Traps. Avoidance, detection, meaning.

[Nomad]

I guess one way you could remove detection without making it too lethal is to restrict the locations where traps can be generated - say if random traps only occur in the squares next to room doorways and around floor objects. That way their placement would seem more intelligent, and players would know where to stop and search if they're playing cautiously, but it wouldn't be very practical to do it every single time.

Alternatively, maybe restrict traps so they only occur in rooms, never hallways, and tweak the 's' search function so that it searches all squares in LoS rather than just the adjacent ones. (Maybe with lower odds of spotting traps in more distant squares?) That way the existing searching skill becomes a more fallible, localised form of detection that everyone can use to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Or, hell, just make the existing detection spells fallible. Instead of flawlessly detecting all traps every time, each trap within the field of the spell has a percentage chance of being detected. (Maybe based on your device/spell fail rate?) I would actually support all forms of detection working like this: the spell shows you most of what's around you, but you can't be fully sure that's all that's there. If you're really nervous, cast the spell multiple times for an improved picture.

[Hariolor]

What should traps be? IMO traps should be situation-enhancers. Either by creating ingame incentives or "quests" (fix the status effect), or by consuming resources that @ would rather spend elsewhere (HP/MP/consumables/time).

They should be detectable without magic, based on class and skill (I very much like some of the LoS ideas mentioned earlier), and there should always be *some* traps that can only be detected by magic, and some that can only be detected by searching. I think this would challenge all classes more evenly and would force caution while eliminating the "press A to not die" effect.

Direct-damage traps are best left in places where there are also baddies, as are paralysis, blindness, etc. The idea is that these traps are only useful if there's something lurking to finish off the job. I can imagine the later S-types being particularly fond of using traps to soften up their prey (driders, areana (sp?), etc). A direct-damage trap in an area without baddies is basically useless, consuming only turns and/or potions and/or MP necessary to heal. A minor inconvenience but in their current incarnation not really very intimidating.

The other traps should be ones that cause long-term effects that are harder to get rid of by simply consuming a few CCW. The idea would be that accidentally hitting one of these would provide a new immediate goal, much in the way running out of food/torchlight/?recall/etc can cause an @ to give up on what s/he was doing and focus on that for awhile. I find these diversions are fun and add to the experience of the game.

A few ideas for trap effects:

any of Paralysis/Blindness/Darkness/Slowing (combined with summoning...?)

Stoneskin (as the current mixed blessing effect)

Blink (like being stuck wearing a ring of teleport until cured)

Teleport 10 levels up/down

Drain all charges on inventory items

Render one inventory slot (semi)permanently unusable

Erase all mapping/detection of current level

Decoy ESP (grants ESP but also includes many false positives, like hallucination but less completely crazy)

Randomly swap all stats (reversable!)

Change all monsters currently on level to one randomly chosen symbol (maybe excluding monsters in vaults - if possible)

[Timo Pietilä]

I think what Timo meant was that since some of the traps are too dangerous to ignore (as you point out: summoning and teleportation) you can't afford not to detect traps, because you'll hit the "deadly" ones.

Correct. You can ignore the known non-lethal ones, but you can't ignore them all which means you need to detect them.

[nullfame]

I think new trap effects would be interesting and more damage by level.

Maybe remove the trap destruction spell from books and/or make the consumables more rare? That would force people to disarm more. I don't disarm summoning traps. I think twice about teleport and trap doors. If there were more interesting side effects and disarming was more of an issue I think that would make traps more of a challenge.

[d_m]

Too easy to detect: true.
Too deadly to ignore: false.

I think what Timo meant was that since some of the traps are too dangerous to ignore (as you point out: summoning and teleportation) you can't afford not to detect traps, because you'll hit the "deadly" ones.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Too easy to detect and disarm and too deadly to ignore.

Too easy to detect: true.
Too deadly to ignore: false.

SOME traps *can be* deadly, but NO traps do enough damage to you (directly) to be considered deadly. The two we fear are summoning and teleport; these can immediately put you in a terrible position, facing considerable opposition that can kill you. Traps that paralyze or confuse can also be an issue.

But because there was no uniform concept, we've got a lot of very minor traps as well, that, as you note, are meaningless time-wasters.

So this is why we need to go back all the way to square 1, and start with the question I posed. The answer is the basis for all others:

--what kinds of traps do we want?
--how hard should they be to locate?
--how common should they be?
--how hard should they be to disarm?
--how much damage can they do, or conditions can they inflict?

[Timo Pietilä]

I think these last couple comments beg this question:

What purpose do we want traps to serve in the game?

Without that as a basis, we're wandering around in the dark.

That is the "meaning" part of the thread. What are they there for. I'd say they should be there for flavor and added danger and for smart person with some experience maybe work as a alert: "there is a trap, so there must also be something why it is there".

