fandomonymous

hi guys

i'm in florida now, i'm gonna be an adjunct instructor at a college an hour away from here teaching statistics and college algebra and even though the pay is miniscule and the commute is ridiculous i'm very happy

even if it'll be over a month before I have my desktop back and therefore can get back into Let's Playing and podcasting with Roguelike Radio (UGH DID I MENTION I'M A REGULAR AT RLR NOW???? because holy shit i'm a regular at RLR now and I consider Darren and Eben to be friends and waaaaaaaaah i feel like such an ascended fangirl i am not worthy waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah)

i live with my brothers-in-law and they're decent folks but i miss my partner so so so much

i'm also completely utterly over the moon about welcome to night vale, bwaaaaaah. anyone care to hear about my headcanons? (they are totally self-indulgent and borderline Mary Sueish but I DON'T CARE)

We were the Terrible Lightness of Crawling, and we had never won this game before depsite many, many attempts. But each of us had a plan, had a build in mind, strategy gleaned from a terse bot/wiki named Henzell or random posts at a place called the Tavern.

The goal was not to directly beat other teams, though occasionally we'd run into a ghost of a player in the past. We didn't even really get to work together, but we did all have one common goal - to defeat the dungeon itself, the random traps and pitfalls it set along the way, find the runes and snag the Orb of Zot.

Like a number of games I'll be discussing, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a roguelike - a procedurally generated dungeon crawler with a high degree of randomness and permanent character death. It's not as plot-focused as Ancient Domains, not as item-focused as Nethack, but it's very slickly made, with automated exploration and extremely well balanced skills. And unlike both of these, it's still in active development, with new species and classes constantly made.

One of the ways the community keeps abreast of these changes - and legitimizes their victories - is having a centralized server (actually two: I play at Akrasiac, the North American server; there's also a European one known as Develz with more features but also more lag for me as an American.) with a copy of the most up-to-date version of the game. People can telnet into this server and play online onto a shared leaderboard, with deceased players taking the form of powerful "player ghosts" found at random. Nethack does this too but I feel more connected to Crawl's. It has its own community and its own feel.

Crawl as a whole is a great game - as I said, balanced very elegantly and autoexplore is one of the best innovations in modern roguelike theory. I love it so much I'm awkwardly making a Let's Play. I suck at roguelikes, to be honest - because I move quickly and carelessly - and so I hope that by recording and explaining my movements I can slow down and be a better player. I'm glad Crawl is my first LP and I wouldn't have it any other way.