Early game strategies can vary and some can be quite fun (healer/pacifist run) but in my experience the "sameness" sets in once your strategy becomes "step 1: get wand of wishing".
Of course you don't HAVE to use that wand. But it's there.
I think knowing what the ascension kit contains doesn't necessarily break the fun or the challenge of the game. It just makes it possible to win (whereas, while flying blind, you probably won't win the game given a normal human life span and a normal working adult's amount of available free time and willingness to keep playing and experiencing YASD after YASD).
I've seen folks suggesting NetHack is not a good game, because it requires so much spoiling in order to be winnable. But, I kinda enjoy reading the lore. It's part of the game for me; just because it happens on the internet rather than in the game terminal doesn't make it less fun.
In fact, there is one such person commenting here! To them, learning what can happen in the game is cheating: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11523094
This makes all the sense, to me, of excoriating people who want to know the rules of chess before starting to play as "cheaters".
Chess is played with another person. Not that it is possible but reading spoilers and looking at source code is sort of like cracking open the persons brain to figure out what sort of general strategies and tactics they will use on you... it is not equivalent to learning the rules chess.
No it isn't. That would be running the game in a debugger so you know what will happen. Learning the rules of nethack just tells you what can happen; this is absolutely the norm for everything else you do.
>I think knowing what the ascension kit contains doesn't necessarily break the fun or the challenge of the game. It just makes it possible to win (whereas, while flying blind, you probably won't win the game given a normal human life span and a normal working adult's amount of available free time and willingness to keep playing and experiencing YASD after YASD).
I didn't know what "YASD" meant so had to search it. Neat! I learned something new.
And on that same note, there is an entire game based entirely around YASD/YAAD! "I Wanna Be The Guy" a game about dying in a million different unpredictable and stupid ways combined with many ways to kill yourself through user error or forgetfulness.
I'm not sure if the completion of IWBTG is at all comparable with NetHack as I'm not too familiar with NetHack.
Here's the Boshi speedrun, it's entertaining even if I would never want to play myself.