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The November Nethack Tournament

General Rules

Use your common sense: don't hack into the game servers, don't deliberately corrupt or leak memory or otherwise try to crash or hang up the game, don't abuse the RNG, and don't be a jerk.

Bots are prohibited as well. TNNT is a tournament for human players, not a competition for the best or luckiest bot. Players found to be running a bot may be summarily banned from the tournament. (Our working definition of a bot is any system that automatically evaluates game state. Thus, pasting macros is fine, but running a startscum script that quits the game if your inventory, stats, or surroundings do not meet certain criteria is not.)

Apart from bots, anything within the normal execution of the game is fair game. This includes farming, scumming, abusing program bugs, reading other characters' dumplogs, viewing ttyrecs of your own or others' games, using interface enhancers like InterHack, and hanging out on IRC to see if the gray stone you picked up in Mines' End gets livelogged as the luckstone.

Digging for victory is fine, of course, but please make sure to set !bones in your rc file so that you don't leave useless bones and throw away other players' interesting bones on your way down.

Clans

To create clans, invite players to your clan, and accept invitations to others' clans, please log in.

Clan size is capped at 12, and a clan is not allowed to have more than 12 pending invitations. The tournament is designed so that adding new clan members, however inexperienced, cannot hurt the clan overall.

On November 10th at 00:00 UTC, clan membership will become frozen; people can still leave or be kicked out of clans, but cannot create new clans or join new clans.

Trophies

Various accomplishments across one or multiple games earn you trophies. To see how to earn these, go to the Trophies page and hover over them; they will show up as a tooltip. Some trophies need a bit more explanation and are covered below.

Many of the trophies which can be earned individually can also be earned collectively by a clan. If an individual earns one of these trophies on their own, their clan will also get the trophy.

The Great and Lesser Race/Role

The Great Race/Role are a set of multi-ascension trophies for playing all of the interesting character combinations for a given race or role. Gender does not matter. Alignment does not matter for The Great Race, but it does for The Great Role. Only starting alignment is counted - tricks with changing your alignment in-game won't work.

The Great Human is a special case, and requires you to play only those roles which must be human, as shown in the table below. The required Monk can be of any alignment.

Similarly, there is no such thing as the Great Knight, Samurai, or Tourist, because only a single race and alignment combination can be played with these roles.

These may be achieved by individual players or by clans working together.

Below is a table of requirements for each race or role:

Trophy Number of Ascensions Requirements
The Great Orc 4 Bar, Ran, Rog, Wiz
The Great Gnome 5 Arc, Cav, Hea, Ran, Wiz
The Great Dwarf 3 Arc, Cav, Val
The Great Elf 3 Pri, Ran, Wiz
The Great Human 4 Kni, Mon, Sam, Tou
The Great Archeologist 4 Hum-L, Hum-N, Dwa-L, Gno-N
The Great Barbarian 3 Hum-N, Hum-C, Orc-C
The Great Caveperson 4 Hum-L, Hum-N, Dwa-L, Gno-N
The Great Healer 2 Hum-N, Gno-N
The Great Monk 3 Hum-L, Hum-N, Hum-C
The Great Priest 4 Hum-L, Hum-N, Hum-C, Elf-C
The Great Ranger 5 Hum-N, Hum-C, Elf-C, Gno-N, Orc-C
The Great Rogue 2 Hum-C, Orc-C
The Great Valkyrie 3 Hum-L, Hum-N, Dwa-L
The Great Wizard 5 Hum-N, Hum-C, Elf-C, Gno-N, Orc-C

The Lesser Race/Role works identically to the Great, but instead of ascending, you must instead complete a game with each required character combination where you successfully retrieve the luckstone from the bottom of the Mines AND retrieve the prize from the end of Sokoban.

Like other trophies, these can also be earned collectively by a clan.

Achieving a Great Race or Role does not necessarily imply that you also deserve the same Lesser Race or Role, since it is possible to ascend without completing Sokoban and/or retrieving the Mines' End luckstone.

Ascending without Killing (insert monster here)

These trophies are fairly straightforward for the most part, but one bit of clarification: in order to achieve the trophy, you can't let the specified monster die by any means, like how it works in Junethack. Merely abstaining from killing them personally while your pets or conflicted monsters finish them off will not earn the trophy.

Streaking

A streak is a series of consecutive winning games by the same player. Because you can have multiple in-progress games on multiple servers, the rule is that the first game started after a win is the candidate for continuing a streak. Winning or losing non-candidate games will not affect the streak whatsoever. If you start a new game that is eligible to continue two or more streaks, it will continue the streak with the earliest overall start time.

For those familiar with DCSS tournaments, these rules are the same as theirs (except that you can play the same race/role as much as you like and it will still count towards the streak).

Achievements

Achievements are small in-game accomplishments you can collect for yourself and your clan, which vary in difficulty from pretty easy to very challenging. You can use the #achievements command during a game to view which ones are and aren't completed. The #tnntstats command is also useful for viewing progress towards certain achievements.

To see a list of all achievements and what is required to earn them, navigate to your player or clan page, or view all achievements by the number of people who achieved them.

Other Errata

A "post-Amulet splat" is defined as any game in which the hero possessed the Amulet of Yendor, but which did not end in an ascension. Thus, dying is not necessary for it to count as a splat.

A "successful swap chest donation" is an instance of some other player removing an item you put into the swap chest.