Early game Unangband

[Derakon]

Generally when I play a new variant, I roll up someone strong and dumb. There's always going to be surprises, and they tend to be easier to absorb if you have a few extra layers of muscle. Once I'm more experienced I'll give the fragile races/classes a shot.

[Therem Harth]

My trap instakill was with a Giant of some sort actually (I think Frost Giant). Now that I think of it, a trap doing that much damage was probably a bug.

[nooblet]

Melee in Un seems to be harder to do well than in V, even as a good melee class. I remember the high-end melee fighters were better than their V counterparts which made up for it.
The game was way too weighted towards melee classes for my liking... being a mage was perilous to the extreme, let alone a bard.

[Napsterbater]

Originally Posted by HallucinationMushroom

I would rank the 5 stats you need like this: Con, Siz, Dex, Str, Cha and put enough in agility for a non-penalty. I have been playing with some hobbit thieves lately and find that loading up on con and siz is pretty much required for survival.

As a Hobbit Bard I have to put in more points to Agility than to Size in order to come out without a penalty. I'm actually thinking now that the best bet to survive is to forget about stats and keep the gold to buy a nice enchanted weapon or rod with.

You boost 2 stats every few clevels and 5 every 10th level. For experimentation purposes, I would highly recommend going into debug-mode (ctrl+a) and giving (ctrl+c) a brand new hobbit bard 99 (ctrl+o) potions of experience. Drink them and play with different stat choices to see what kind of character you can expect to have at different clevels. I didn't bother doing that with my troll bard since he only needed to focus on dex and cha, but with a hobbit it's going to be much more of a juggling act to get what you want.

See this is why I don't have the patience for Un. I like the game to make my gameplay decisions for me. I'm not one of those who spends hours poring over the D&D rulebooks looking for the right combination of spells, feats or whatever to make my character a superman. I just want to have fun. I can do this with any race/class combo in Vanilla. In Un, just to get started I have to make a zillion false starts, read spoilers, ask for advice. If I wanted that, I'd still be playing Nethack.

Sure I could just go with a Troll Warrior and bash everything to death. But I can do that in Vanilla too. I like the idea of Un because it's got a lot of promise of variablility, it looks like a game I could get lost in. That's why I keep coming back to it. I want it to work for me. But come on, I can't kill anything at clev1 dlev1 by throwing with a hobbit thrower? That's a problem. Maybe it's WAD, in which case I'm totally missing the point of how to play the game. Do I just sneak around until I find a good enough weapon to kill with and just hope I don't get instakilled by a trap?

[Napsterbater]

Tried a Hobbit Thief, and enchanting my starting weapon to +4/+4. Couldn't melee goats in town with it, but I was able to set it in a trap and kill the Goats with it. I'm thinking traps are the way to go here.

[Napsterbater]

               _______________________
              /                       \         ___
             /                         \ ___   /   \      ___
            /            RIP            \   \  :   :     /   \
           /                             \  : _;,,,;_    :   :
          /             Vince             \,;_          _;,,,;_
         |               the               |   ___
         |            Vagabond             |  /   \
         |                                 |  :   :
         |              Thief              | _;,,,;_   ____
         |            Level: 1             |          /    \
         |             Exp: 0              |          :    :
         |             AU: 43              |          :    :
         |        Killed on Level 0        |         _;,,,,;_
         |                  by walking headfirst into a trap you set with a Rod of Feedback.
         |                                 |
         |    Wed Jun 29 18:20:39 2011     |
        *|   *     *     *    *   *     *  | *
________)/\\_)_/___(\/___(//_\)/_\//__\\(/_|_)_______

Hahahaha!

[Napsterbater]

It would be nice if the game showed you where the trap you set goes off. It seems to be completely random, which direction, and you don't find out until you step off the trap. Step in the direction of the trap, and you set it off. With a +8/+8 scimitar, that means death.

[Napsterbater]

The game also mentions you can set traps with both a launcher and ammo, but I can't figure out how to do this. Every time I try, I get a murder hole.

[HallucinationMushroom]

Well, speaking of Nethack, that's a Nethack-like death for sure. Good one. Have you tried throwing flasks of oil? They explode.

[HallucinationMushroom]

I think I have you beat on the stupid death. I tried throwing some oil around grenade style with so-so success. It turns out that sometimes they don't explode, but sit on the floor. I was near a pile of maybe 5 flasks of oil and nailed a nearby centipede in the face with an exploding oil flask, which caused all of the flasks to ignite which blew me to smithereens. On the upside, I learned you could leave a large pile of oil flasks and lure a monster in to totally annihilate it.

I tried about 5 of your hobbit throwing bards and it feels impossible I must admit. Before I played with Croaker I tried bards that were Dunadan, a few different variety of elf and one throwing bard that was a man of Gondor and while those were hard, they were nothing like this. While I expect more competence of even a level one character, there's probably a reason all those drunk singing hobbits don't adventure far from the Green Dragon.