Stumbled upon a monster zoo with my mushroom/fire wizzad. Me, my summons, my tasty fungal buffs, and my burnination, versus about one hundred and fifteen monsters. Distract with summons, avoiding enemies with mushroom-induced invisibility, setting things on fire, and one tentacle nuke arrow. One hundred and thirteen dead badguys. I think I leveled twice.
Also, my other character, a rogue on rogue difficulty (hard mode). Started unarmed except for a (terrible) crossbow, ten terrible bolts, and ten okay poison-ampoule-bolts. The starting room had one exit, and a crit-stat-boosting artifact ring. Kinda neat.
The next room had an out-of-depth monster, that does TONS of damage. Focus fire, and it dies - but the room was also full of regular monsters, and I'm kinda running out of ammo. At the end of it, I have -no- ammo, OR weapon, and I was beat down to low health and out of healing. Waiting to regenerate HP spawns monsters! And I get 1 HP back every 14 turns, so it's slow at best.
End up finding this big hub room through the next door... where I find yet more monsters! I spend some time trying to avoid them and grab some loot... and then I see it - over in the middle of the room, an iron breastplate! Those have 3 armor - which can soak hits I take down to 0, if the damage is applicable. Mine. With VERY careful use of teleporters and traps, I manage to get enough XP to level up - and take Knightly Leap, an awesome ability that lets me teleport two tiles, and then one to the side, with only the price of a six turn cooldown.
Eventually, meet several more out-of-depths, make them stomp on traps and die, find tons of awesome stuff. Eventually find an AMAZING crossbow. It does like 10 damage, all total, whereas the one I started with/had before only did 1.
In short, I cleared out the whole first floor on Rogue, with a dude that had/still has almost no offensive capability or other special features beyond opening doors and jumping like a chess piece himself. All my previous characters pretty much died within like five rooms on Rogue. Felt good man.
[spoiler]Dungeons of Dredmor[/url]