Remove featherfall or make it useful

[Tiburon Silverflame]

buzz, the 'slippery slope' argument is usually really weak. Fine, if there's other stuff that no one cares about...then we ditch that. Keep it to a high standard. The ONLY benefit for feather fall is avoiding tiny amounts of damage in one narrow situation. The damage is irrelevant once past the *very* earliest levels. There are damn few traps on those first 5-7 dungeon levels, and past that, you're probably high enough level to ignore the trap damage.

And it would probably be a good thing to remove some of the crap that's accumulated over, what, 20 years, umpteen updates and however many maintainers. With that kind of pattern, the game almost always just gets extended, with new things being attached. It's much less common to trim out. The result is a long-term tendency to bloat. And IMO there's a LOT of bloat when it comes to items.

[Hariolor]

Getting rid of the current useless stuff may lead the the next best tier of items eventually being considered useless. There is a slope to be considered here. Not every thing can be "useful", because "useful" a relative term.

IMHO "useless"ness occurs when a given feature fails to provide a benefit. This can occur because it helps overcome an insignificant obstacle (featherfall), or provides a meager benefit (slay animal, orc, etc).

The fluctuating nature of Angband is great, but it also means that feature creep has led to a fundamentally imbalanced game. Not that it necessarily was balanced to begin with...

Well-balanced games tend to have specific obstacles, and specific solutions. The best ones make some of these solutions mutually-exclusive so as to force the player to make tough choices.

[will_asher]

I'm inclined to agree with Pete here -- I mentioned the gravity resistance as something that I felt was not a good idea because it makes gravity a lot less threatening.

I do like the trap immunity / reduced burden ideas, though. Trap immunity would mean that you wouldn't need to remember to detect traps all the time; I have trouble gauging the utility of that in a strict optimization sense (you do this, what, every hundred turns maybe?) but it'd make the user's life easier. And a burden reduction would be immediately sought out by mages.

It makes gravity a little less threatening, but not by a lot (at least in DJA). I think it works partly because feather falling really is already kindof rare except on the early ring (which has no other benefits) and as a random power. If you were in gravity hound depth, you would be sacrificing something else if you decided to wear a ring of feather falling.

Traps are already underpowered. They're very easy to detect, and if you can detect them, they're trivial to avoid. If you add trap immunity to the game, you might as well remove traps altogether.

[Timo Pietilä]

IMHO "useless"ness occurs when a given feature fails to provide a benefit. This can occur because it helps overcome an insignificant obstacle (featherfall), or provides a meager benefit (slay animal, orc, etc).

The fluctuating nature of Angband is great, but it also means that feature creep has led to a fundamentally imbalanced game. Not that it necessarily was balanced to begin with...

Well-balanced games tend to have specific obstacles, and specific solutions. The best ones make some of these solutions mutually-exclusive so as to force the player to make tough choices.

Game is balanced when it is fun to play. Quake was fun (and is still fun when played head to head). It didn't have any specific solutions, just blast away your enemies. Sometimes a "unbalanced" feature leads to better balance in game. TY-curse in TY-era Z.

Even useless item is still an item, and as such affects generation rates of every other item. Useless feature in item affects ratio of useful features in those same items. Which we need to be very careful about. Too much good is not good at all, it just changes the scale of measurement of what is useful.

We don't actually need to axe "useless" items. We need to axe out "semi-useful" items. Those are the source of boredom in items. They dull out entire range of items. Actually we might need to have real junk to create contrast and flavor (shards of pottery, broken sticks, skeletons). Maybe even as non-squelchable items.

[Nomad]

Traps are already underpowered. They're very easy to detect, and if you can detect them, they're trivial to avoid. If you add trap immunity to the game, you might as well remove traps altogether.

I guess the other way to approach it is to nerf trap detection along with introducing immunity as an ability: remove the rods, give the spell only to rogues, and everyone else survives on a limited supply of scrolls and their own searching skills until rods of detection start showing up. Or at least have detection show all traps as the same, so you can't tell a lowly pit trap from a trap door or summoning runes until you unwisely try to disarm it in the middle of a vault.

[fizzix]

We don't actually need to axe "useless" items. We need to axe out "semi-useful" items. Those are the source of boredom in items. They dull out entire range of items. Actually we might need to have real junk to create contrast and flavor (shards of pottery, broken sticks, skeletons). Maybe even as non-squelchable items.

