secret doors

[quarague]

I think they are a rather nice feature but unless you are a warrior by the time you get to about clevel 5 they become completely irrelevant because you constantly cast detect traps which also detects secret doors. This seems like a waste of a good feature to me. Secret doors that are not discovered yet cannot be opened/ bashed down by monsters, allowing for some tactical usage. With the current dungeon layout you can sometimes guess where they are, sometimes not, so a high search skill becomes useful. All nice game play features that get almost completely lost if you are not a warrior.
There are multiple ways to fix this, easiest would probably be to take secret doors out of the low level detect spells. Others would be to separate detect traps from detect doors/stairs for spells, as it is for staffs/ scrolls/etc. Rogues could have a special ability to sense secret doors.

[Timo Pietilä]

I think they are a rather nice feature but unless you are a warrior by the time you get to about clevel 5 they become completely irrelevant because you constantly cast detect traps which also detects secret doors.
[....]
There are multiple ways to fix this, easiest would probably be to take secret doors out of the low level detect spells. Others would be to separate detect traps from detect doors/stairs for spells, as it is for staffs/ scrolls/etc. Rogues could have a special ability to sense secret doors.

I have suggested LoS search instead of grid next to you. With 100% search you should be able to detect every trap in LoS as soon as it enters the LoS. With less than that each movement while it is in LoS gives you % chance of detecting it (this means that in large lit room high-level char never needs to worry about traps). Make those early searching items actually useful. No spells/devices except maybe scrolls.

Also trap placement should not be completely random, and they should not be instant death-types. Currently they are just randomly placed and too deadly to be ignored, so everyone detects traps as soon as they enter the trap detection border.

Similarly avoiding/not avoiding traps should not be binary, you should be able to walk to trap grid without triggering it if you know where it is without disarming it (depending of some skill and trap level). Also disarming trap should have very low chance of triggering it, and failure normally just does nothing. A bit like weak char tunneling in granite.

[takkaria]

I think it's a good idea to make secret doors less detectable. But not with as many secret doors as we have now. I think we need fewer secret doors in the dungeon and we need them in less predictable places, which is something the devteam has discussed for 3.5.

And as to traps, I have an extensive rework planned after 3.5 if my enthusiasm for it doesn't decrease. This includes LoS searching, removing/nerfing magical trap detection except maybe for rogues or high-level mages, searching and disarming skills that don't increase much with level making items that affect those skills a lot more valuable over the entire game, adding undisarmable traps, always-visible traps, trap avoidance, fewer traps per level, better trap placement, and a variety of more interesting traps (like webs near spiders).

[damerell]

Secret doors that are not discovered yet cannot be opened/ bashed down by monsters, allowing for some tactical usage.

An obvious change there would be to have the player's knowledge not affect the tactical situation. Until you go and open the secret door, the monsters can't use it.

[Derakon]

The big difficulty with secret doors is that they can get newbies stuck. When you don't know where a door is and it's cutting you off from the rest of the level (especially if there's no staircase in your section for whatever reason), your only recourse is to tediously search every candidate wall section in the hopes of stumbling across the door. This isn't fun.

What we need secret doors to do is to add interest to the game, without the penalty for them being hard to find being just "you get to waste your time searching". Some thoughts:

1) Secret doors hiding alternate routes through the level. Everything in the level is accessible without needing the doors, but they give you more options for getting around and/or avoiding unpleasant areas.

2) Secret loot closets. A small adjunct to the rest of the level that's blocked by the door and has some loot in it. More or less equivalent to Croesus's vault in NetHack.

3) This is a bit offbeat, but hidden "control rooms" that the player could interact with to change the rules on the level slightly. For example, adjusting the rate at which monsters spawn (by setting the state of alarm on the level). This kind of thing would probably work better in a variant where the player is made to feel like they're infiltrating a fortress rather than exploring some caves.

Things like the entrances to pits and other special rooms can of course also remain hidden, because being unable to open them does not prevent you from exploring the rest of the level.

[DaviddesJ]

I would say that part of the concept of Angband is that there are some things that are only relevant early on but become less relevant later in the game. Secret doors are one of those---one way or the other you are likely to gain a detection ability that detects all doors, including secret doors, and so they are not "secret" any more. Identification is another example. At some point, you probably get a resist fear ability, and then the monsters that used to frighten you, don't any more. Or you get see invisible and then the difference between visible and invisible monsters becomes irrelevant. Etc., etc.

[MattB]

Could I just ask please, what does the shift-s command actually do?
Thanks.

[ekolis]

Toggles search mode. I'm not entirely sure what search mode does exactly, though - my best guess is it automatically spends an extra turn searching every time you perform an action. Anyone want to back me up on that or correct me?

[DaviddesJ]

Yes. It's in the docs somewhere. Search mode spends one extra move searching for every normal step you take. (I'm not sure what it does if you're firing missiles that only takes a fractional time step!)

[MattB]

Thanks guys, that's really helpful.

[MattB]

The big difficulty with secret doors is that they can get newbies stuck.

So is there an argument for an in-game message about the shift-s command?
(I only found it by accident and until today I wasn't sure what it did).

[ekolis]

As in, "You are now carefully searching your surroundings with every step" when you activate it? That would be useful, yes...

edit: and of course some sort of deactivation message too, such as "You stop searching your surroundings so carefully."

[DaviddesJ]

There's already a help page on keyboard commands that lists every single command that exists.

Pretty much no one should ever use search mode. Doing that will get you in trouble. It's just included for historical reasons.

[MattB]

As in, "You are now carefully searching your surroundings with every step" when you activate it? That would be useful, yes...

I was thinking of a shopkeeper message, such as "If you can't find a way out of a level, search as you go by pressing Shift-s", but yeah, what you said too.

[MattB]

Pretty much no one should ever use search mode. Doing that will get you in trouble. It's just included for historical reasons.

Please explain?