Some DungeonMaster tips and Tricks.

[A3000T]

Hello all,

I have some Dungeon Master tips and tricks to share. I sent them to
the Dungeon Master encyclopaedia some time ago, but the website has
not been updated since then. So I thought I might as well post them
here too:

(I have Amiga version 3.6, harddrive installed on a real Amiga with a
joystick with autofire button in the mouseport and a USB-mouse to
move the pointer. The tricks and tips I discribe may not work with other
versions or on other systems.)

The Diamond Edge is the best normal weapon in Dungeon Master. Use
its "stab" option. It does more damage per minute then any other weapon.

The completed Firestaff's "fuse" option has the same effect on
nonmaterial beings as a powerful des ew spell.

The number of items in the dungeon is limited. If you run around and kill
a lot of monsters that leave items behind, things will start to disapear
to make room for the new items. This does not effect things that already
existed at the start of the game, things in your inventory and things in
chests. Put your hunting trophies and the poison darts from the
launcher on level 10 in a chest of you want to keep them.


Now some tips to speed up training for high level characters:

Go to level 10, coordinates (30,38) on the map on dmweb.free.fr, and
get a single trolin to follow you. You should be facing the door to the
"enlarge my view" puzzle, while the trolin is standing next to you. The
trolin will start hitting you (use some vi potions when things get out of
control, but do not kill it). It will also prevent water elementals from
reaching you. You will now get experience points very fast because you
are on a deep dungeon level and a monster is attacking you. Kick the
door for ninja levels, berzerk the door for fighter levels (use autofire
joystick trick if available). When running out of food or water, just open
the door and go to the rats' level via the skeleton-key stairwell.

Go to level 12, coordinates (32,30) or (33,31) on the dmweb.free.fr map,
The black flame in front of you must be active. Cast fireshields so it can't
harm you any more. (2 mon fireshields will protect you for about 3 minutes)
You will now get experience points very fast because you are on a deep
dungeon level and a monster is attacking you. Even if the black flame can't
harm you, you still get fighter points for getting hit by it. While the
black flame is hitting you, cast lo ya for priest levels, and cast on oh ven
or alternatively ee ful for wizard levels. These spells at that power level
will give the most experience per mana points used. If you go crazy quickly,
try mon ya for priest levels. It is not as efficient, but it is less work
for the player. Gaining wizard levels will take about twice as long as
priest levels. When you run out of mana or fireshield, just step back and
rest; The black flame can't follow you, and chaos and the demons can't
leave their room. The skeleton-key stairwell is nearby, so you can go to
the rats' level to get food and water quickly.

Get a rope. Climb down where there is no pit. The climb down action
will fail and there will be no recovery time. But you did get the experience
points for climbing down. In combination with the autofire joystick trick
and the "sparring partner" trick, you can go from nothing to archmaster
ninja in just 3 hours. Remember to keep an eye on the character's stamina
when doing this.

Kind regards,

Dennis

[Simon]

Are you sure items disappear? I thought the nature of DM as one large file containing all of the data would mean nothing was ever lost. I don't remember items vanishing when I played the amiga version on my amiga.

[beowuuf]

You can read about it in posts in the CSBwin/DMBuilder forums

Essentially since the database isn't infinite, there are general items marked for deletion in the engine, like worm rounds, if they go above a certain number. An individual item can be marked excemp, so items initially placed in the dungeon are never removed. DMBuild had a bug at one time where this flag wasn't set, so important items disappeared as the game progressed in custom dungeons.
Anyway, so in a long game, monster dropped items especially become fair game for deletion.

This can be why some people start getting weird cloned effects - the game engine seems bad at re assigning item numbers, so sometimes it deleted a food item dumped in someone's store, and then you have a strange cloned item in your inventory that actually has a list of food attached to it - which is why when you die, crash city

[Paul Stevens]

like worm rounds, if they go above a certain number.

There is no counting of particular items. If any 'type' of item (clothing, for example)
requires a new entry and no empty entry is available then soemthing is thrown away.
It tries to throw away things not on the same level as the party. But other than
that it simply cleans things out of the cells in sequence, starting at level zero.

monster dropped items especially become fair game for deletion.

In my terminology this is not quite true. Items held by monsters
and then dropped are generally marked as 'important' and
not deleted. The 'Remains' of monsters (worm rounds, shields,
shanks) are, indeed, fodder for the recycler. These are items
created at the time the monster dies.

[beowuuf]

oh, i thought i remember seeing a text file you had with thing like 'worm rounds' 'wooden clubs' etc and a number. Still, my bad memory is why i suggested broswing those forums!

and yes, i meant remnants, not placed items carried by monsters, as they are placed at the start of the dungeon, and also should get flagged as important

[Automaton]

Cool Post A3000.

