Appreciating Caves of Qud as a gymnasium for Stoic thinking.

Things mentioned in this episode:

Caves of Qud
Jotun, Who Parts Limbs
Rogue
NetHack
Angband
A snapshot of my Stoic studies as they stood when my character “Kiyuwumar” met their end
An example of the Mastodon posts I made during that run

Full transcript:

I know that my best run at Caves of Qud, and indeed any traditional roguelike, happened between the first and fifth of March in 2023. I know this because of the dates attached to the Steam achievements I earned during that run, which today read to me as an inventory of keepsakes found on the body of Kiyuwumar, the Star-Eyed Esper, when their body was recovered from the ruins of Bethesda Susa. Among them, the one that breaks my heart is an achievement earned for befriending the science-genius NPC known as Q-Girl. It depicts her in portrait—a sort of anthropomorphic bear with a punk hairstyle and goggles. My character died so suddenly that I know they weren’t found with Q-Girl’s photograph clutched to their breast. But I think it’s not impossible that, in the split-second of awareness that their end had come, her face was the last thing they thought of.

This heartbreak represents my high-water mark in the roguelike dungeon-crawler genre, and it is likely I’ll never surpass it. I couldn’t bear to even try Caves of Qud again for the rest of that year. When I timidly started to play around with the game again ahead of its long-awaited official one-point-oh release, it didn’t dispel the psychic hurt from my previous run, which I realize I now wear on my memory like a scar, no less real nor more ridiculous than the mark by my right thumb from where the family cat scratched me once in the 1990s. This game injured me. And I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck by Halstrick.

It was the legendary troll named Jotun, Who Parts Limbs, who killed my Caves of Qud character with a single axe-throw, mere moments after I first encountered him, and while I was just beginning to size up the situation. When it happened, I sat in silence for a long moment, my blood turning to ice. With nerveless fingers, I took one last screenshot, and I knew here I beheld the whole of my practical response. There would be no coming back from this error, no confessor I could call who could tell me how to undo my mistake through meditative toil, or through manipulating data files. For me, the game was over.

As designed! Caves of Qud—that’s spelled Q-U-D and it is pronounced like the cow’s chew-toy—is a traditional roguelike, one that hews close to the mechanics of the primordial computer game literally titled Rogue, a single-player, tactical turn-based dungeons-and-dragons simulator. Qud has several play modes, but the one it nudges you to think of as the true way to play—by making it the default choice on its New Game menu—is the so-called “Classic” mode, where character death is immediately permanent. This game isn’t the sort of roguelike that becomes iteratively easier as you replay it, allowing you to retain or upgrade certain aspects of your character between “runs”. Anything that you carry between Caves of Qud runs is encoded entirely in the experiences and memories of you, the player. The level-one scrub that you roll up at the start of your hundredth Qud run is no more intrinsically powerful than the one you meet the very first time you play.

I’ve been a fan of traditional roguelikes for a long time, starting with twentieth-century classics like Nethack and Angband, though I never made particularly deep progress at any. I’ve been aware of Caves of Qud for some years, but I finally got the nerve to try it after I saw that Steam had marked the game as fully compatible with Steam Deck. Which immediately enthralled me, because seeing that little green checkmark seemed a patent absurdity. Every trad-rogue that I’d ever enjoyed required so many keys in order to issue its umpty-hundred possible commands that it even resisted play on a laptop, which lacks the requisite number pad. But the Caves of Qud developers, beginning their work on the near side of the millenial divide, managed to actually make a dungeon crawler of the ancient mode completely playable with only a game controller. They created a clever scheme which arranges all the commands you need into chords involving the trigger and shoulder buttons. So, to move around, you tilt the left stick in one of eight directions, then squeeze the right trigger. This frees up the right stick for highlighting and learning more about other objects in the world, and the D-pad-plus-trigger for paging through the visual quick-access bar of unusual commands specific to your character’s skills, something informed by MMOs and other, much newer role-playing games.

In addition, Qud mixes in a lot more automation than the ancient games had. For example, the left shoulder button will automatically have your character try to move towards and attack the nearest enemy, regardless of direction, and pressing the Y button while holding the left trigger puts your character into an auto-explore mode that stops as soon as they see a threat.

This sounds like a lot. It is a lot! And yet, if you’re willing to give it enough attention to learn the ropes, it clicks. It’s a good game, developed with care and attention to player feedback over the course of many years. After a couple of sessions, it even starts to get comfortable, and you may begin to feel confident with it! You’ll probably start keying in commands rapidly, learning to read the screen, a sense of mastery starting to creep in.

And that, of course, is how you lose.

Well, I knew the risks, which is to say, no matter how high I flew, I knew the only way that this could possibly end.

When I had that amazing Qud run which ended so abruptly, I had been studying Stoicism for about one year. The philosophy was brought to my attention from a colleague at the very large technology company I worked for at the time. A chief hangup of the ancient Stoics was death, and specifically the purpose of living when death, the erasure of everything, was inevitable. And one way to square that terrible circle is this: Your life is a gift, and it is your duty to respect that gift by making of yourself the best you that you can, given the time and resources available. And because of these studies, I could not help but see that a traditional roguelike as a simulation of this, precisely.

Stoicism counsels its students to locate their own path to developing personal virtue, and to walk that path as far as they can. In a roguelike, the nearest you have to virtue is experience level, and hit points, and ability scores. So be it: it’s an abstraction, but an effective one. Just as in reality, you have essentially no control over the game-world external to your character, but you can do your best to extract experience points from it, and then you do have full control over spending those points to improve your character in some way. Also, you have from the outset an ideal that you can strive for—winning the game. But whether you get there or not—and very probably not—the game will end. It will probably end suddenly, and much sooner than you’d like it to.

So I wore this attitude as best I could, for that one week when I found myself possessing a Qud character that had somehow survived for more than ten hours of play and was well into the midgame, against all odds, gathering up power and potential. I began every session reminding myself that I was ready to die. I would post summaries of my achievements each day to Mastodon, and always conclude with a reiteration of how I already felt peace with the increasingly precious character’s inevitable loss.

So when it happened, I wasn’t sad, or mad. I was devastated, I felt real shock.

It was the furthest I’d ever gotten in a game genre I’ve been fascinated with since I was a kid, and even when you fully expect it all to get ripped away in an eyeblink, the sense of separation from this long focus of your time and attention is horribly painful. But I remember it. I remember it! Hundreds of thousands of in-game experience points might have spun away into the darkness with a single flash of the axe, but they all translated to one point of experience in my real life, earned by the challenge of how I choose to face this chilling breath of loss and mortality, delivered more profoundly and more directly than a video game had ever gifted to me before.

And it’s up to me how I spend that gift, on myself.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.