Healing

If your hit points drop below zero, you die. Always have something to quickly restore them.

Escaping

A trapped adventurer is a dead adventurer. Always have a way to get out of trouble.

Detecting

The best defence is being prepared. Don't get ambushed.

Cuts, poison, and stunning

Many monsters can inflict special kinds of physical damage on you, such as opening wounds, poisoning, or stunning. After you start earning a little money, plow some of it back into potions of cure wounds, and keep them handy at all times. If a monster manages to heavily stun you, get away fast!

Character-hindrance

There are many monsters capable of casting spells to blind, confuse, slow, and paralyze you, plus quite a few other nasty tricks not mentioned here. Free Action (paralyzation immunity) eventually becomes critical to your survival, and you should keep stuff that fixes blindness and confusion on hand. Your Saving Throw protects against these and other attacks.

Elemental and magical attacks

Acid, Electricity, Fire, and Cold are the basic elements, and many monsters use them. Because the maximum damage they can do to you is very high, becoming resistant is important. Unlike with other attack types, you can resist, double resist, and be immune to the elements. Double resistance is the combination of a permanent resistance (from equipment) and a temporary one (from a spell). Temporary resistances are also known as oppositions. Immunity to any of the elements is hard to get.

Poison is deadly, and not so easy to gain resistance to. You can double- resist (resist and oppose) poison.

There are many kinds of magical attacks; most can be resisted, some can not. The resistable ones capable of doing the most damage are darkness, chaos, and nether.

For more detail, see the section on object attributes?.

Reductions of Experience and Stats

Even when your character is starting out, there are rare traps and monsters capable of lowering his stats and draining his experience. Slowly, these dangers increase until it becomes very important that you find objects that provide hold life and sustain at least your critical stats.

Theft

Nobody is more annoying than a thief. You've just found that cool spellbook or nifty weapon, and now it's gone. You can gain a significant degree of protection from theft by increasing your armour class and your dexterity, and can always collect your stuff from the thief's corpse. Unfortunately, thieves are smart enough to stash away the money they take from you.