Vaults, TO, and some general musings

[Estie]

One variant I played long ago, it may have been Fay, had chests/coffers that were unmovable/attached to the floor. If you wanted what was inside, you had to crack it open/waste many turns/risk setting off the trap inside the vault. It stuck with me that this was pretty cool, rather than lugging a chest up to the safety of town.

Indeed yes. All it needs is chest types with very high value; in the last room of a vault, instead of having artifacts and ego items on the floor, there could be one or more of those.

Since there are already different chest types about, its just a matter of making big ones (large steel chest being the biggest ?) immune to the various aoe attacks and increasing amount&quality of their drops, place them into vaults and not place them anywhere else (in addition to immobility).

That way, you can fight vaults without fear of destroying the loot (earthquake might still kill chests?) and its impossible to tell whats in a vault before actually clearing it.

[Nick]

At last behind a hidden door that they could not have found or opened had not Elessar had the aid of Gimli the Dwarf a steel closet was revealed. Maybe it had been intended to receive the Ring, but it was almost bare. In a casket on a high shelf two things were laid. One was a small case of gold attached to a fine chain; it was empty, and bore no letter or token, but beyond all doubt it had once borne the Ring about Isildur’s neck. Next to it lay a treasure without price, long mourned as lost forever; the Elendilmir itself, the white star of Elvish crystal upon a fillet of mithril that had descended from Silmarien to Elendil, and had been taken by him as the token of royalty in the North Kingdom.

So vaults could contain cupboards.

[getter77]

There are/were all manner of special chests in Portralis---why not lift some highly dramatic bits from it to bring some home to Vanilla, as it were, so long as it isn't interwoven with The Curse of Maths Madness that came to stalk it into oblivion where it still rests?

[fizzix]

More vault ideas that I've been playing with.

1) Nicking Crawl's Ziggurats. Basically these are one-time-only branches, where each level has a one way entrance and two exits, one back to the dungeon and one to the next level. Each level has increasingly difficult monsters and increasingly better loot. With Nick's new restruct apparatus to save levels, we should be able to implement something like this without too much difficulty. For Angband, we'd have to make destruction not work inside. I'd also give the player advanced knowledge of what lies on the next floor so there can be a somewhat educated decision.

2) One way exits to vaults + penalties for teleporting out. Imagine a vault with a single door entrance and 2-3 difficult monsters inside. Once you enter the vault, the door closes behind you (becomes a permanent wall) and another door appears on the opposite side of the vault. Forbid teleport other (and monster teleportation) inside vault. Player teleportation is allowed, but then the vault is completely sealed. There could also be some penalty for teleporting out, like destruction of inventory or a small permanent stat drain. So basically there's a risk for entry, but that risk isn't life/death but rather risk of inventory items. A player is more likely to take them. Once you exit the vault, either through the exit door or via teleport, both doors are permanently closed.

[krazyhades]

Yeah, I've been in favor of a DCSS Ziggurat style approach for a while now. I also really like the vault-sealing idea.