ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I am constantly dying already in Barrow Downs, because of losing my caution. I yawn at the boringness of the beginning of the game, see a conjurer, go beat it up and notice only after a few hits, when my HP has fallen from 200 to 17 that it is actually a boar of Everholt.
Or I go beat up another Centipede that is blocking my way and notice too late that the c is this time red. And die right away.
Or I run around one of those forests with trees here and there, so that you can't just do .-direction to run safely. When I notice the flock of crows is already there, I have already moved a few times too much and stand in middle of the flock that very quickly kills me before I have time to read a phase door. Especially if I was in the forest because I was escaping something that ended up being something different than I had thought with the first sight and was already on low HP, this can be very deadly. Or if I just arrived to Barrow Downs level 1 the first time. (Why are there crows on BDw lvl 1 anyway? Once you see them in the beginning of the game, you could as well do shift+q..)

Anyway, all this is really disturbing. Because most of the game until Barrow Downs level 7 or so is just wandering around and killing anything you see in order to raise your EXP, it causes one to grow a kind of a routine of hacking and slashing. Of course I don't go kill dangerous creatures, but because some 99% of creatures are not dangerous at all, I oft^H^H^Heventually always forget to be cautious enough and confuse something dangerous to something puny. Or run too fast in woods.

I'm sure it could be possible creating some kind of mechanism that warns if I see a creature that either 1) is on a list of dangerous creatures that I have made myself or 2) has killed me very often in the past. Such warning should not be possible to scroll past by constantly hitting space without reading the text, such as is normally done with anything ending with --more--, but one should have to press a specific character to continue (maybe simply y/n).

It is stupid dying because of reasons external to the game. A real warrior surely would not confuse a boar for a conjurer, but would instead just phase door, enter some nice-looking void and run to the nearest < or >. But a person playing the game does confuse the things and I want to be able to stop that from happening.

So, since I have no idea of how to write a script to get such a feature running on 3.0.0alphasomething, I would need some help with it. Anybody?
I want to be able to concentrate on the actual game, not its interface!

Have you tried playing with another term window showing a list of monsters? This can be helpful for spotting dangerous or unknown adversaries.

In general, there are a couple of strategies- playing very cautiously and slowly, and staying at levels where you can beat everything, or playing quickly and very cautiously, where you dive to hard levels, avoid everything that might kill you, and picking up better loot because you are on a deeper dungeon level. The cautious part is that you need to be consistent about checking out what you are seeing or fighting, and always have an escape.

Dying a lot is also part of the game.

How are your Disturbance Options set?

when my HP has fallen from 200 to 17 that it is actually a boar of Everholt

For this set your Hitpoint warning to at least 50%

I have already moved a few times too much and stand in middle of the flock

When running 'Disturb whenever viewable monster moves' should trigger. You could even try 'any monster' but that is very annoying once you get telepathy.

Even if you don't read messages, you should notice something disturbing your flow of keypresses

Dakkus, don't feel too bad. I've been playing the game on and off for the better part of 7 years and I've yet to beat this game once. The most you can do is chalk it up to experience and not get careless.