First, in character creation:

By moving the mouse over to your stats or hit points, you can increase (or decrease, if you want to deliberately handicap your character) your stats to arbitrary values. There's nothing preventing you from starting with all 18s, and I think you can give exceptional strength to characters who shouldn't have it.

This game *does* implement racial level limits. In other words, non-humans will not be able to level up past a certain point. Therefore, unless you intentionally want to limit your character's growth, you should only make human or multi-class characters. (The game doesn't implement dual-classing, unfortunately.)

Mages can only learn new spells from finding them. Single class mages get to start with 3rd level spells, while triple class mages don't even start with Improved Identify.

Clerics are the class least dependent on RNG, as they automatically get all available spells; no need to find them. (Just remember to pray for your spells and then rest.) Note that Clerics are also good at surviving in low-food dungeons because Create Food is a spell in this game.

Next, for dungeon generation options:

The monster difficulty setting, IIRC, has a side effect: stronger monsters mean more experience. This may make the game easier, rather than harder.

The option to disable undead enemies is there because undead can do nasty things including level drain to the player. (Of course, with undead disabled, certain abilities and spells are useless.)

Finally, a few notes on spells:

Spiritual Hammer is good in this game: It gives you a hammer that can be used at range and will return after being thrown. This spell will be wasted if you don't have a free hand.

Aid is better than in other D&D based games because it's main limitation, only affecting one character, doesn't apply in a game where you only *have* one character. Unfortunately, nowhere does the game tell you how many temporary HP you have.

Vampiric Touch is overpowered in this game; the temporary hit points *stack* and *last forever* (or until you take enough damage to lose them). If you manage to find this spell (and are a mage), the game becomes *much* easier. (You might even need to limit your usage of the spell to only using it when your health bar isn't blue in order to preserve the challenge.)

The 8th and 9th level spells mentioned in the manual are not actually in the game. The original release came with an errata sheet that mentioned that. (Sorry, no Time Stop in this game!)

Other things:

Identifying items works a lot like in a traditional rogue-like, but there doesn't appear to be an option to name your items yourself.

However, you can try out an item to see what it does and reload your saved game. (Death Real doesn't prevent this as long as you don't actually *die*.)

On that last parenthetical note, I wouldn't consider Death Real to be true permadeath. It deletes your saves when you die, but it does not prevent you from reloading your save if something less severe than death should happen. (If you want, of course, you could do a no-reload playthrough, and this game seems better suited to that than most D&D games.)

A few more notes:

The copy protection is still intact; you will need to have the PDF manual when you descend from B1 to B2.

On my current playthrough as a Fighter/Cleric/Mage, I have been lucky enough to find both Improved Identity (been using it a lot) and Vampiric Touch (can't use it yet).

With magic power set to high:
Spells have long durations. Cast your spells after resting, and they may very well last until your next rest.
I have seen Cure Light Wounds heal 14 points with one casting.

There aren't many drawbacks to a lack of food. The most serious one is being unable to benefit from resting; you will slowly lose health (according to the manual, 1 point every 24 hours), can't select which spells to memorize, and can't regain spells by resting. Hence, if you are playing with high food consumption, you can wait until you need to rest before eating. Just make sure to eat first. (Maybe there should have been an option to make starvation actually painful?)

If you *really* want a specific mage spell, there is a cheat that can give you random items, which can include spellbooks.

I always loved finding a long hallway and beating the tar out of the monsters while dual wielding spiritual hammers. As I recall you could throw one, cast another spiritual hammer and transfer it to the off hand before the original hammer got back. In a long hallway you could pummel multiple creatures, on the initial pass and on the return pass. I don't remember it ever missing.

I also agree with your statement that non-humans must multiclass. I believe I had my best runs with an Half-Elven Cleric / Thief and Human Cleric. My worst runs were almost always Fighter types (Paladins / Rangers / Fighters) and Mages, unless I could get them to about level 5. I don't recall if the Monk class was available, like it was in Forgotten Realms - sort of.

I don't remember the class limitations - some were quite low (level 5 maybe for cleric?) Do you know where I could get that info.

