ABSTRACT
The most impressive thing about devnull’s NetHack tournament is its longevity. Despite the great obstacles to making roguelikes work as multiplayer games they have long had a substantial online presence, and a big part of this is the relative ease in setting up terminal-based, ASCII games for playing over the internet via telnet, SSH or some other form of remote console. There’s an array of several Stars, from plastic to dilithium, that are awarded for making game progress. Most of the really good players know that to do well at NetHack requires knowing as much about the game as they can and so pre-disable them in their tournament config file. Everything that clips even a single hit point is potentially a source of mortality, and NetHack has so many sources of piddling low damage that the great majority of those death types, in practice, only occur to players who are shooting for them.
