YMMV / NetHack

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Vlad the Impaler has his own mini-dungeon, but he's only slightly more powerful than his own vampire mooks, and since you encounter him near the end of the game he's usually a total pushover. He's so anti-climatic that it's become a Running Gag to Cherry Tap him to death with -3 thoroughly corroded orcish daggers, thrown scrolls, and other such things, and name the object in question "Vladbane."
    • Vlad has been buffed in 3.6x however.
  • Medusa, despite getting her own special level, makes Vlad look like Demogorgon by comparison. Any kind of reflection will instantly kill her. If you have an amulet of reflection, she'll petrify herself when you walk into her room. If you don't have an amulet of reflection, a hand mirror will work just as well, provided you have a blindfold or towel. Alternately, smashing her in the face with a cream pie or flashing a camera at her will blind her.
  • The Wizard of Yendor, unlike the demonic bosses of Gehennom, is not immune to death rays. During the final stage of the game, he will likely revive himself in front of you several times, shouting "So thou thought thou couldst kill me, fool," only to be immediately snuffed yet again by your Wand of Death. He occasionally curses your items or summons monsters while deceased, but the Wizard himself isn't much of a threat.

• Broken Base: Two of the major arguments in fandom have been:
  • Should the game be played using the graphical tile-sets or the original ASCII format?
  • Is it a legitimate tactic to exploit programming quirks which allow such things as "pudding farming" (see below)?
• Demonic Spiders: There's at least two or three at any point:
  • On early levels, you have to deal with Floating Eyes which paralyze you, Gas Spores which do obscene damage by exploding when they die, and killer bees which are fast, appear in groups, and have a poisonous sting that can kill instantly if you're not resistant.
    • Floating Eyes can be avoided, killer bees can be Elberethed, but may The Lady help you when your pet decides to start attacking that gas spore that's adjacent to you.....
  • On early-middling levels, you have to deal with Soldier Ants — the most common enemy-based cause of death in the game (accounting for 1.75% of all deaths on nethack.alt.org. Go team ant!), as well as mumaks, massive war elephants with a ridiculously powerful headbutt attack.
  • On the middling levels, you have the infamous Cockatrices and many enemies who will swallow you and kill you, including Lurkers and Purple Worms (which can also be encountered on the earlier levels).
  • Then you must contend with Demon Lords and Princes, and should you actually survive them and get the Amulet of Yendor, you must face an infinite amount of more and more powerful Wizards of Yendor, and the consistently respawning Riders of the Apocalypse: Death, Pestilence, and Famine. You're War.
• Fandom Rivalry: Various other games over the years have had the distinction of being "the other pretty popular traditional roguelike". Nowadays the honor probably goes to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Which is of similar age, still in active development, and has a diametrically opposed design philosophy to NetHack's. But candidates in the past have included everything from Angband to even briefly Red Rogue during its brief time in the sun.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Vladsbane, for whatever underpowered/corroded joke weapon some players use to kill Vlad.
  • Rodney for the Wizard of Yendor.
  • "Rubber chicken", for a cockatrice corpse wielded for its instakill Taken for Granite properties.
• Fanon: Many fans joke about visiting the "demigod bar" after a successful ascension, and will occasionally make a point of gathering an ice box full of potions of booze to be used there. Despite what you might think, such a place doesn't actually appear in any canon NetHack material, not even by mention.
• Game-Breaker: A very controversial thing to do in Nethack is "Pudding Farming", causing an enemy that splits into two whenever you attack it to split multiple times to abuse the game's prayer and sacrifice systems. A similar thing is to repeatedly kill a boss that is on the last level of the game. This boss reincarnates an infinite number of times, but gives a full score each time, meaning with the proper setup, hitting the max score is trivial (but that's OK, since in Nethack, it's generally considered a sign of skill to ascend with a lower score rather than a higher one).
  • The devteam implemented an immediate and savage punishment for pudding farmers. It's called Pudding Farming.
    • Also, nearly anything you'd accomplish with Pudding Farming won't help you on the astral plane.
    • As of 3.6.0, puddings (and green slimes) leave behind "globs" rather than corpses, which cannot be sacrificed, making pudding farming basically worthless.
