One of my favorite games is ADOM (
free to play on Steam, has a great
wiki). It's a grand scale classical roguelike, which means a couple things. It's a turn-based game, has Dungeons & Dragons gameplay elements, and has randomized loot. A successful run takes about 20 hours for non-experts, death is permanent, and the game is very punishing, filled with tricks and tracks that are not "fair" by modern design philosophy. If you can be several hours into a run, never mind the dozens or hundreds of hours lost to past failed runs, and permanently die out of nowhere to making a simple mistake, that's an environment
primed for "oops!" moments, which the community calls YASD: Yet Another Stupid Death.
To immerse you in ADOM spirit, consider the Gorgon. Once you reach a high enough level, it can spawn randomly in dungeons. Besides its generic melee attack, it has a petrifying gas attack that fills a few squares. If you're in range, and you fail a RNG check to avoid it, you are petrified and die
instantly unless you were
actively wearing a specific rare item (not just "holding it in your backpack".) You can be 10 hours into a run, not paying attention to the enemies you're quickly grinding on in the dungeon, and "Oh, I didn't see that was a Gorgon, it already killed me, and I wasn't wearing an Amulet of Petrification Resistance. Oops! YASD." This happened to me. It was funny, but it wasn't the astronomical tale of failure I will weave for you tonight.
ADOM's claim to fame is how
involved it is. It isn't just many hours long, it's hundreds of unique enemies and items, diverse environments and characters, branching story paths, and oozing secrets upon secrets. I have already had to simplify a couple things thus far, and I will keep doing that when needed to keep us moving. Among its most involved elements is its magic system. There's so much that goes into using magic. There's different attack types with different ranges, elemental advantages and resistances, status and terrain effects, magical items, and character types with subtle magical strengths and weaknesses. Like in many D&D-inspired games, "Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards" comes into full display. Wizards are very squishy and limited at the beginning, but once you survive the daunting early-game and get a good run going with them, they are terrifying. There's all kinds of obscene spells, ranging from the standard Invisibility, to stunning your opponent and gumming them up in spider webs, to just immediately killing them on contact, or even the fabled Wish.
One obstacle to using magic is even learning it in the first place. First, you have to find a spellbook of the appropriate spell, which usually means a random drop, and Wish is not as likely to drop out of the sky as Fireball. But then you have to actually
read the spellbook. Reading spellbooks takes a long time, so it would be bad if somebody stabbed you, because then you'd have to start from the beginning. Starving to death in the process would also be bad. Also, you must know how to read–which is not guaranteed–and having the magical acumen to actually understand what you're reading. If you're not up to snuff, you might fail to learn the spell, and if you're really off, you might lose stats or something. Then, if you fail to learn a spell enough times, the spellbook just disappears for good.
Even though learning magic is hard, it's so powerful that it's often worth a try. Many character types, called "semi-casters", aren't super well-suited to magic, but they get by on good melee weapons and managing to cram in a couple helpful, easier spells. And now we can explain my tale.
I was such a semi-caster, and I luckily managed to snag a couple spellbooks in the early part of the game. I then made it to the first "checkpoint" of the game, the Dwarftown level. It's a town and there are dwarves in it, living in houses and buildings across the town, often running some shop or providing some service. If you're nifty, or have read a spoiler like I did, you can even teleport into a secret room and get some rare items. I say "checkpoint" because, again, death is permanent, there is no real checkpoint, but Dwarftown has no hostile monsters by default. It's peaceful, has the first general items store, and has lots of other functionalities–it even has a special large map to fit all these helpful NPCs–so it's a milestone to reach and you'll keep coming back there.
Because Dwarftown is this peaceful checkpoint, it's a great place to learn magic, especially for characters who... need a little extra help to do it. I got reading, and I clearly needed the help–I was not learning the spell. I kept at it for multiple tries, though, because magic is that good. Then, I realized something.
First, I had moved somewhere else. If you really fail to read a spellbook, a rare possible punishment is you get teleported to a random area in the level. I had forgotten, but it's not a big deal, since you can just walk back to where you were.
Second, I was in the secret room. By pure dumb luck, I randomly teleported myself in there. Out of hundreds of possible squares in the whole map, I hit one of three matching squares–one of the four squares is occupied by the NPC who gives you the rare items, so it doesn't even count. I collected my items, but you may have a question. How do I get out now?
The Teleport spell is very difficult, so I certainly haven't learned it. There are items that let you teleport, but I was way too early in the game to have them. All I could do was keep reading my spellbooks and hope I got the random teleportation punishment again. I read them until they ran out of uses and disappeared, and that was it. No teleport. I checked all my items for something that could save me, but I knew it was over. I manually wasted time in the room until the hunger system put me out of my misery. I was so bad at magic that, after settling down in the safest place in the game, I zapped myself into a coffin and starved to death.
