DETAILS:
We are getting reports of permissions errors under the following
circumstances:
1.  OS version 10.3.x (i.e., not earlier versions)
2.  The OS was "clean" installed, rather than "upgraded" from an
    earlier version.
3.  nethack-343-mac-term.pkg.sit is being used

The root cause is that OS 10.3 changed the way groups are assigned
during the process of adding new users.  The old way was to add
all new users to the "staff" group.  In 10.3, each user is assigned
its own unique group with the same id and name as the user (just
as Linux does it).  That change by itself is not a problem, but
for some reason they took out the code that also adds new users to
"staff".  Now there is no longer any group that "automatically"
contains all real users.

WORKAROUND:
An administrative user needs to run the following shell
command once for each player:

sudo niutil -appendprop . /groups/staff users FOO

where FOO is the login name of the player's account.  More than
one player can be specified by separating the login names by
spaces.