Bluh, why does Maeve abandon my elf for killing a fleeing myconoid? She's chaotic neutral/evil! And they can't even accept terms. The same action did knock me down from NG to true neutral, but I don't know why she'd mind.
I found out why my orcs weren't finding practically any items or gold, though, I had dumped luck
Tanglefoot bags are just absurd, though. "Don't ever use heavy armor" bags. The wiki does warn that nimble fighters are more effective than heavy ones, but dang. I've lost a few priests that way now. I've looked up the counters now, but most require being specific classes or races. Even when I did make the DC15 escape artist check, I usually failed the DC15 reflex save and just got stuck again!
It's just a huge change from 3.5e, where the main counter is a *strength check*, dexterity is penalized, and there's a -2 on attacks. Here there's no strength check, you need to make a high reflex save every round just to act... that doesn't sound appropriate to me. Reflex saves are for quick reactions, such as avoiding being glued to the floor in the first place. Sure, heavy armor should make it hard to avoid that. Once you're already covered in the stuff, though, it's a matter of breaking free through force (strength) or rogueish hijinks (escape artist). And that's just supposed to be freeing yourself from the floor!
It's like tanglefoot bags here cover a warrior from head to toe in, not glue, but a mass of adamantine strands which must be quickly unraveled before one's arms are free. And the strands rapidly rise from the floor to re-bind your arms every time you move. It's... kinda dumb.
Eh, but I'm just frustrated at the game's difficulty right now. It seems like everyone has an AC of 19+, and they can all hear my rogue with max points in move silently and a +2 to attack. To be fair, I should have taken Weapon Finesse instead of Acrobatic, but I thought a stealthy rogue wouldn't have to max hitroll just to hit unaware targets. Okay okay, the bonuses for sneak attacking are pretty nice, it's really just armored foes which are the problem then. And armored foes are vulnerable to these tanglefoot bags, or my armor-penetrating hand crossbow (little damage, but as a drow I started with a bunch of poisoned bolts and poisons), or this stiletto I guess.
And as a stabby rogue I should simply be avoiding zombies and skeletons, I know
I should find wands or scrolls to deal with them. (Screw lizardmen, too, and their natural armor!)
It wouldn't be a roguelike if level 1 characters didn't die to embarrassingly low-level enemies! On the whole, I did get frustrated a lot over the past few days... because I keep playing, because it's fresh and kinda exciting. I think I'm getting better. (switching to no-deaths mode until the frustation wanes, though. If my sneaky drow gets ambushed and OHKO'd again, I'd just be savescumming anyway)
Edit: I've kinda been building that post over several utterly different characters. I have not been playing a drow rogue/priest of Maeve in heavy armor.
Yet.Edit2: And my tanglefoot troubles would have been solved by a few potions of dimension door, IE if my orc priests had more than 6 luck...