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(DCSS = Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup)
Found a suspicious vault locked by crystal doors (can only be opened by the player), read a scroll of revelation to see what's inside.
Holy shit. A storm dragon, a hell knight, a deep elf annihilator?! Even on a fully cleared floor this party will kill you outright.
Mean game.
I never played DCSS. Does it have anything to cause monster infighting, like Nethack does with the ring of conflict? If yes, that would be probably your best bet: let them fight, and kill the survivor.
Either way this looks extremely nasty.
The closest to in-fighting in DCSS is a wand of charming that makes an enemy fight for you for some time. Unfortunately, it's single-targeted and can fail against its target's willpower.
If I would need to open this mess and deal with it, I'd do the following:
Clear the entire floor first, making sure to not disturb anything inside with noise (they won't open the blue doors but that'll still mess up my plan, see below);
Open the blue doors then make a few steps away from the vault (enemies are still not aware of me);
Drink a potion of lignification that will turn me into a tree (we'll need it for a later step);
Probably drink some other potions like resistance (to not be one-shotted by the dragon), invisibility and especially haste;
Shout to attract attention of the enemies;
Read a scroll of immolation - it applies a special status effect to all enemies, making them take additional fire damage when they lose health and explode when they die, heavily damaging anyone who stands close;
Read a scroll of torment halving everyone's health in half (which is considered an attack, so it'll trigger the immolation's fire damage) - it usually applies to the player too but the tree form grants immunity to it;
Read torment again if it wasn't enough;
Read a scroll of teleportation and then walk around the floor, killing off whoever is still alive.
With this plan, my chances to win would probably be higher than the risk of death.
For monster infighting, there's also orbs of mayhem. But yeah, somewhat of a risky option. You can't really control which monsters are affected and they can still decide to attack you, and the affected monsters get buffed. 😅
With all the new orbs I completely forgot about the orb of mayhem to the point that I was shocked to see it in one of my recent games.
the affected monsters get buffed.
Yara's Violent Unraveling reasons B)
To be honest, the main reason I linked to that wiki page is that I had opened it to try to find out whether orbs of mayhem are still in the game. 🙃
Would not have surprised me, if they tweaked the design a bit with 0.34 and then gave them a different name, but at the same time, well, I did just describe that they have upsides and downsides, which is how the devs like to design things...
Amusingly, mayhem is a unique orb brand because all the other brands scale heavily with evocation skill nowadays yet mayhem still has a fixed effect. But it's the one the most likely to backfire so that makes sense.
Yeah, DCSS will do that sort of stuff from time to time. But you were smart, and you avoided it! Good for you.
I've kind of stopped opening crystal doors until I've cleared at least another floor. I'm not sure, if you still get the same total XP when you do that, but just died a few too many times from crystal vaults...
They rarely provide anything really good for characters who can clear them while also forcing you to burn through lots of your consumables. It can be fun though, a nice way to remind yourself that this game has permadeath and you can't just smash two buttons until victory.
No worries, I find plenty opportunities to remind myself of that. Currently playing a troll of Xom, because I'm dumb. And one time, the jackass teleports me into the middle of the fortress in Elf:2. Had to read 3 teleport scrolls, because they kept teleporting me just to different parts of the fortress, since I guess that fortress is quite large.
Apparently, I was too panicked to take a screenshot of that, but here's another fun one from Xom's teleportation shenanigans:
The most brutal part is that he always teleports you a variable number of times and you never know for sure, whether he'll stop there, so I also have a version of that screenshot with --more-- at the bottom, where I still had hopes that he'd port me back out of there. He did not. 🫠
Xom is always such a hellish ride lol! I didn't play them since 0.32, need to check them out again with the new bazaars.