
====== Defence ======

Healing:
     If your hitpoints drop below zero, you die.  Always have something to
quickly restore them.

Escaping:
     A trapped adventurer is a dead adventurer.  Always have a way to get out of
trouble.

Detecting:
     The best defence is being prepared.  Don't get ambushed.  Detect often.

Defending against pure damage:
     Your armour class (AC) reduces the chance that melee attacks will hit you.
It reduces the pure damage inflicted by ordinary melee attacks (those without
any special effects), and protects against certain kinds of traps, but offers no
defence against magic or ranged attacks.
      Each piece of armour has a base AC value and possibly also a magical
bonus.  Add the two together, and you have the total protective value of the
item.  For example, a Chain Mail (-3) [14, +6] increases your AC by 20.  Note
the "(-3)".  It is a (small) penalty to fighting; heavy armour restricts your
movement slightly.

Cuts, poison, and stunning:
     Many monsters can inflict special kinds of physical damage on you, such as
opening wounds, poisoning, or stunning.  After you start earning a little money,
plow some of it back into potions of cure wounds, and keep them handy at all
times.  If a monster manages to heavily stun you, get away fast!

Character-hindrance:
     There are many monsters capable of casting spells to blind, confuse, slow,
and paralyze you, plus quite a few other nasty tricks not mentioned here.  Free
Action (paralyzation immunity) eventually becomes critical to your survival, and
you should keep stuff that fixes blindness and confusion on hand.  Your Saving
Throw protects against these and other attacks.

Elemental and magical attacks:
     Acid, Electricity, Fire, and Cold are the basic elements, and many monsters
use them.  Because the maximum damage they can do to you is very high, becoming
resistant is important.  Unlike with other attack types, you can resist, double
resist, and be immune to the elements.  Double resistance is the combination of
a permanent resistance (from equipment) and a temporary one (from a spell).
Temporary resistances are also known as oppositions.  Immunity to any of the
elements is hard to get.
     Poison is deadly, and not so easy to gain resistance to.  You can double-
resist (resist and oppose) poison.
     There are many kinds of magical attacks; most can be resisted, some can
not.  The resistable ones capable of doing the most damage are darkness, chaos,
and nether.

     For more detail, see the section on object attributes.

Reductions of Experience and Stats:
     Even when your character is starting out, there are rare traps and monsters
capable of lowering his stats and draining his experience.  Slowly, these
dangers increase until it becomes very important that you find objects that
provide hold life and sustain at least your critical stats.

Theft:
     Nobody is more annoying than a thief.  You've just found that cool
spellbook or nifty weapon, and now it's gone.  You can gain a significant degree
of protection from theft by increasing your armour class and your dexterity, and
can always collect your stuff from the thief's corpse.  Unfortunately, thieves
are smart enough to stash away the money they take from you.

