<p>NetHack is awsum!</p>
<p>However, I died in about 30 seconds from a "little dart". </p>
<p>How do I play this game? I seek thy help, fizix.</p>
<p>A water nymph took all my stuff and then a water demon killed me. :(</p>
<p>Please don't tempt me. I wanna study from my Ross Probability book</p>
<p>Aw, come on. No way I could pass this up :D</p>
<p>0) Don't kill your GPA. It'll probably take you several months to win the game if you play a lot and spend a few days reading the online spoilers. (For normal non-geniuses, several years.) NetHack is a harsh mistress and a difficult addiction to treat, unless you happen to come across a better game, which you probably won't. But do not get discouraged -- the first few levels are always the hardest.</p>
<p>1) Don't drink from fountains. They can give you wishes. They can also summon nymphs and water snakes (among other things), which can be very annoying to a low-level character.
2) Don't be burdened. Drop stuff you don't need at the moment. Make sure it's in a safe place (preferably in a chest with Elbereth burned into the ground; if this isn't feasible put it by the downstairs, levels freeze when you're not on them).
3) Don't melee floating eyes.
4) Play strong characters at first (valkyrie, barbarian, samurai). If playing a weaker character, make ranged attacks a greater priority. Wizards are fun since you see many in-game items that way.
5) Use hjkl or numpad to move for access to diagonal movement. Fight in corridors so you're not surrounded.
6) To save yourself: Run away, engrave "Elbereth" (scares most monsters, but beware erosion), apply tooled horn or expensive camera, read scroll of teleportation, zap wand of teleport (at self or monster), quaff cursed potions of gain level, quaff healing potions, #pray.
7) Don't eat old or dangerous corpses.
8) Beware ec;Laq and purple h.
9) Use your pet.
10) Join the IRC channel #nethack on freenode for advice. Check the newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.nethack for spoilers. Read the fine manual. You can find other good spoilers if you google wisely.</p>
<p>Happy hacking!</p>
<p>^ are you kidding me?</p>
<p>
[quote]
7) Don't eat old or dangerous corpses.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I played Wyvern for some time. I went to the fountain, got lots of arrows, and then kept on attacking the healer while constantly healing myself. It helped me level up several times each time I killed a healer.</p>
<p>And then I also like to eat corpses. of everything. I ate the corpses of the townspeople I killed. The police arrested me afterwards though. Then I make a new account :D</p>
<p>Wow, Wyvern and Nethack are related:
<a href="http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=362253%5B/url%5D">http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=362253</a></p>
<p>==
I miss computer games. >: (</p>