YASD

Yet Another Silly (or Stupid, depending on who you ask) Death, an oft-applied acronym when speaking of NetHack. Nethack has so very many ways of dying that a YASD is inevitable for most hackers. Sure, sometimes you'll die during a swordfight, but more often you'll die because you were starving and fainting and a grid bug bit you. Or because, while hallucinating and blind, you killed your pet kitten and your god struck you down in anger. Or because you choked to death on a tin of greasy deep fried slime mold. We've all been there. The dev team thinks of EVERYTHING.

My most entertaining YASD was as a Rogue who had both Stormbringer and a tame arch-lich. Either of those on its own would have been good; the combination was fatal. I knew that Stormbringer and pets don't mix, but thought the arch-lich was so tough I couldn't possibly kill him by accident. Well, I whacked him with Stormbringer one too many times, and he got mad and killed me with a touch of death.

YASD is almost always "Yet Another Stupid Death," from what I've seen, and USUALLY means that you did something dumb that got you killed (For the other kind, I've died on my FIRST TURN in the game by stepping on a Flame Trap...). I have managed to do many of the most embarassing ways to have a YASD.

• Starving to death is a YASD in my book... food is PLENTIFUL in Nethack. Fresh corpses are easy (there are some bad ones to eat, naturally), but if you're really out of food and starving, PRAY! Your God will take care of you... unless you've been naughty...
• Dying to a newt because you were dumb enough to attack a Floating Eye with a hand-to-hand weapon.
• Deliberately picking up Excalibur with a non-Lawful character. (I forgot that the sword isn't very friendly, and wanted it to pad my final score, when I Ascended... I was thinking positive!)
• Seeing the corpse on the ground next to the boulder, and NOT pushing the boulder out of the way first. ("Click!")
• Testing out an unidentified wand (of Polymorph) on a Grid Bug.
• Kicking a tombstone because I couldn't figure out how to dig into the grave (This was when tombstones were new, around 3.3.0 or so). Yes, this actually killed me; it's only a few hit points, but when you've only GOT a few...
  This is my dubious NetHack claim to fame, by the way. As far as can be ascertained, I was the first person EVER to die in this method.
• Unsuccessfully attempting to ride my horse. Repeatedly.
• "This is a scroll of genocide! What do you want to genocide?" Gnome (forgetting that my character that time around was a Gnome... I sometimes play randomly-created characters)
• And the one I still kick myself for, on a regular basis (It was my best game, and I still haven't surpassed it): I was blind, with ESP thanks to eating a Floating Eye corpse early on in the game. I "saw" a Cockatrice coming down the hall towards the room I was in, so I fried it with a Wand of Fire. I then walked over to where the corpse was, to verify it... "DYWYPI?"

  For those of you who aren't already groaning: When you're blind, you tell what's around you by touch. I wasn't wearing gloves... and touched the Cockatrice corpse with my bare hands.

Nethack is evil, and takes pleasure in proving it to you regularly.