Traps. Avoidance, detection, meaning.

[Atarlost]

Actually, I'd say there's another option.

(3) traps cannot be avoided without activities that present other risks. Making reliable trap avoidance require digging through granite could lead to real decisions as to whether the trap or monster generation is more dangerous if trap dangers, monster generation rates, and digging difficulty are suitably tweaked. This might involve the addition of a new, harder rock after stat gain.

I'd say it's also okay for traps to be relevant only to some classes. Rogues pay in combat capability relative to warriors to get utility spells and some of those utilities make traps a non-issue for them. I think that's okay in principle, though if traps become more serious it might need to be balanced perhaps through something like delayed access to teleportation magic. If mages were to lose their remaining non-spell damage options it wouldn't be out of line for them to have trap trivializing spells either. In their case it might be retaining stone to mud instead of trap destruction.

[d_m]

I don't have time at the moment to read the post about traps, but I should say that several of the devs have been giving some time to thinking about traps.

I will post more when I have a chance and can collect the thoughts I've heard on the topic.

[Nick]

Actually, I'd say there's another option.

(3) traps cannot be avoided without activities that present other risks.

This is a good point, and it's kind of already the case. Often traps can be avoided, but sometimes not. I know when I play O/FA, I will usually avoid traps if possible rather than disarming them, because of the risk of a disastrous failed disarm - so they are IMHO doing their job.

This suggests to me that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with traps in V, but maybe some numbers need tweaking.

[PowerDiver]

This is a good point, and it's kind of already the case. Often traps can be avoided, but sometimes not. I know when I play O/FA, I will usually avoid traps if possible rather than disarming them, because of the risk of a disastrous failed disarm - so they are IMHO doing their job.

That works, but it is the chance of failed disarming that makes it interesting. If you want this, then the spell needs to be changed to require the player to be adjacent, and to have a significant chance of setting off the trap, say 10%.

[Derakon]

What advantage does the spell have over normal disarming then?

[Nick]

What advantage does the spell have over normal disarming then?

On checking, the V spell works perfectly; in O/FA, it has 5% failure chance (and failing sets off the trap, adjacent or not).

[Derakon]

No, I meant, what advantage does the spell have over standard disarming techniques? If the spell isn't foolproof, why wouldn't you save your mana and do things the "hard" way?

Granted, currently it's completely opaque how likely you are to set off a trap. Your disarming rate is given as a percentage, but I'm pretty sure that that's your odds of disarming a trap, not of not setting it off, which is usually what people are more interested in.

[Nick]

No, I meant, what advantage does the spell have over standard disarming techniques? If the spell isn't foolproof, why wouldn't you save your mana and do things the "hard" way?

Manual disarming in V/O/FA can set off the trap. In V the spell can't fail, and so is clearly better; in O/FA the spell has a standard 5% fail rate, so it may or may not be better.

[PowerDiver]

What advantage does the spell have over normal disarming then?

You could set things up so that a typical mage or priest at a particular DL would be twice as likely to set it off disarming manually as doing it spellwise, if you have any idea what "typical" means. [edited had it backwards]

A different distinction would be to make manual disarming typically take an average of 10 to 20 turns using code similar to dig code, but the spell takes only one turn. Then assuming manual is safer, you get the option to trade safety for speed.

[Atarlost]

I think if we want to make traps significant without removing perfect detection we need to get rid of spells and rods of trap detection. Probably scrolls too since they're in a relatively cheap to buy out shop but wouldn't be worth a slot as a dungeon consumable. Maybe leave the spell to rogues if that's part of their shtick and they're considered to pay in class balance for trivializing traps.

Assuming wands of trap disarming stay but are made dungeon only with fewer charges mages should have enough of an advantage from recharging, especially if Tensor's is re-buffed with something actually worthy of the name so it's worth carrying or spells are shuffled so the top recharging spell is in a better book. I think it used to be in Kelek's in the Ben H days.

Even with recharging wand charges should be too dear to use on every trap. That means some fine tuning of trap frequency and wand frequency, but nobody ever said this would be easy. The easy thing would be to just leave traps as a boring slot tax for fighters. When the top recharge spell became available mages might outgrow traps, but only when not fighting Balrogs or Morgoth. At that point adding trap creation to Morgoth could be diabolical, as would adding it to any demon a balrog might summon. Another charge drainer is also not unthinkable.

[PowerDiver]

I think if we want to make traps significant without removing perfect detection we need to get rid of spells and rods of trap detection.

I think traps are pointless, and my solution would just be to remove them. Less is more. NPP's active traps are significant, but they aren't really traps in the sense of this discussion.

If wedded to using traps, I'd change so that detecting a trap of a particular type is a function of (#traps prev detected, #traps prev set off, distance to trap) of that type, and nothing else. Once you detect a trap you should be able to step on its square without setting it off the same way that monsters wander aimlessly through trap squares without setting them off.

[MKula]

I kinda like the idea (a bit further down the thread) of trapped rooms rather than trapped tiles. That would have the side effect of "intelligent" trap placement (since you know that rooms - rather than corridors - would be trapped), and would therefore simplify trap detection (again, since you'd only have to check rooms).
EDIT: It also just occurred to me that you could do the opposite too... trapped corridors. Running through a poison gas corridor could be quite amusing. Especially if being chased by Gorlim or something equally nasty.

The "trap" tiles would be placed the entrance of each room, but if triggered, would affect the whole room rather than just the tile. To disarm the "room" you would have to either a) disarm the trap found at each entrance to the room or b) disarm only one entrance tile, which would disarm the whole room.

And yeah, you could have some fun with trapped rooms: triggered traps could lock all doors (this could be a default for each trap), poison the room (-2hp/turn for each move in the room), summon an OOD monster to the middle of the room, slow everyone in the room, cause hallucinations as long as you're in the room, speed up monsters that are in the room, destroy/teleport all loot that drops in the room... lots of cool stuff. There's lots of room for creativity here.

[Therem Harth]

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.

Not sure if this is a good idea, but I think it kind of makes sense.

[Derakon]

That's heading towards NetHack, IMO. The player's under too much inventory pressure to have to carry around a bunch of miscellaneous tools for very specific circumstances.

[camlost]

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.

Not sure if this is a good idea, but I think it kind of makes sense.

Ewww. I don't want inventory clogged with trap-be-gones.