A few nights ago, I made a change in my life. No longer being content with being immediately and thoroughly emasculated by NetHack, I decided to spread my wings and see what other sights the roguelike world had to offer. My first stop brought me to ADOM.

That was Tuesday. I'm not sure when Saturday showed up, but I assume it was around death #127.

The biggest problem that I have is that while I'm utterly in love with how thorough it is in character generation, it's a massive pain in the ass to go through the rolling procedure every time my level 1 ass gets splattered across the first floor of the Puppy Cave by an exploding door. Or when the zombie swarm ate me. That one was pretty bitchin'.

I finally turned to darker, more sinister methods of self preservation. Some call it "save scumming." I call it saving three minutes with a batch file. I rolled a new character and immediately quit the game. I copied the save file and renamed it with a different file extension so that ADOM didn't recognize it and I couldn't accidentally load it up, die and screw myself over. A short batch file was written up with nothing more than copy "Wren.adombackup" "Wren.svg" as it's contents. Now, every time I die, I just hit the shortcut to the batch file, reload and I'm on my merry way.

Is it wrong? I don't think so. I liked the character after generating it. The save is at the very beginning, so it's not like I'm trying to desperately pull a doomed character out of the fire when I've been working at it for a week solid.

You can have my pass to the Hardcore Gamer Lounge. I'll take my three minutes, thanks.