I've mentioned before that I think those 'junk items' should be generated with the monsters and give clues as to what may be lurking in the dungeon. pottery shards or broken swords mean semi-intelligent creatures (kobolds, yeeks, orcs etc.) Skeletons mean dangerous animals. You can also have burned, melted, frozen and (whatever electricity does) bones for elemental monsters.

They certainly should be squelchable though.

[Timo Pietilä]

I've mentioned before that I think those 'junk items' should be generated with the monsters and give clues as to what may be lurking in the dungeon. pottery shards or broken swords mean semi-intelligent creatures (kobolds, yeeks, orcs etc.) Skeletons mean dangerous animals. You can also have burned, melted, frozen and (whatever electricity does) bones for elemental monsters.

They certainly should be squelchable though.

If they are not in monster drops, are always created as single items and not piles of items then there is no reason to squelch them. Consider them as dungeon decorations

In any case I think we should increase floor items a lot compared to monster drops. Current dungeon is way too boring.

[Pete Mack]

If you want to experience traps at their worst, play a warrior and dive fast. Unless you get lucky with an early Rod of Detect Traps, you will discover that traps are not harmless, particuarly trap doors and summoning. This is a relic of an earlier variant where trap detection was less universal; it was not truly by design.

If you want to find out how traps work when designed with easy detection, try NPP 0.5+

[buzzkill]

If you want to experience traps at their worst, play a warrior and dive fast. Unless you get lucky with an early Rod of Detect Traps, you will discover that traps are not harmless, particularly trap doors and summoning. This is a relic of an earlier variant where trap detection was less universal; it was not truly by design.

Except for summoning and to a lesser extent trap-door/teleport, traps are mostly harmless. I'd like to see traps scale properly with dungeon level. I suspect that they do probably already scale, but not strongly enough. An 'in-depth' character has virtually no chance of being seriously hampered by a (non-summoning) trap. Most often, even with negligible disarming skills, I won't avoid a trap (except for summoning, because it does scale properly). I just keep bumping into it until it is disarmed. The damage to my stats, kit and/or HP will be mostly inconsequential. Carry around a means of disarming? Never. Use a scroll of trap/door destruction if I happen to have one for some reason? Maybe, if I happen to remember to.

More trap variety would be nice too. If it's in the game, it should be able to appear as a trap. Just call it an 'unknown trap' (which it would be wise to avoid) and let the chips fall where they may. A trap that creates traps? Sure, why not.

[krugar]

Some thoughts on additional traps:

- Instadeath (tought one, I agree)
- Equipment zapping (removes and destroys one piece of equipment)
- Town teleport
- Burning Trap (damages player and destroys all scrolls. Chance to destroy books too)
- Freeze Trap (damages player and destroys all potions)
- Shock Trap (damages player and zeroes out metallic equipment for extend time)
- Mind Trap (affects player memory and clears level mapping)
- Super Trap (A trap of any kind that can be detected as normally, but cannot be identified. Also harder to disarm and easier to set off)

A possible trap damage formula:

[Player Maximum HP] * [Depth (level)] / 100 * [Trap Dam Factor (TDF)]

Trap damage thus increases the deeper one goes in the dungeon with level 100 meaning full HP damage. Note that "Total HP" means the player total HP unhurt. So a hurt player chance to be immediately killed by a trap is higher the deeper they go. The exact opposite of what is currently happening.

The TDF is a property of traps, a real number in the interval ]0,1] that can reduce total damage based on trap type or conditions in which the trap was placed. For instance, the result of a RNG during level creation, or a reflection of the level of the monster using the trap creation spell. I suppose this element introduces the necessary unknown into the formula so that players cannot immediately determine the danger factor of a trap.

[Player Maximum HP] * ([Depth (level)] + [Trap Dam Factor (TDF)]) / 100

Same as above, but TDF is now an integer in the range [0,n] that generates a deadlier trap as if it was n levels deeper.

Note: 100 represents Morgoth's dungeon level. Should be changed accordingly if this level ever changes.

On Feather Falling and traps

Personally, I don't see feather falling as feather walking. Traditionally (meaning in RPG-like games) it's not. Feather falling deals with damage from falls and not some sort of special walking ability that is instead controlled by abilities like stealth, speed and levitation.

Currently, I think, it balances out pit traps with other traps by introducing a damage negation effect into them that other traps have through resistances. That is alright. But admittedly is not reason enough to have it as a top special ability in equipment because unfortunately there's no other opportunities for feather falling as there are for elemental and magical resistances.