I knew most of it, but that trolin thing I didn't.

Another thing I noticed and is probably particular to RTC:-

In the early levels I used to punch all the rock monsters to death, we called them ninja fodder for the levels we gained off them and we were always trying to get the best speed possible off of the 2 front characters. Because RTC is windows based and takes the windows environmental parameters, if your mouse wheel button is set to "double click" (Mine always is!) then you can activate a weapon and produce the move your mouse is over by clicking once on the mouse wheel getting some hyper fast attack speeds on punch.

Cheers!

Autom

[Paul Stevens]

i remember seeing a text file you had with thing like 'worm rounds'

Yes, indeed you did. It is still there but hidden in the code.

My answers were with respect to the original Atari code (and probably
Amiga) because that is what the first post was trying to describe. CSBwin
attempted to make this algorithm a bit better by, for example, throwing away
the things in greatest abundance. Like this shields that skeletons drop
by the hundred if a skeleton generator is nearby. Or worm rounds instead
of dragon steaks. Now that CSBwin has much larger databases the problem
is not nearly as important.

[beowuuf]

ah, i thought you wee making flesh some atari code for explaination, rather than it being a CSBwin thing - apologies!

[sucinum]

what gives more priest/wizard-experience, if you are at the end of the rat-lvl? - casting while being attacked by a skel down the stairs or casting spells in the dragon-level (down the skel-key-passage)?

[Sphenx]

I think Chaos level and the Dragon level have the highest experience multiplier factor, then you might prefer training in these levels.

[sucinum]

but the monster next to you gives a 50% bonus, this might make up for that.
Level 9 has an exp-multiplier of 4, lvl 13 one of 6. so this could maybe be a draw.
but you can access the dragon-level a bit earlier...
maybe i try out the flame next time, should be the best training spot (weak and immobile monster, highest exp-bonus by deepness).

[beowuuf]

especially if you ae training with priest shields and healing potions beside the flame!

[sucinum]

to be honest, i did almost everything in DM except one thing: going for archmasters. i should have implemented flames in imprisoned for that

[beowuuf]

It's overrated, but I got alot of reading done when I tried for archmaster on wizards

[sucinum]

3h for ninjas sounds pretty doable

[cowsmanaut]

hmm how about a run where you can only eat what you kill.. no picking up of other food. So, screamer slices, worm rounds, rat drumsticks, Dragon steaks. would that be at all difficult? There is usually something edible around a few levels up or below you when you run out.. Just trying to remember if you even find food beyond the first few levels.. Seem to remember living mainly off worm rounds and screamer slices anyway.. hmmm..

Maybe the reverse would be more difficult?

moo

[Sphenx]

I did not know about the 50% bonus when you are next to a monster. Does this bonus apply for any experience you gain? Does it work for fighter, ninja, priest, wizard? If so, I would agree training in front of a flame should be the best spot, you can gain fighter experience because it is fighting you, you can cast protections (priest), damage it with vorpal blade (wizard) and replenish it with fireballs (also gain wizard), so it may never die, and you gain a 50% bonus for all of that? What is the exp-multiplier in Chaos level, 6? Makes a total of a 9 exp-multiplier? I never went deeply in the DM mechanics (I'm only a "craftsman"... does it make sense?

[beowuuf]

Maybe you should have a 50% bonus too?

The way to test this owuld be djarcas's CSBwin hack, where it can show all experience. I do believe this was the case though...the effect lasts onyl a short time if you are no longer damaged though, right? I forget if it was monster proximity or monster damage that triggers the temp modifier, i just remmeber it didn't actually last long

I do recall in zyx's mildew dungeon, the mildew corridor actually dropped you into the deepest dungeon level against some screamers - I have never, EVER seen a party gain so many levels so fast
I even gained a fighter level from blockign with a shield, i beleive...well, it was the last action performed to gain the level : )

[Guest]

Now some tips to speed up training for high level characters:

Go to level 10, coordinates (30,38) on the map on dmweb.free.fr, and
get a single trolin to follow you. You should be facing the door to the
"enlarge my view" puzzle, while the trolin is standing next to you. The
trolin will start hitting you (use some vi potions when things get out of
control, but do not kill it). It will also prevent water elementals from
reaching you. You will now get experience points very fast because you
are on a deep dungeon level and a monster is attacking you. Kick the
door for ninja levels, berzerk the door for fighter levels (use autofire
joystick trick if available). When running out of food or water, just open
the door and go to the rats' level via the skeleton-key stairwell.

