Thought I'd share a hilarious moment with you guys.

So, I've been lurking around for a bit now, seeing how everyone else enjoys IVAN. I myself have had it for a while, but never ran into such an amusing, yet helpful coincidence. So, here my person is, Meteoric Steel Katana, Bronze Venom Dagger, no body armor, a cloak of electricity resistance, and a troll hide belt +1, sitting at Genetrix. I myself am wondering how the hell I'll be able to pull it off. So, knowing Silva has screwed me over in the past, I decided to ATTEMPT to pray to her. Lo and behold, she triggers an earthquake, I slowly make my way back to Genetrix, annnd... part of the ceiling caved in on her, leaving the stairs completely open. @@ I myself was laughing for the whole journey to Attnam. Just thought I'd share this odd, enjoyable experience with you guys due to the 'most horrible deaths' and 'best beginning items' and such.

To pick a nit: That was LIVAN, not IVAN (0.50 IVAN has no katanas and venom daggers are a CVS thing IIRC which LIVAN was stacked on top of, sorry).

To share the joy:

That's what's cool in IVAN (and LIVAN): the merry process of learning, and the bit when after learning stuff from a 1000 bad moves that ended up in a violent death You actually make the one that's good and take a lesson from this one, too!

Way to go, now tell us how long did it take to die, Hikalian ;P

Well, considering I've made it to GC quite a few times, this time I was loaded with wands like nobody's business, so.. I tried tackling the vault. Killed all the dwarves, most of the guards, then Denim got me. So... amazing playthrough quickly went downhill. .-.

Yeah the Vault is a tricky one. I often just take the armor and then teleport myself out of there, since the armor gives you teleport control it's not a problem. Except if you can't kill the dwarves when coming up the stairs again.

Eh.. I'll need to get more leg strength before I try taking the Vault then, last time I tried taking junk and running I ended up getting overloaded and.. just kind of laying there helpless while they chopped me to pieces.

You could've just dropped some stuff and came back for it later Unless they hacked one of your legs off or something.

Overload is easy to cure; just don't try to move and drop things until you're only stressed. I can't recall if stuff is allowed to happen inbetween drop sessions, but nothing will happen to you while you're dropping things, even if you drop a lot of stuff!

Eh, the minute I picked something up and ended up with OL, they whacked my head despite the +5 PP Helmet I had, so.. unconscious, chopped to bits. I'm going to try it again this run, considering my pile of wands.

Well, ideally you want to avoid being stressed or burdened, simply because being burdened/stressed impairs your fighting skills by 25/50%, and it also hurts your Agi/Dex, which are also both important for survival (the better your Agi, the faster you move, for example). Failing this, you simply *must* understand that if you see a monster you're not sure you can kill easily, you need to unload your stuff *before* you get into melee range and fight it, because the alternative is to take hits where you might otherwise parry and die and be sad. You can always pick the load up after the fight is over; if you wait until you're in dire straits to put things down, you'll be too dead to pick it up again!