Introducing those opportunities (by perhaps introducing new damage types or attacks into monsters) seems too complicated. On the other hand, using it as a means to avoid traps could seem like the right thing to do. But:

- Makes little sense for the aforementioned reason feather falling is not feather walking. I understand this point is purely argumentative.
- It removes from the game an opportunity for a much more exciting later development: Class based trap avoidance skills and player speed factor (i.e. rogues and rangers being better at avoiding them; The faster the player is the biggest the chance they will trigger it. Also even when trying to disarm).

Instead, I suggest feather falling to be entirely removed from the game, leaving pit traps as the only trap type which damage cannot be reduced/negated. Which can open some doors to interesting consequences in the hands of devilish developers and a renewed fear of players from this classical type of trap. Alternatively, feather falling could become a spell.

[will_asher]

my trap ideas: (some of which are already in DaJAngband)
- earthquake traps (which can damage the PC's space)
- hallucenation traps ("You are surrounded by a purple haze!")
- mana drain traps
- deep pit traps (more damage along with the difficulty of getting out of the pit)
- taking buzzkill's idea: a trap which creates other traps. And when you try to disarm it, you usually can't tell whether you were successful or whether you triggered it. (dissapears after it activates)

An instadeath trap would be cheesy and bad.

[Derakon]

ToME 2 has a variety of nasty traps that, combined with traps being more difficult to manually disarm, mean that everyone carries a source of magical (fail-proof, or at least non-harmful-when-failing) disarming. If you don't have a way to safely disarm a trap, then you just go around, or if there's no way around, you do without whatever's on the other side. The risk simply isn't worth trying to manually disarm traps.

Consider: traps are usually dealt with during "dead time" in exploration, when there's nothing particularly urgent going on. For them to be a significant factor during these periods, they have to be pretty dang nasty, since you assume that the player is fully-healed and generally on top of things. But then every once in a while, the player has to deal with traps while in combat situations. I don't think you can make a trap that is interesting when there's no combat without making it ludicrously dangerous when there is combat.

If we want to make traps more interesting, then we have to rethink entirely how traps work. Simply beefing them up isn't an acceptable solution because of the instadeath potential.

That said, we can have a larger variety of effects for the current "not-very-dangerous" traps. Traps that modify the local terrain can be interesting -- assuming that the player isn't then required to dig through solid granite after triggering the trap.

[Rizwan]

Combination traps like poisoned pit and summoning

[Timo Pietilä]

If we want to make traps more interesting, then we have to rethink entirely how traps work. Simply beefing them up isn't an acceptable solution because of the instadeath potential.

How about removing magical devices of trap disarming or give trap a saving throw when it is tried to disarm with magic, and not make it trigger with failed disarm attempt? Give it actually activate only when you both fail in check of disarming and separate check of activating it. Make rogues and other "good thieves" (hobbits) get 100% sure that latter will not happen, but never reach 100% for first.

Basically just make it take time to disarm a trap or take damage for activating trap without trying to disarm it. Also disarming and or activating a trap should not move @ to the grid with a trap. A triggered trap door or spiked pit becomes a hole into ground that can't be disarmed if @ doesn't move to it. Others, like summoning, poison darts, teleport etc. just does what it is supposed to do. Maybe "physical" traps like pits and trap doors could be avoided just with high enough DEX. Even undetected ones.

BTW also make sure that with perfect searching you don't step on any traps even when they are created one turn before you step in it.

I would also like to see monsters activating traps. or, if aware avoid them. But that is thing that would need better AI (4GAI? 5GAI?).

[Nomad]

I would also like to see monsters activating traps. or, if aware avoid them. But that is thing that would need better AI (4GAI? 5GAI?).

I was thinking about this earlier, but it becomes problematic in vaults, where the traps and monsters would end up working against each other, and makes the create traps spell something that actually protects the player. It would be kind of neat for players to be able to set their own traps, though. (Hey, how about that as another use for spikes?)

I think the way to go with later dungeon traps is to move away from straight HP damage - there's no real way to make it dangerous without unreasonable chances of instadeath - to things that cause the player inconvenience instead. Traps that cause earthquakes, destroy floor and inventory items, drain charges and mana or do nether damage, summon breeders, sticky curse things that you're wielding, teleport you back up several dungeon levels... Stuff that won't kill you unless you're already in trouble, but will make you lose time replacing and uncursing gear or regaining lost ground.