Yet Another Stupid Death

Yet Another Stupid Death (commonly abbreviated to YASD) is used when a player has done something, usually avoidable, that leads to their hero's demise. Common YASDs in NetHack include:

• Hitting a floating eye in melee combat, then getting nibbled to death by a newt while paralyzed
• Attempting to engage melee combat with very low HP left
• Being killed by a water demon or water moccasin after quaffing from a fountain in hopes of getting a wish
• Not noticing that your character has gotten weak from hunger, then being attacked while fainted
• Not noticing that your character is satiated, then greedily eating a corpse for intrinsics and choking
• Touching, eating, fighting bare-handed, or otherwise manipulating a cockatrice, its corpse, or its egg
• Drowning in water or lava
• Genociding oneself
• Eating rotten food after recently praying
• Eating something you shouldn't eat (e.g. Medusa's corpse—"hey, there's a melon on the ground!")
• Zapping a wand of death (or some other powerful ray) at a wall and getting hit by the rebound
• Wandering near a known giant eel or kraken
• Death by boredom
• Being smote by sacrificing a unicorn on an altar of its own alignment
• Kicking and injuring your foot resulting in death due to low health
• Falling off your Knight's starting pony after attempting to ride it at XL 1
• Wishing for a cross-aligned artifact, and having it blast you to death
• Forgetting about the power of Elbereth
• Dying in possession of an identified amulet of life saving, but not wearing it simply because you forgot to put it on
• Forgetting that you have low health when restoring a save file and immediately starting to explore
• Consorting with a foocubus at XL 1 and dying from level drain or exhaustion.
• If you are a monk, wearing the eyes of the Overworld before you have dealt with Medusa.

Some players distinguish YASD from YAAD (Yet Another Annoying Death), using YAAD or DYWYPI for random, unavoidable events such as falling onto poison spikes (provided the pit wasn't already known, of course) or an encounter with a Gnome With the Wand of Death, and reserving YASD for pilot error. The dividing line depends on the player; to a sufficiently expert player, almost all deaths are avoidable YASDs.

Amusingly enough, YASDs can happen to monsters as well, such as bouncing a beam off a wall back at themselves.

Bad Ideas can sometimes (but not always) lead to YASD, and there is an article dedicated to lessons learned the hard way from Bad Ideas and YASDs alike.

Variants

dNetHack

• Thinking the P in Gehennom is a harmless gray ooze
• Treating an e in Gehennom like an ordinary floating eye
• In a cluster of spawned gas spores in Gehennom, thinking all those e are gas spores
• Killing mummies for fun

EvilHack

• Attacking a gray fungus in melee combat
• Quaffing from a forge

This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.

It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.0. Information on this page may be out of date.

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