30 or over....

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

Really? What's your hobby, mine is calculating squares of double-digit numbers in my head while commuting. Numbers around 7 are painful, you need to really concentrate on calc to get that right. Makes commuting over in no time flat.

There's something freakily similar about Angband players.

Computing squares is one of the ways I convince my brain to fall asleep. It gets me focused on unimportant things rather than worrying about all sorts of other crap. I continue each night where I left off, backtracking a lot. I'm current at 5570^2.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by fizzix

There's something freakily similar about Angband players.

Computing squares is one of the ways I convince my brain to fall asleep. It gets me focused on unimportant things rather than worrying about all sorts of other crap. I continue each night where I left off, backtracking a lot. I'm current at 5570^2.

I fall asleep way too fast to ever get that done properly. That's about 30 million. Insomnia or really fast at that?

I think angband is coders game, logic and tiny details matter, and tiniest error can lead to death, pretty much like with program coding (make a typo in wrong place and program no longer works).

[Mondkalb]

While having an interest in mathematics and science in general I really suck at coding. I can barely manage simple tasks in visual basic inside MS Access or Excel. So I doubt that any mathematical urge compelled me to play Moria or Angband.

I figure the charm of these and other RPG games or fantasy games in general lies in their mystical nature, their offerings of the unknown and hidden secrets yet to discover. When I first started playing Moria, there was no WWW to speak of and certainly not available to me. I had to discover everything on my own. All the treasures and enemies deep down in the dungeons of Moria and later Angband were a spellbinding enigma. Alas! Those were the days, my friends ...
That would match my fascination for astronomy.

For the record, I'm 57.

[bio_hazard]

I'm 39- first played in about 1994. I was a bio major but one of my roommates sophomore year in college had a brother who was an engineering major at MIT who introduced us to both Angband and Magic the Gathering.

I'm a biologist (hence the forum name)- no real experience with math beyond calculus and various statistics classes. I'm ok with data-basey (e.g. find observations matching this, that, but not the other) type of tasks in excel or matlab or R, but if you ever saw my Matlab code you'd probably become violently ill.

I would love to learn enough programming to make a variant- I've even bought an old Intro to C text but I just haven't found the time to work through it yet.

Also, I've never won Angband without major cheating.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Mondkalb

While having an interest in mathematics and science in general I really suck at coding. I can barely manage simple tasks in visual basic inside MS Access or Excel.

Just to point out that in my experience that's a LOT more than most people can do (I have a lot of experience as university IT guy).

[Algus]

I'll be 29 in a couple months. Guess that means I'm catching up with you guys.

Always been into old school computer RPGs. While everyone else was playing Baldur's Gate, I was still into the SSI games. Angband makes me nostalgic for being a kid. I still play AD&D 2E with my friends from time to time but we only get to play a couple times a month and aren't always playing D&D.

Angband's been filling a void for me ever since we all got out of college.

And I'm an English major that works as middle management in retail. I need a calculator for adding double digit numbers LOL

[Fendell Orcbane]

Originally Posted by bio_hazard

I'm 39- first played in about 1994. I was a bio major but one of my roommates sophomore year in college had a brother who was an engineering major at MIT who introduced us to both Angband and Magic the Gathering.

I'm a biologist (hence the forum name)- no real experience with math beyond calculus and various statistics classes. I'm ok with data-basey (e.g. find observations matching this, that, but not the other) type of tasks in excel or matlab or R, but if you ever saw my Matlab code you'd probably become violently ill.

I would love to learn enough programming to make a variant- I've even bought an old Intro to C text but I just haven't found the time to work through it yet.

Also, I've never won Angband without major cheating.

What do you consider major cheating ? I ask because some people consider monster spoilers to be major cheating.

[AnonymousHero]

Originally Posted by Fendell Orcbane

What do you consider major cheating ? I ask because some people consider monster spoilers to be major cheating.

They do?

If so, they're wrong -- it's complete make-work to identify/probe everything and then just keep reusing the same save-file over and over again. (Plus, it's absurd that monster knowledge is connected to the savefile -- the savefile is not the player.)

At best it adds an aspect of meta-gaming.

Eliminate that cheat_ option and just give all monster knowledge immediately, I say!

[bio_hazard]

Let's not get this thread derailed by that topic! Plenty of threads in the Vanilla forum that have gone over this.

This was in the capricious days of youth, when I would save-scum, cheat death, and even sometimes in tough fights scum the turn by turn actions in a battle. Don't do that stuff anymore.

[Fendell Orcbane]

Originally Posted by bio_hazard

Let's not get this thread derailed by that topic! Plenty of threads in the Vanilla forum that have gone over this.

This was in the capricious days of youth, when I would save-scum, cheat death, and even sometimes in tough fights scum the turn by turn actions in a battle. Don't do that stuff anymore.

I guess I'm just wondering why you haven't had a win then...because with the help of this forum I think I had my first one in three months. BUT I know some people don't like TO, destruction, or other things they feel make vanilla "too easy". I guess I was wondering if you were one of those people.