I have complained about perverse randomization frequently this year, and I am sure it will come up as I continue to play a few rounds of Elements per day, but I just heard a winner from NetHack, the archetypal roguelike. Random roll: a monster started with line of sight to the character’s starting point. Random roll: the monster had a wand. Random roll: it was a wand of death. I presume that your odds of dying before your first action (in a perma-death game) are very low.
: Zubon
Although at least it’s provable that many of the other deaths that appear to be random in Nethack could have been avoided by better play. (Empirically, by Marvin, who ascends something like 80% of his games under tournament conditions …)
There are Nethack tournaments? Sounds… odd, yet interesting. To the Google machine!
I’ve starved to death in a 1×1 starting room because my search skill was to low to find the secret door out.
Okay, as a Nethack player (five ascensions to my name), I take issue with that statement. The starting room is never as small as 1×1. Even if it were, repeatedly searching in the same place will eventually uncover any secret doors. A level 1 character can usually find a secret door within 20 turns or so and it takes about 1500 turns to go from full to death of starvation. “Being locked in a tiny room soon after starting the game and unable to find a door out” sounds more like you stumbled into a vault to me.
Also, I think but am not sure that you can just kick the walls to find secret doors. Don’t know if the chance of success on that is any better than that of searching, though. Not about to look it up ;).