  • A programming oversight with the purple worm allows you to take one as a pet, let it eat wraith corpses, and break its level cap. If you can do so, either by letting it loose in a graveyard or repeatedly reverse-genociding wraiths, you can send its level through the roof. Hit it with a wand of speed monster, keep it away from cockatrices, and it will One-Hit Kill anything that gets close. You'll have to do some work to get it through a few of the special levels, though.
• Gateway Series: The game is a common entry point into the world of roguelikes.
• Genius Bonus: Many things in Nethack, including some of its Shout Outs, are very subtle. For example, there is an enemy named the "quantum mechanic" which sometimes carries a box. Inside the box is a cat named Schrodinger's cat, which has a 50/50 chance of being either alive or dead. If you examine the game's source code, you will learn that the state of the cat is not determined until you open the box. Some fantasy items benefit you if you know the myths without even having read a spoiler: Unicorn horns heal, clay Golems can be destroyed by erasing their writing, amethysts (which literally means "not drunk") convert booze to water.
  • Since the game has strong Unix origins, there's also plenty of jokes only a Unix/Linux geek would understand.
• Goddamned Bats: From 3.6.0 onwards, almost every vampire bat you come across is actually a polymorphed vampire or vampire lord, which essentially means you're up against a fast-moving mook with two health bars and an annoying level drain ability. This change also seems to have introduced the unintended side effect of making vampires appear much more frequently than before.
• Good Bad Bugs: If you let a tame purple worm eat wraith corpses, it will break its level cap. Exploiting this can send a purple worm's level skyrocketing.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Go team ant!^Explanation Ants, represented by a lowercase "a", collectively have one of the highest player kill counts of all monster classes. It's a running joke on the nethack.alt.org chatroom to cheer them on whenever chatbot Rodney reports an NAO player killed by one of them.
  • Vladsbane^Explanation Vlad the Impaler is absurdly underpowered for his place in the game, but facing him is mandatory because he carries a vital Plot Coupon. To style on him, players will kill him with the weakest and most useless Improvised Weapon they can scrounge up — food rations, thoroughly rusty tin openers, worthless pieces of glass — and name it "Vladsbane".
  • Stocking up for the demigod bar^Explanation Since winning the game ascends your player character to demigodhood, players like to joke that after finally managing that herculean task they'll likely want to kick up their feet at a divine pub, and prepare for the trip pre-ascension by filling an ice box with potions of booze, snacks, and perhaps a greased figurine of their preferred gender of amorous demon.
• Moment of Awesome: Reaching the end of the game and ascending, especially for the first time.
  "Congratulations, mortal! In return to thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!"
• Nightmare Fuel: For a game that uses ASCII graphics, this game has its fair share.
  • Abandoned temples. Upon entry, there's a random chance you'll be paralyzed by a massive ghost.
  • Beehives can make those who are fatally allergic to bee stings extremely uneasy.
  • Green slimes that cause your body to decay and transform into a green slime. The process is described in Brain Bleach-inducing detail as you slowly turn into slime.
• Older Than They Think: Graphical tiles had already appeared in later personal computer ports of the game's predecessor, Rogue.
• Scrub: Don't get caught using any movement key configuration other than HJKLYUBN. Or maybe numpad. Don't admit to using the tile graphics, either.
  • Beyond this, players' personal rulebooks get complicated. Abusing borderline glitches is seen as legal by some (and denigrated by others), and while avoiding trial-and-error by liberal use of the spoileriffic wiki used to be seen as bad form, it's now more or less accepted in the age of the Internet.
• Sequel Displacement: The game's predecessor, the now-lost Hack, is comparatively obscure.
• That One Boss: Master Kaen (the Monk quest nemesis) and Demogorgon both qualify, as (due to his propensity for coming back with more hit points and a higher caster level than before) does the Wizard of Yendor.
• That One Level: The "vanilla" version of Gehennom is often disparaged not because it is hard, but because it consists of numerous levels of tedious, twisting mazes. Variants such as Slash'EM, SporkHack and UnNetHack all attempt to mitigate this by making Gehennom shorter/more varied/more deadly.