Traps. Avoidance, detection, meaning.

[Therem Harth]

Okay, so much for that.

[buzzkill]

I'm going to float a random idea: requiring items to disarm certain traps. The default could be an iron spike, but some traps might require things like lamp oil (rune-based traps) or even CCW potions (gas traps?) to deactivate.

It's not a horrible idea if...
a) Items aren't necessary for disarming, but instead greatly increase the chance of success or
b) the items that are requested aren't entirely out of the realm of what you may be carrying anyhow.

Just to keep it simple...
Items of teleportation disarm teleportation traps.
Items of summoning disarm summoning traps.
Items of stat boost disarm stat disarming traps. etc.

But because useless stuff gets squelched and traps are relatively harmless, even to those with no disarming skill, I don't see a point in pursuing it aside from flavor. Traps are too easily detected, disarmed, avoided (or simply ignored) already.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Even b) is likely to be very tricky, because inventory is too class-dependent. A warrior will have teleport items, but a mage likely won't...so now you need to have the teleport or TO spell, also work on traps. And: given the fairly wide variety of traps...it seems likely that every class will need 1 or 2 items to cover capability holes. The example of a summoning trap, being countered by e.g. a staff of summoning...I never carry that staff. Given that summoning traps are one of the two *serious* traps, this idea would largely compel us to do so.