Funny. The first thing that came to my mind when he was first mentioned
was: "Who's Hank Aaron?"...

I can vouch that I know a lot of people who know what NetHack is and
play it. I can also vouch that I am certain no-one I know has ever heard
of "Hank Aaron".

The world is bigger that the USA, and outside of North America, not a
soul knows any baseball heroes by name, except maybe for Joe DiMaggio,
but him only thanks to Simon and Garfunkel...

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio,
Our nation turns it's lonely eyes to you.
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson.
Jotting Joe has left and gone away,
Hey hey hey.

Happy hacking,

Boudewijn.

Wow, I never had such a weird game of NetHack.

Note: This was on a private server with around 10 other people, I'm not
an administrator, nor do I know the wizard account's password.

I was bored and thought, I could play a wizard, instead of my usual
Valkyrie. Now, I started as a male wizard with an intelligence value of
18, so I could cast spells hungerless and the greatest thing of all: I
had a blessed spellbook of identify. The first thing I did was picking up
random items to train my divination spells. Once I got skilled, I
searched for an altar (Which was on DL 1, lucky!) and sacrificed until I
got Magicbane. There, I started enhancing my dagger skills and managed to
get skilled. Afterwards, I enhanced my attacking spells, to skilled.

I already was at XL 9 when I descended to DL 2. There happened something
I'd never have expected: A bones file with a ghost named "wizard", a
grave ("wizard, killed by strangulation"), an amulet of strangulation, a
cursed bag of holding and a cursed potion of water. I took the potion of
water, ran up to DL 1, made a water prayer and got holy water.

I dipped the bag into it and took out the six wands.
Three of them were wands of wishing (0:127) and the other three were
wands of death (0:127).
Then I found these things in the bag: The blessed +20...

...or whatever it's called.

I know this will be utterly unimpressive to most players, but my rash
impatience had prevented it from happening so far.

I got a pet balrog early on, festively dubbed Baby Jesus, which happily slew
everything in Minetown, so I sat there sacrificing or eating whatever came
along until I had collected quite a set of -banes (I only really needed
Maggie, being a wizard) and got some intrinsics. When my wrist started
hurting, I visited the bottom of the mines just for the hell of it (no pun
inten-- wait, that doesn't work anyway) and found a load of nice gems. Also,
an unexpected wand of wishing got me SDSM and speed boots.

Baby Jesus stopped being tame when I left him in a lower level of Sokoban
for a bit (he kept getting in the way), so after getting the amulet of
reflection (useless at this point) I had to tiptoe past him with a sob and a
goodbye.

Travelling through the whole dungeons up and down with just
a rusty +1 orcish helm until Astral, where the first killed
player character carried a blessed +7 helm of brilliance!!!

Janis

vintermann gmail.com> wrote:

[ Please do not snip attributions of people whose text you leave in.
The first bit of the following was written by "sigmajargon": ]

Sure; get crowned as a Lawful while wielding a long sword. Or dipping a
long sword in a fountain, as a (correctly-prepared) Lawful (and getting
lucky). Both will turn the sword into Excalibur, if possible.

Richard

The most recent versions of sporkhack make the mines way too dagger
rich with every other Gnome carrying several. It's like the tourists
are almost playable.

Plus look at all of those crossbow bolts!

Why not change the random gnome to one random small weapon. The
surviving gnomes will be able to gather enough daggers to throw off of
their dead buddies soon enough.

-HJC