I assumed he meant 'start again from the same (initial) save file'. Although the competition rules do say that you can do some initial shopping and restart from that save file.

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How about Tom Bombadil for a pacifist competition? The winner is whoever defeats Morgoth while killing the fewest number of other monsters. I could set him up with Life + Sorcery and a special area sleep attack. (Special feature: Is unable to identify The One Ring and it has no powers when worn by him ;-)

Precisely. Lighten up, Buzzkill - nobody's cheating.

I've always wondered how a Nethack-esque conduct would work in a *band. Naturally, it would have to be in a variant where charm spells actually work. You'd also have to take care that it wouldn't be a scum-fest for items on the floor - I suppose disconnected stairs would take care of that. There'd also have to be some way of tracking total monsters killed in the dump; I don't know which, if any, variants do that. Fewest monsters killed sounds more fun than least XP to win, though.

I could probably fudge those issues with a 'competition binary/source'. It would be interesting to try, anyway. :D

I was considering a (reduced) XP payout for monsters rendered (mostly) harmless. It would probably be too easily abused, though.

OK, this is what I'm planning (implementing) so far. Comments and notes of (dis)interest very welcome!

Variant: TinyAngband (Morgoth on level 27, quick advance, nice items, relative of Hengband and Zangband)

Character: Tom Bombadil
Race: Earth-spirit*
Class: Avatar*
Melee and ranged pretty much suck, racial ability Twilight Song puts enemies to sleep. Racial ability gets more powerful with level.
Spell realms: Life and Sorcery (essentially Mage/Priest)
The One Ring: Has no power over Tom Bombadil, and its abilities cannot be used by him.
Tom Bombadil is essentially unbeatable while in The Old Forest but loses much of his power out of it.

Monsters can be 'tagged' once for 1/5 normal exp payout. 'Tags' are awarded for non-fatal disabling effects (sleep, teleport away, etc.)

Victory conditions: Banish Morgoth to his prison while killing the fewest other monsters.
If nobody kills Morgoth in the time limit then "Kill Sauron", and if nobody kills Sauron then "Deepest level reached" - all with 'fewest monsters killed' proviso.

The Earth cried out when Morgoth, Lord of Darkness broke free of his prison before the prophesied time of Dagor Dagorath and Tom reluctantly decided to get involved. Killing is not in his nature and he will avoid ending the lives of even the most misguided of Earth's creatures whenever possible.

* Competition special, not in standard game.

Is Tinyband in English? I know you mentioned an English version was forthcoming.. Could you provide a link?

Also, I'm a bit wary of all the special conditions disrupting game balance. It should probably be playtested a bit privately before being submitted for a larger competition.

You can use the compile hints here with the developmental code here to get an English binary.

I think you can point your favourite SVN utility to this url
http://svn.sourceforge.jp/svnroot/xa...yAngband/trunk
to download it.

The official English version will be out in a few days.

Well, I would be quite happy to just have a standard TinyAngband character and a standard competition (first to kill Morgoth), but there didn't seem to be much interest in that.

Obviously I plan to playtest it myself - as it's a 'quick' variant that shouldn't take a vast amount of time.

No OS X version? That sucks.

It seems that the
main-mac.c
version could probably be compiled for OS X. I don't know anything about the Mac side of things so I can't give guarantees.

main-mac.c may or may not work. main-x11.c will certainly work, though the interface is lousy compared to native OS X.

Apparently there's someone on the Japanese side who can compile for OS X. I don't know the details but if it goes ahead he should be able to provide an archive of the binary.

In other news the TinyAngband maintainer has taken over producing the 'competition version' from me. Probably for the best :p (I'll have to get the practice doing something else ;-).

At least if I don't do that bit myself I might be able to take part in the competition. (Depending on whether I end up play testing or not).

[EDIT] Oh, and I still want to hear people's opinions about this (pacifist option and normal comp. in TinyAngband option). The sooner I know whether it's 'go' for the next competition the sooner we can get started.