IMHO it is more interesting to train with water elemental, at least for the fighter levels which you can gain by jabbing water elementals with the vorpal blade. This way I had reached archmaster level in fighter for my 4 characters, but I must admit at had taken a lot of time... (arond 12 hours to go from Mon master to archmaster for a single character). Water elemental do less damage than triolin and live longer so that you waste less time to heal and make it reappear once it is dead. But for the ninja probably the triolin trick is better. My method consisted to punch into the green monsters of level 4, or the screamers of level 3 but it took something like 3 hours to go from um master to on master, which is far less interesting

BTW, a funny thing to do with water elementals is to kill them with fireballs. When they are in front of a wall you can throw a fireball at them and they will suffer damage because thanks to the wall the fireball will explode at their location (same as when you commit suicide by throwing fireball whereas you stand in front of a wall). It also works with ghosts and the other immaterial monster of the level below, but not with black flames which simply absorb fire (maybe fire potion do work, I did not try)

[beowuuf]

I believe zyx did some tests to find out how much damage you do this way with fireballs - i believe it was something staggeringly small like 3% of the normal damage!
Funnily, the player gets no such slack when we lob a fireball against a wall!

Pain rats would be better levl depth wise for gaining experience punching them, but then again they do alot of damage back to you...

[dg2]

I believe zyx did some tests to find out how much damage you do this way with fireballs - i believe it was something staggeringly small like 3% of the normal damage!
Funnily, the player gets no such slack when we lob a fireball against a wall!

Pain rats would be better levl depth wise for gaining experience punching them, but then again they do alot of damage back to you...

I agree, but this is something that one should do at least once.

[Exodus]

...so I have been using the rope for about 1/2 hour and have not gained any inja skills. Does anyone know RTC0.31 somehow disabled this "cheat"?

My character's Ninja level is Expert, but I figured that if a previous poster can get to archmage in about 3 hours, I should have become at least master in 1/2 hour, no?

Also, I did notice that there is a recovery time, and that I do NOT lose some stamina. Both these facts contradict what other people posted. I am suspecting that this is no longer working, but perhaps I'm wrong...

Any comments on this?

Thanks, Exodus.

[beowuuf]

did it work like this in previous versions? I think previous comments refer to normal DM

[Rico Len]

See I always preffered using Chaos as my leveling puppet. Just stay behind him and cast spells, punch or berserk and I've found leveling to go quite quickly... does he have a different experience modifier?

I don't know if anyone's as anal as I am about cleaning their dungeon but I found that when I was cleaning (IE moving all drops into nice neat piles in the dragon level) that the loss of items became quickly apparent. Especially when I tried to make a trail of rat meat from the rat room on the rat level down to it's respective pile on the dragon level. I was able to complete that trail, but the screamer trail from the worm level I could only get to the tomb of the firestaff. :p

Oh and Cowsmanaut, I only ever eat food that I can replenish. I pile up my apples, breads, corns, dragon steak & cheeses in the dragon level, then live off rat meat, screamer slices and worm round. It doesn't make the game hard at all really. Though I don't think I could do that in CSB. I nearly starve to death at the beginning until I can finally get through the Ku path and fill a few chests full of dragon steak.

[PaulH]

After reading the above, I really don't think you need to have bothered filling in the 'are you a DM nut' quiz...

[MetaPhysik]

These are tremendously useful, I usually thro a heap of things ahead of me while I travel around the dungeon to raise ninja levels, and occaisionally get a pre-emptive hit on a monster sometimes.

I shall be looking into the rope trick.

[Maven]

Hello all,

I have some Dungeon Master tips and tricks to share...
<snip>

Get a rope. Climb down where there is no pit. The climb down action
will fail and there will be no recovery time. But you did get the experience
points for climbing down. In combination with the autofire joystick trick
and the "sparring partner" trick, you can go from nothing to archmaster
ninja in just 3 hours. Remember to keep an eye on the character's stamina
when doing this.

What is this "Sparring Partner" trick of which you speak? Can I attack my fellow player and trip the "recently attacked" flag?

[dayday2008]

would walking into a wall imitate being recently attacked?

[Ameena]

I don't think it does - I think you have to actually be hit by a creature. Or possibly you have to have received damage and have a creature standing nearby (either next to you or within a couple of squares, possibly). This has been discussed before, somewhere, so maybe someone wil be able to point you to whichever thread it was. It was ages ago and we talk a lot .

[zoom]

only in your dreams... I daresay (there is a timer that has to be activated for extra exp and I doubt bumping into walls yields that)