staves Staves was a bit of a bummer, and I've decided that further builds should probably use something else -- what I don't know though. Communism maybe. But it started out well enough, and at one time I found an *amazing* ring, giving 5 to both mana and health and 2 to regen on both as well, so my mana regen was at 6. I'd saved the monster zoo on DL2 for last, but something happened and I died to a spell mine (?). Some of my krong'd equipment allowed me to retaliate with a poisonous gas cloud, which would kill me too if I didn't move out of it. Which is what I guess the spell mine refers to. Oh well, such is life (or death, as it were). Sandstorm works very well when you have three glyphs active all the time, I might add (which is why I miss the character so much - that ring was key to making it work). The idea behind the build was to use BGH to level up faster, Ley Walker to keep the glyphs active, golemancy for the mustache golem (so I can get a few levels for free) and then Egyptian Magic for wrecking things. Staves didn't work very well though.
I didn't technically die, but losing this guy turned me off of DoD until just recently. wandcrafting/rogue scientist/fleshsmithing/either ley walker or alchemy/archeology/either perception or tinkering/piracy. Rogue scientist is so sexy because the mask and the canister work so well together; toss a canister, walk around IN the fumes, stuff chasing you dies, but you don't because you got a mask would make batman cream his jeans.When you get the fleshsmithing capstone, its the same, but you can do it WHENEVER YOU WANT. you got a big toothy problem? Fart. walk 2 paces. repeat until problem solved. Plus fleshsmithing is really versatile. Add to this the meatwand loop. The Wand of Meat generates 2 out of the three components in it's own manufacture, with plenty of extras... I think I must have generated something like 1500 units of undifferentiated ur-flesh by keeping a ready supply of salt on hand. It all went to the lukefisk. Not particularly effective. Just funny. I actually picked up wandsmithing so I could power the Aetheric Death Ray. Which worked pretty well, except I went though mana like cheap beer. Oh well. The last thing I did was get the Diggle God of Death blessing, which make me completely immune to my own foul odors. I figured nothing could possibly kill me! Nothing did. Instead I got stuck in a mysterious dimension, with the exit portal spawning underneath an immoveable tomb. The picture on file load has me standing next to the tomb and crying. But its cool. I already smoked dred.
I remember my first encounter with the wizardland clones (is that what the trap is called?) i had a crazy random class and i pulled that lever than let's just say... it didn't last long.
