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.

For now, bots are banned as well. If they're unbanned at some point in the future, they will still be disallowed from impersonating a human (playing on an account registered to a human) or cybernetically enhancing a human clan (playing in a clan that contains humans).

However, 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, go here.

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

At November 10th at midnight 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.

Scoring

The primary way to score points is by ascending. Ascensions start out at 50 points each, but repeated ascensions of the same role scale down in points according to Z-score rules.

Z-score rules make the second ascension worth 1/2 as much, the third 1/3 as much, the fourth 1/4 as much, and so on. Fractional points will be rounded down. Ascending a role for the second time will earn 25 points instead of 50. The third will earn 16. The fourth 12. However, ascending a different role will earn the full 50 points. (There aren't any fractional points anywhere else in the tournament either. All the bonus point calculations described below round down in the same manner.)

New in 2020: Z-score was previously applied based on role/race combinations, and is now based only on role, just like how the NetHack Scoreboard calculates Z-score.

Clan Scoring

Clans' games also use Z-scoring on roles for repeated ascensions, but bonus conduct, speedrun, or streak points earned on ascensions are not affected by this and merely add into the total clan score. For example, if player A in a clan ascends a valkyrie with no frills and player B ascends another valkyrie and gets 10 bonus points for it being part of a streak, the clan earns 85 points (50 and 25 for the two valkyrie ascensions, 10 for the streak bonus). It doesn't matter which player ascended first.

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

Trophies

Various accomplishments across one or multiple games earn you trophies, which come with an associated boatload of points. 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.

The Great and Lesser Race/Role

The Great Race/Role are a set of multi-ascension trophies, and gives extra credit 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:

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.

The Great Race/Role is worth fifty additional points for each character combination it requires (as shown in the table above), and The Lesser Race/Role is worth five additional points for each character combination it requires. 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. As such, they are scored independently of each other.

New in 2020:Ascending without Killing (insert monster here)

These trophies are fairly straightforward for the most part, but one bit of clarification is needed: 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.

Ascending with Conducts

Conducts consist of point multipliers which are applied to a base score of 50 points (earning less than 50 points due to Z-scoring won't affect your conduct bonus points). Ascending with more than one conduct is harder, so it multiplies the multipliers together for a bigger bonus.

The exact formula for conduct bonus points is 50 × ((multiplier1 × multiplier2 × ...) − 1)

* Never remove an item from a swap chest. Inserting items does not break the conduct.

For conducts that necessarily imply other conducts, such as Vegan and Vegetarian, the multiplier for the less stringent conducts are not counted. For example, a foodless ascension only earns the 1.5× for foodless, and the multipliers for vegan and vegetarian are not factored in.

Turncount Speedrunning

Games that are won in under 20,000 turns score additional bonus points equal to 500,000 divided by the turncount of the game. For instance, a game that finishes in 5,000 turns will score 100 bonus points, whereas a game that barely finishes in 20,000 turns scores 25 points. No points are awarded for games longer than 20,000 turns.

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.

For those familiar with DCSS tournaments, these rules are the same as theirs.

Games that are part of a streak get a multiplier for score that increases with the length of the streak. The multiplier is retroactively awarded: ascending the third game in a row and extending a 2-streak into a 3-streak will apply the higher multiplier equally to all three games. The streak multiplier also multiplies bonus points for speedrunning and conducts.

Streak multipliers are:

The exact formula for the amount of streaking bonus points added to an ascension is (50 + conduct bonus points + speedrun bonus points) × (streak multiplier − 1)

Achievements

Achievements are worth 1 point each, across all games (if you get the same achievement in two or more games, you still only get 1 point for that achievement counting towards your individual score.) If you get all possible achievements and the All Achievements trophy, each achievement counts for 2 points instead.

Achievement-related points are counted towards your individual and clan score directly, and are not multiplied by any streak you may have.

Below is a listing of every achievement a player can earn in-game, and a description of that achievement and what needs to be done to earn it.