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.
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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.

[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.