I can understand that viewpoint, having won with every race/class combination (before the new classes were added), but apart from challenges for experienced players I doubt new players will be playing those without the experience penalties that balanced things out a bit. Nonetheless, like you, I'm fine with it either way.

I don't think XP modifiers have value, because I don't think that's the right way to weight one race over another. I think they should all have the same XP progression, and they should each have specific advantages and disadvantages (hopefully roughly in balance) that make them appeal differently to different players' styles of play.

Not sure if this has been fixed since, but I'm looking at Sphara's necromancer win and the lantern of shadows says "intensity 3 light"

Apparently it has (although I don't recall when) - I just generated one and it behaved correctly.

Thanks, that was very helpful. Bug found and fixed - your savefile should work fine now. I assume no-one was really playing persistent levels, because this bug was completely disastrous :)

Since it was introduced I like to play persistent without WOR and it feels more "real". If I can't defeat an OOD unique, or a can't get into a walled pit, I go back later. I also stash hoards of good randarts, Life potions and Mass Banish and go back for them before the Morgoth battle.

Thanks for all the cool stuff you've done to Angband. I just registered to post about this bug but I've played since Moria.
I'm psyched to play the final version of a Necromancer.

I should have said - your savefile will work fine in the next build, which should be out soon.

New builds up on the nightlies page and angband.live with the following changes:

• Lights back on the ignore by type menu as before
• Fix to bug which made an extra step get run sometimes, particularly into traps and after recall
• Fix horrendous crash bug in the persistent levels birth option
• Bugfixes and improvements to the necromancer Command spell, including:
  • Better descriptions of objects dropped by commanded monsters
  • Fix to a bug which crashed the game every time a monster with acid, electric or poison melee attacked another monster
  • Added a command to release a commanded monster ('r')
  • Improve messages
  • List valid monster commands if an invalid one is entered
  • Fix a bug causing crashes when a monster tried to inflict another with melee paralysis
• In-game helpfiles gutted to just leave basic command and symbol lists

Note that the full help files are now in the docs directory, and are in .rst format - so fairly human-readable and even better browser-readable. They are also here. Note also that the help files have not been updated beyond 4.1.3; that will happen soon (and before 4.2 release).

In this last build I cant pick up money when a monster is in LOS, and some keystrokes are ignored in some situations I cant figure out.

Regarding XP penalty question
 

Why not consider something like what FAAngband did?

FAAngband has no XP penalty at all but the races like high elf start in a more dangerous part of the game, facing higher level monsters from the outset? These races also start with better weaponry to balance out but it's still very challenging.

Here are some suggestions:
- let the weaker races start with better weapons, maybe something they inherited.
- let the weaker races start with more gold at the beginning. Let the high elves, etc start no more than with 100 gold whereas a human get 1000 which would be enough for a bow plus hand weapon, etc
- let the stronger races have a specific vulnerability. Maybe high elves are inheritantly vulnerable to poison or cold, say 10 to 15%?

Just some thoughts.