So, I'm currently playing a build (and character) whom I have named Urza, for reasons that should shortly become apparent to a not insignificant portion of Magic the Gathering players. His skills are all four crafting disciplines (Smithing, Alchemy, Tinkering, Wandmaking), Archaeology, Burglary, and Golemancy. His current incarnation is my most successful character yet - I'm on floor 5 (tiki-land), while none of my other attempts have made it through more than a small portion of 4. I'd like to note that on level 1, golemancy + ring of deepest skies (is it normal to find that in the starting room on every new game?) + softballs is very cheesy. Lay a minefield of blades, use a single softball to lure things in when you're ready (you have better eyesight than them, so you have set-up time). 2-3 blades kills a normal beeperson, so even Bee Arthur goes down that way. If you loot anything better than softballs from the vending machines, they just go down faster. The ring means that if you can survive 2-3 hits, *combat heals you faster than food,* which is just kinda silly. By the time I went from floor 2 to floor 3, I had Tinker maxed and only 2 ranks left in Smith, greatly aided by floor 1 having no less than 4 shrines to Inconsequentia. However, floor 2 had a Monster Zoo containing an absolute NIGHTMARE of an Living Statue (possibly named, I can't remember for sure). Nothing I did hurt him beyond 1-2 points out of more than 120, and the doors to the Zoo were blocked with where stuff was standing. With each of his hits taking half of my HP, he was not something I was confident of defeating. So I ran back, closed the *next* set of doors (which is exactly why I follow a depth-first rightmost-recursive search of the dungeon doors, closing doors to any finished branches on recursion exit) and prepped to fire one of the two (!!!) Bolts of Mass Destruction I had found - one looted, one *laying on the freaking floor*. At which point, in the turn I fired at the door, one of the Zombys I had raised with a Bone Wand stepped into my line of fire. Adjacent to me. I was quite displeased. On the other hand, "quaff a potion of lively regeneration and sprint out of the firefield" seems to be a good strategy, since I ended up surviving. I then waited for the effects to cease, my HP to recover, and my real-life heart rate to go down, and tried again. At which point the Living Statue, with a sliver of life left, walked through the shattered wall surrounding the closed door. Thankfully, the ranged weapons and/or wands I used on him killed him. I don't really remember what I used, as I was properly panicking by that point. As someone who has enjoyed roguelikes since I was 12 or so, I have to say: sudden near-death due to your pet failing INT and WIS forever? Horrible monsters you defeat through three kinds of luck, one level of planning, and loads of terror? Jokes everywhere (mailer daemon anyone)? Man, feels almost like SLASH'EM again! EDITED TO ADD: If anyone who isn't hugely familiar with the MtG backstory is interested, Urza was the first planeswalker to be the focus of a plotline (and ended up being a significant part of many.) A planeswalker is a being with the ability to travel between planes of reality, which are world-equivalent and are all over the place in terms of what they're like. Any kind of being can have the planeswalker 'spark'; Urza was human, but others have been dragons (Nicol Bolas), elves (Freyalise), etc. He was an artificer, and while he focused on tinkering and creating magical foci (see: wandcrafting, although in MtG wands aren't really a Thing), he had a good bit of smithing and a bit less alchemy in the mix. Add in a day job as an archaeologist (which can be described as 'burgling people who have been dead long enough that nobody cares', no offence to archaeologists intended). Finally, one of his actions with the broadest impact was creating the silver golem Karn, who ended up becoming a planeswalker in his own right and creating the entire plane of Mirrodin. He also has a long history of using (and misusing) dangerous artifacts and weapons. See: the Golgothan Sylex, the Nine Titans, the Legacy Weapon, a whole boatload of issues caused when he overdid it on the time-manipulation stunts he applied to the academy he started...
Finding that ring at the start of every new game is unusual. I believe that was done so the devs could test it out. I thought they fixed that in the latest build.
A bit off-topic, but what you said (Which I get, as the confiscation of property owned by Jews by the Nazis, aided by the Swiss and others, is a topic of great interest to me). It's not so much that they've been dead long enough that no one cares, but that sometimes the people are not actually looked at as real people, but as primitives, something between animal and human, who are simply beneath concern. What has me thinking about this topic is that I've been reading Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Sign of the Four", in which British soldiers return to England from India with a 'treasure', and when one of them is murdered, Holmes and Watson try to have the treasure 'returned' to one of the soldier's daughters. At no time do they ever ask if the original owners or their family or descendants are still alive, or how did the soldiers come about to actually have such a treasure. Was it spoils of war, or simple and straight-forward opportunistic looting? Was it burglary? Was the family arrested and their property confiscated? Or maybe grave-robbing? Maybe they get to it eventually (haven't finished the novel yet, honestly). But I found it to be an alien concept that no one ever thinks about where that treasure actually came from, who owned it before the soldiers brought it home to England? This is a way of thinking that lives on. Ask people what they would do if they found a million dollars in a suitcase with no name on it (or even if it had a name on it), what would you do, and so often you'll hear the same response, 'finders keepers'. Hell, the whole Dungeons and Dragons/fantasy hack and slash genre is based on the 'finders keepers' principle, if you think about it. The last time I actually ran an rpg campaign, I made sure that I would turn things on their head from the usual logic. Orcs were not these stupid, evil barbarians, elves were not these noble goody-goodies, and so on, magic did NOT equal power (and actually was not magic), and so on. Had I kept on running it, it would have been neat had I had them run into the former owners of all the loot they had so nobly appropriated and see what happens. Anyway, carry on. Sorry for the way off-topic speech.
