This lets me assuage my ego at the extent of invalidating the chance to learn from the run. Of course, I could also just conclude that this particular lich was simply some sort of super-lich, or that his crystal spear was an unavoidably extra-crispy spear, or some other unique-to-this-run factor means that nothing that happened was my fault. But if you predict that you can beat that ancient lich and you can’t, then you are Dead With No Do-overs, and It Sure Looks Like You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About With Ancient Liches, and Maybe You Should Work On That. You can make all sorts of incorrect predictions in real life and simply forget about your misses and remember your hits. It naturally forces you to take responsibility and update your internal model, and it does so in a rigorous, no-nonsense way that’s hard to come by in everyday life. After all, if you kill off a character with eight hours invested in them (something I’ve done more than my fair share of!), those hours were completely wasted unless you manage to learn something from what happened. So beating Crawl requires some degree of self-reflection. And if you die, all of your progress is gone – the only difference run to run is what you learn. You can’t endlessly grind to improve your level, nor can you look up exactly what steps to take or memorize a route. Combining these factors means that there’s no way to guarantee yourself a victory in Crawl. The second is that consequence is permanent – you can’t ever reload a save to a previous turn, and if your character dies, your file is deleted. The first is that the levels are procedurally generated every time – you can’t memorize the layout of the dungeon, because each run takes place in an entirely new version of the dungeon. (You also could just play it – it’s free to play and available both in browser or as a local download.) Crawl is a roguelike, a genre of game that’s undergone some linguistic expansion in the last decade, so we’ll focus only on the two attributes that are core to our story. Very much including myself, here – I was an active Crawl player at the time and fell prey just as much as everyone else.īefore explaining the bug, some background on Crawl is needed for those who haven’t played. It persisted for two weeks before it was removed, and it has a lot to teach us about just how easily domain rationality can make you vulnerable to certain kinds of ignorance. Maybe I'm horribly wrong here.Today we’re going to look at a piece of video game history: a bug introduced six years ago to the game Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (abbreviated DC:SS or just Crawl, as distinct from the game named simply Crawl). If it's the only weapons you have an aptitude for, it makes sense to use them, but any other option seems a better choice if you have aptitude for it. Long Blades just seem "meh" compared to the other weapons' utilities. Unarmed Combat is GLORIOUS FISTFIGHTING, and has generally reliable damage output and speed without worrying about getting an executioner's axe or a demon whip or a triple sword. Staves are staves, kinda a niche group for killing stuff but good for spellcasters. Axes have cleave for passive crowd control chopping. M&F have the same or better damage output without the hassle of lopping hydra heads, since both weapon groups are single target. I dunno, but long blades really seem to be the least useful weapons branch. On melee fighters fighting hydra, I have 3 words: "Maces and Flails." Hydra can't grow more heads when you're too busy smashing their existing heads to pulp with a blunt metal stick.
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