Our current traps are meaningless waste of time. Too easy to detect and disarm and too deadly to ignore. Kind of like aggravation, you either aggravate or not, you detect traps and not get hit by them or you don't detect and get hit by them. There is no mid-way.

[Timo Pietilä]

My main problem with doing away with trap detection is that it leaves the game more open for "Whoops, something you could not have known about killed you." Right now that's largely limited to things like warriors, priests, and paladins who venture into drolem country without generic-monster detection and get really unlucky. I.e. the current unavoidable-instadeath rate is small.

I'd say our current instadeath rate is zero with patience. And that is a problem. You need to artificially increase your danger level to make game challenging. We need more challenge that cannot be countered by patience.

If we're going to increase it, I'd rather it be by something suitably impressive (e.g. ancient dragon popping up at 800'), not by the player blundering into a teleport trap and getting dropped in the middle of some gravity hounds that he purposefully avoided earlier.

If you plan to just do away with trap detection and replace it with trap noticing, then trap noticing needs to have equivalent reliability -- basically, that means that traps are automatically seen once you step next to them. Or else traps need to have zero instadeath capability. No teleport, no summons, no paralyze.

I have no problem with removal of teleport and summoning. Paralyzation however is not fatal in current vanilla unless you are into middle of monsters without FA.

I would like to see traps having some meaning. Not just some arbitrary random grid somewhere with a trap, so that you would not need to look for them all of time. They should be there to protect things. Mechanical guardians. In other words they should be way rarer and positioned so that you don't just wander in them. Vault entrances, perimeter defenses, alerting monsters. Maybe even thematic traps that tells you something about inhabitants of the dungeon. Place webs in corridors near spiders. Arrow-traps with rangers and orcs. Boulders with giants. If you die to that, then that did what it was there for.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

I think these last couple comments beg this question:

What purpose do we want traps to serve in the game?

Without that as a basis, we're wandering around in the dark.

[Derakon]

I'm not saying traps can't be changed. I'm just saying that taking the current system and just changing the detection mechanic (from a perfect but tedious approach to an imperfect automatic approach) is not sufficient. Even if you just make traps less common, this amounts to, what -- an occasional, random penalty for race/class combinations with bad perception? Nobody's going to change their equipment loadouts just to be more likely to notice traps, especially if it requires losing capability against a more quantifiable threat.

I agree that traps, as they are right now, are not very interesting. But I also don't think they can be made interesting with only minor tweaks.

[EpicMan]

But right now traps are tedium. Except for the very beginning traps are just a rote 'cast DTraps when I get to the edge of detection or take the stairs' and act as a speed bump 'cast destroy traps then move'. If you want to leave things like that we might as well turn traps into hostile glyphs that take a turn to break before we move on them; with always-available trap detection they are just speed bumps where you press A not to die/get hurt.

In fact, we could just stop generating traps past dungeon level 10 or so without changing gameplay very muchm, aside from freeing up one inventory slot. Traps are in this regard very similar to food right now - it is purely an inconvenience.

If you're worried about increasing the % of non-player-created instadeaths make traps about 1/2 to 1/3 less common than they are now, except maybe in vaults. That way the "hit teleport trap', gravity hound breathes gravity (x8)...You die" is less likely to happen.

[Derakon]

My main problem with doing away with trap detection is that it leaves the game more open for "Whoops, something you could not have known about killed you." Right now that's largely limited to things like warriors, priests, and paladins who venture into drolem country without generic-monster detection and get really unlucky. I.e. the current unavoidable-instadeath rate is small. If we're going to increase it, I'd rather it be by something suitably impressive (e.g. ancient dragon popping up at 800'), not by the player blundering into a teleport trap and getting dropped in the middle of some gravity hounds that he purposefully avoided earlier.

If you plan to just do away with trap detection and replace it with trap noticing, then trap noticing needs to have equivalent reliability -- basically, that means that traps are automatically seen once you step next to them. Or else traps need to have zero instadeath capability. No teleport, no summons, no paralyze.

[Timo Pietilä]

Unfortunately, @ cannot coexist on a trapped square unless it gets disarmed first.

I don't think it would be impressive coding challenge to change that. That would allow also "persistent" traps like spider webs that immobilize but do not paralyze @. I think we should change that.

[nppangband]

You will have to factor in how to handle secret doors as well. The same spell that detects traps also detects hidden doors.

[fizzix]

Oh, and one other point on 'intelligent' placement: while we tend to be setting the enemies to be immune to traps, it might still be more sensible looking to put traps in places where there are (inconvenient) paths around the traps. It would be more realistic not to want to have to dodge your own traps, right?

Better yet, if you could tweak the AI to slow down or go around trapped squares- just for that time you see the orc mob flow around that one tile and go "Wait a minute..."

I think the idea is that if you know the trap is there you can avoid stepping on whatever triggers it as you walk by. Unfortunately, @ cannot coexist on a trapped square unless it gets disarmed first.

You should definitely get a trap detection attempt for any trap that's in LoS in a lit square.