Lately I've been playing ToME 2 with trap damage leveling disabled... Using characters that have no reliable means of trap detection or disarming.
This has led to rather interesting - and IMO more enjoyable - gameplay. ToME traps are for the most part much less lethal without the damage scaling, except for a few outliers like the Trap of Drop Everything. But when your character has unreliable trap detection and less reliable disarming, they still pose a hazard, and it's often necessary to tunnel around them - or grit your teeth and take some damage. Not to mention the risk of taking an unexpected acid ball while fighting a pack of monsters.
IOW, traps can make the game more interesting... If you don't have instant trap detection and disarming, and if survival without those is actually possible.
So my current thoughts on traps look like this:
- Traps should not get damage scaling with depth, and should not be horribly nasty to start with, barring a few outliers - the summoning and teleport traps. None of them should be able to instakill a typical undamaged character at the depth they first appear at.
(This, AFAIK, is already the case in Vanilla.)
- Trap detection spells should have a limited radius, and not be available until relatively late in the game. Trap detection through manual searching ('s' or 'S') should generally have a good chance of working, but Perception ability (i.e. search frequency) should be hard to come by. In general, trap detection should be more limited, at least until later in the game. Searching radius > 1 would be nice, but not really necessary.
- It should be possible to ID generic trap types. For instance, if you stumble across a summoning trap, you should have a chance of identifying later traps as being a summoning trap of some sort (but NOT the specific type of summoning trap).
(Not sure if this is the case in V, I believe it was last I played...)
- Traps should be hard to disarm! Magic devices that disarm traps should be very rare, if present at all. Disarming traps manually should be possible, but have a significant chance of failing for most classes, even at high levels.
Overall I'm thinking that making traps harder to bypass, without being excessively dangerous, would help add a bit of spice to the game.
Thoughts?
This has led to rather interesting - and IMO more enjoyable - gameplay. ToME traps are for the most part much less lethal without the damage scaling, except for a few outliers like the Trap of Drop Everything. But when your character has unreliable trap detection and less reliable disarming, they still pose a hazard, and it's often necessary to tunnel around them - or grit your teeth and take some damage. Not to mention the risk of taking an unexpected acid ball while fighting a pack of monsters.
IOW, traps can make the game more interesting... If you don't have instant trap detection and disarming, and if survival without those is actually possible.
So my current thoughts on traps look like this:
- Traps should not get damage scaling with depth, and should not be horribly nasty to start with, barring a few outliers - the summoning and teleport traps. None of them should be able to instakill a typical undamaged character at the depth they first appear at.
(This, AFAIK, is already the case in Vanilla.)
- Trap detection spells should have a limited radius, and not be available until relatively late in the game. Trap detection through manual searching ('s' or 'S') should generally have a good chance of working, but Perception ability (i.e. search frequency) should be hard to come by. In general, trap detection should be more limited, at least until later in the game. Searching radius > 1 would be nice, but not really necessary.
- It should be possible to ID generic trap types. For instance, if you stumble across a summoning trap, you should have a chance of identifying later traps as being a summoning trap of some sort (but NOT the specific type of summoning trap).
(Not sure if this is the case in V, I believe it was last I played...)
- Traps should be hard to disarm! Magic devices that disarm traps should be very rare, if present at all. Disarming traps manually should be possible, but have a significant chance of failing for most classes, even at high levels.
Overall I'm thinking that making traps harder to bypass, without being excessively dangerous, would help add a bit of spice to the game.
Thoughts?
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