Back Again

[John Gregory]

Hello All,

A tried DM a few years ago documenting my experiences on this forum perhaps to other inmates' hilarity.

IIRC, I played all the way through failing at the final battle/trapping but remained enthusiastic overall at the adventure.

For reasons I am now unsure of, I stumbled back on the subdirectory where the DM distro exists finding it called to me enough to give the game another try. I found myself hooked immediately upon entering the maze room containing the avatar portraits.

With giving it as close to no thought as possible, I chose the dinosaur Hissa this time as my avatar and off I went. As I remember things, this game is dramatically different from my last. My avatar is rugged so enormously less vulnerable to hits but keeping the game lit is a challenge. So while the stage remains the same, the play is drastically different.

For example, I'm currently on the 3rd level as I count because I call the picture frame level as 1. I was overwhelmed in the previous game by the blue apes behind one door. This time I easily waltzed through them. I don't recall any light issues last time but this one was a major issue until my avatar gained a sufficient level to reliably create torchlight. That took camping out at a safe place to grind up to the point of being up leveled.

This time through I've lost the element of shock due to ignorance of what's coming. I forgot a good deal but do remember the broad strokes of everything so far. So here I am back and looking forward to new experiences during an older setting.

[jayrshaw]

Hi John Gregory,

It's good to see you giving the game another spin. I can definitely see how a solo playthrough with Hissa would have a less bumpy start than one with Tiggy! Looking forward to hearing how things progress moving forward.


--Jay

[Ameena]

Hissssa is one of the more physically-strong starting characters so yeah if your last run was a solo Tiggy (the squishiest of characters!), anyone will seem less difficult. It sounds like you're still going solo, rather than taking a full party, though? So you'll still find it more difficult than you otherwise might since you have less firepower and inventory space and such. At least with Hissssa you can cast a Lo-level light spell if you let his mana regen after casting "Lo". I tend to go with a two-player party and he is always the first half of that party...though I reincarnate him and call him Ameena so he kind of becomes a she .
The first level is the Hall of Champions and yes, most of us count that as Level One (a few call it Level Zero). The "blue apes" are generally known as "blue trolls" or sometimes "trolins". Hopefully you manage to finish the game this time, and then maybe you can move on to CSB and have fun being lost and clueless and dying all over the place like the rest of us once did .

[John Gregory]

I'm bouncing between levels three and four. I explore four some but then retreat to three to hone my skills in the angry cabbage and purple worm regeneration rooms. Yes, I'm playing my avatar as a solo. I'm currently, IIRC, artisan wizard and ninja, adept fighter and craftsman priest. I'm going to search for spells online since my remembrance of them is sketchy at best. I remembered torch, fireball, wellness and relearned anti-venom from a scroll. I forgot that the scrolls use the names rather than symbols so also will need a Rosetta Stone.

I'm back in the dungeon due to getting some wired headphones in for an evaluation. In the spirit of 1980s wired, I booted the game to use with these samples. I never considered assembling a good team because I thought this would be a one and done but got hooked so continued play after writing up my view of the headphones. The above posts got me to thinking that maybe I'll abandon this ill considered non-team, return to level 1/0 and assemble that two avatar team. Then again, I've persevered this far finally getting my avatar solid in all skills so...

Well, time to get off the console and back into the non-screen world. Good to see you to again. Oh, one more thing. I forgot or never knew, does an avatar get education credit for failed spells or only those that work?

[jayrshaw]

You get a token amount of experience for spells which fail, but not nearly as much as you do for a successful cast.


--Jay

[slickrcbd]

Two comments. For a Rosetta stone, just look at the official manual.
http://dmweb.free.fr/files/Game,Dungeon ... 0,Scan.jpg
http://dmweb.free.fr/tags/manuals/
https://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.451

Also you don't have to abandon your current solo run if you decide you don't like soloing.
You can return to the Hall of Champions at any time before retrieving the Power Gem and grab some additional recruits.
The only drawback is at this point they will be much weaker than your current champion, but you can just neglect to build his skills for a while while working on grinding the other two.
However even if you do do this, I recommend you have the neglected champion practice creating mana potions whenever his mana level gets close to full. Then you can transfer that mana to the other champions to practice with. You lose a lot in the process, but you're still grinding priest levels.

I should mention that often when I take Halk, I wind up neglecting to work on his fighter skills until the worm level, and only increase his ninja skills by throwing stuff (I make him the leader so all manually thrown objects are done by him, which happens quite frequently with the mummies early on) in order to level my other champions health and strength since they are usually much weaker and less durable than Halk.
Since I learned of the trick, I now however will use War Cry on a screamer until he gains a priest level and work on leveling his magical skills on the early levels, so I'm not totally neglecting him.

[Ameena]

Level Three is the one with the six sections accessed off the central hub. Level Four is the one with the purple worms and the Screamer Room. Level Five you can technically skip because the way down to Level Six is right along the corridor from the stairs and there's nothing essential on that level but plenty of annoying monsters.
Spell-wise I only use Fireball, Magic Torch, Harm Non-Material Being, and the Health and Cure Poison potions. Oh, and a single Zokathra of course, but I'm not sure that counts. So you can complete the agme without having an exhaustive list of all the spells, but some monsters are more resistant/vulnerable to certain damage types so you might find certain spells/weapons more useful if you do want everything to die as quickly as possible. I'm lazy though, and can't be arsed to switch stuff around to train anyone. My Ninja skill gets neglected entirely (which means it's at zero because I always Reincarnate my dudes) until I'm on like, Level Nine, when I train it for a bit by having someone chuck a chest ovr and over again. Once they gain enough skill that the chest travels to the next square and I have to move forward to pick it up, I switch to the next person. Which gets them to Journeyman, if I remember rightly. Not very high but it's better than nothing and I can finish DM and CSB with that so it's fine . Your current skills sound decent enough - generally people finish DM with skills around Expert level, give or take one or two levels, so you're doing fine.
When I played the game back in the day, I only ever took four people because it never occurred to me that it was possible to take any other number. It wasn't till I went in search of a downloadable version of the game in the early noughties, joined the forum, and saw people talking about it that I realised you can take fewer than four if you want. So I tried all the other variations - three was...okay? One was a bit difficult - I managed to finish DM but got stuck in CSB where I would kill some dudes and then have to close the door to regen mana, but they'd respawn when I stepped forward again so I'd have to kill them again, etc. A solo player does also mean you can't get hit by any projectile coming down the other side of the corridor (and can "dodge" by quickly moving your character to the other side). Two was the sweet spot for me, however - a full front row so I can always get in two melée attacks, and at least have two spells readied at once (I say "spells", I mean Fireballs, naturally ), a decent amount of inventory space (especially in CSB where there are keys for days), and I can still technically "dodge" projectiles by turning sideways in the appropriate direction.
My go-to party is reincarnated Hissssa and Wuuf, because I like non-human-looking characters, Hissssa is the most physically tough but who still has the mana to cast a spell without needing a boost from a wand or whatever, and Wuuf starts with a flask so I can be casting healing potions immediately if I want to...though I don't cast potions ahead of time but just have the characters keep a flask in their off-hand and cast as needed.
Anyway, good luck whether you choose to carry on, go back, or start again. DM is almost like a tutorial for CSB, showing how basic dungeon mechanics work and having a linear layout that gets harder as it goes, so you have a challenge that slowly ramps up and you can backtrack along a known path to safer areas if you're having difficulty. CSB is...none of those things .