Will this setting replace weaker monsters with stronger monsters or it will simply increase their HD/XP? If it will be just increasing their HD, what is the most "Monster Manual"-default setting?

They probably copied the table from the Dungeon Master's Guide for AD&D. The main reason given for the level restrictions in that book was the increased lifespan of non-human races would mean the heroes of those races would end up with far more power than the human heroes. The book also warns you that if you allow elves to be paladins as a blanket rule, you'll end up with a party made entirely of elven paladins...

Speaking about levels, isn't lv.20 the maximum level in Dungeon Hack? Which is maximum level for any non-human race in AD&D if I remember right? If so, it means that choosing race shouldn't be based only on max level attainable.

Correct me if I am wrong on max level.

I tested with cheats and the maximum level for my Fighter/Cleric/Mage is 17/17/15, which is enough to cast every spell in the game. (15th level mage can't cast 8th or 9th level spells, but this game doesn't have any, despite the manual mentioning them.)

I am encountering enemies that paralyze on the 3rd floor. (Good thing I found the mage spell Protection from Paralysis! Unfortunately, that means I can only identify one item per rest.) One of the enemies is some centipede thing while the other looks like a ghoul, and *both* can paralyze. Paralysis prevents attacks and spellcasting (so what's the point of the spell that cures it?) but does not prevent movement.

It seems that every dungeon level has 2 common types of enemies as well as 1 boss enemy, which is more powerful than the other enemies on the floor.

2nd Edition the highest level any demi-human can attain (except for half-elf bard) is 16 for half-elf rangers. The second highest after that are dwarven fighters, elven mages and halfling thieves with level 15. Other classes (if allowed at all) have caps in the 8-14 range.

There's an optional rule that allows you to attain a higher level if the stats required for a class are high enough (with a maximum of +4 with 19 in a stat). The only race allowed the F/M/C combination is half-elf, and the limits for those 3 classes without that rule are 14 fighter, 12 mage and 14 cleric. With 18 in all stats you get +3 maximum level, so that would fit dtgreene's character.

I probably confused it with 3rd Edition rules or some exotic mplementation (btw, I can't remember such low racial level caps in IE games). Aha, and so how HD and THAC0 are calculated for F/M/C? And you didn't test max level for humans yet?

AD&D uses the best THAC0 for whatever classes a character has. In this case that would be for a level 17 fighter (they have the best progression): 4. Remember to add the Strength bonus (+3 at 18/00) for an effective THAC0 of 1.

Now consider a fighter/thief with 250k xp, that character will be a level 9 fighter and level 11 thief. His THAC0 as a fighter is 12, but as a thief it's 15, so the THAC0 he'll use is 12.

As far as hitpoints go, you roll for a class using its own dice when you level up in that class, add your Constitution bonus, then divide by the amount of classes you have. For level 1 you roll all your dice, add them up and divide by amount of classes then add your Constitution bonus.

Aha, thanks. I think I will make pure human fighter. I like sword-fighting style, and thus I want lowest THAC0 and highest HP :) I can live without spellcasting. Even if level caps at 20, it still means 3 bonus THAC0 and more pure HP.

The Races section of the manual lists the nonhuman level limits under each race.

One other thing: My F/M/C can wield long swords with no problem; in fact, she even started with one equipped. I am pretty sure that is *not* how the pencil and paper game works, and it is definitely not how the Infinity Engine games work.

Weapon wise, the only restriction for multiclass characters is cleric/x being limited to whichever weapons their deity deems apropriate. Fighter/thieves can sneak while wielding polearms and fighter/mages can cast spells while swinging claymores.

The real restriction is armor, where mages can't cast spells if they're wearing any unless they're elves and are using elven chain, and thieves can't use thief skills if they're wearing non-thief armor.

Ok, I chose Paladin class. Characters starts at Lv. 3 and I have to deal with non-max HD rolls (22 HP at Lv.3 with 18 Constitution).

"Monster Manual" default monster difficulty seems to be 4 in this game (if to judge by amount of EXP awarded). At this level orcs and goblins award 15 Exp and Hobgoblins award 35.

Magic Power and Poison Strength are probably also have default values at 4.