Well, technically you're no longer playing nethack. You're playing a new game, comprised of nethack and cp.
-- Doug McIlroy
Nethack is notoriously unfair with the player, and not a really winnable game. The player can be killed at any moment without allowing a single defensive move. If I think that the game was cheating, I act accordingly.
The other option is the exploring mode (X), when you can't be killed, but I find that is boring.
Neutral Wizard blessed PYEC, blessed Orb of Fate, blessed magic marker, +3 blessed greased SDSM, BoH, +3 fireproof speedboots, +3 greased fireproof cloak of magic resistance, write out +ID, ?charging, get your Magicbane or better Greyswandir, etc.
Wizard just has perhaps the easiest endgame, but that part tends to be easy enough with any class for a well-spoiled player. Wizards have a relatively hard early game.
No
> "You choke on your food and die after 20200 moves"
> "It seems that you are having a hard time eating this dragon corpse? stop eating?"
Hum... yes?
"You choke on your food and die after 40678789 moves"
Well, this is simply ridiculous.
In the last 20 years playing nethack, consulting the oracle, reading the wiki, and learning, I reached gehennon... once. This is like the 30% of the game or so. Don't even reached a quest. After a while, solving sokoban and gnome mines by the 800 time is just... meh; Wesnoth is better.
The game would greatly benefit of something like: You lose 70 of your 71 points just descending the stairs into a bones level and become stressed, unable to move and surrounded by enemies. This is your last point, do you want to try something?
Or if you want to be really fun, polymorph into a Xorn or whatever and eat a few amulets of magical breathing to gain it as an intrinsic.
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Amulet_of_magical_breathing
Generally just go through your death list and find what is killing you then look at how to avoid that. Eating random corpses late game is pretty much always a mistake, you should have normal food to rely on in your bag of holding and a blessed tinning kit from the mines for intrinsic granting corpses.
I think that I was even killed by a lichen once
Get your levels up, your stats up, your resists covered and it's mostly just a slog at the end because turns take forever when 30 monsters want a piece of you.
It’s totally winnable! The player almost always has a chance to avoid death. Deaths are usually due to missing knowledge or laziness/impatience. The knowledge is really really hard to gain without wikis, and I absolutely wouldn’t have ascended without wikis, but reading them added another layer of fun for me.
Technically true, but there are always moves you could have done prior to avoid being in that situation. Part of the game is knowing what protections you need to have before advancing deeper into the dungeon.
Um, it's quite winnable. It's much easier to win once you've been thoroughly spoiled (either via investing a large amount of playtime or reading spoilers), but it's quite possible to Ascend (win) through extensive preparation and brute force. The number of truly unavoidable, single-move deaths, particularly in the mid-to-late game is a very tiny part of the whole gamespace (as witnessed by the many, many players who win without anything more than knowledge of the game). And wearing an Amulet of Life Protection will save you from most of those.
Veteran players (at least, back when there was Usenet), would regularly refer to Yet Another Stupid Death (YASD), called such not because it was unavoidable, but because it was avoidable if the player had not made an easily avoidable mistake.
It's totally winnable. It's your job as a player to avoid getting into situations where you don't have 'a single defensive move'.
(It's not the best game ever, nor is it the most fair game ever. True. But almost all games of Nethack are winnable, if you are careful enough and learned enough about the game.)
If ascended a tourist and a healer and an archaeologist and quite a few of the easier classes, too.