Tactically interesting obstacles

[mushroom patch]

All of those can be avoided provided you're willing to play extremely safely. You can, for example, never put yourself in range of a fire or nexus breath.

Ah, good. Comment withdrawn.

In general, it would be better for the game to allow players to be somewhat less careful but more able to back themselves into a corner with few outs through a series of missteps. As it stands, playing very carefully removes all risk, essentially.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Hi!

Halls of Mist only has traps in vaults, in rooms with closets (green #), and near the starting places of monsters with trapping skill.

I find the closet rooms most fun. In those rooms, there are *lots* of hidden traps, plus probably something valuable to be found in the closets.

You may want to read a Scroll of Protection from Traps or to increase your Wisdom (-> Perception) somehow before entering. You search nearby squares automatically for traps, with only one skill roll allowed per trap.

Trying to minimize the squares you walk through in a trapped room is a fun little puzzle.

(I'm going to release the next version of Halls of Mist soon. It's ready for the launch, except that the game crashes in Windows 8... I want to test the build with Windows 10 before I release.)

[Grotug]

@Derakon

I still don't agree. Angband is a game where functionally a player never has to take risks. This is why the "random dicking over of the player" as you put it is relevant.

I'll also note that "random dicking over of the player" is pretty much a given in roguelikes and it already exists at all levels of the game. Descend into a dark room of hounds? Randomly dicked over. Have your staff of Desctruction burned by an off screen fire vortex? Randomly dicked over. Have that stat potion crushed by an elemental in a vault? Randomly dicked over. Nexus stat swap? Randomly dicked over (and more like the hand of god crushing you than any trap.)

I'm not sure at all why we're trying to eliminate these things. We're playing a roguelike after all, presumably we want a challenge based off of random elements.

I've been mulling over the trap issue and think that I agree with Fizzix; not sure why we are trying to remove these things, either. I think the current trap system is fine and any new one will reveal in time that the current one is actually quite good. Not seeing traps is kind of how traps are and need to be; this creates some suspense and the sense of ever-present danger. If you can become able to detect all traps all the time, well, it does come at the cost of some resource, whether be it precious mana or a precious inventory slot. Maybe the current trap system could be tweaked slightly or something, but I'm not sure that down the road an overhaul of traps will be perceived as an improvement, or that there aren't more interesting areas of the game that could be improved (I love the idea of adding terrain such as lava pools, chasms, boogie bogs [like the one Gollum guides Frodo and Sam through, with all manner of mysterious spooks in it]).

One possibility is to leave the traps as they are, but each time @ encounters a certain kind of trap his ability to avoid it/disarm it increases, until said trap no longer becomes an issue. This would require new, more devious traps being added to the game as you descend deeper in the dungeons. For example, you wouldn't encounter the Temple of Doom crushing ceiling trap until, say, DL30 or so. But eventually, you may get to where traps no longer pose an issue; which seems fine if you are CL50 and ready to take on M.

I've been thinking a lot about Indiana Jones (in my mind a classic go-to for how traps quintessentially operate) and, I assume, an inspiration for a lot of the elements of D&D and Roguelikes (why else can @ wield a whip?).

If we think of Indiana as @, I guess he'd be a Rogue class with a very high perception, but think of his companions who are blundering and triggering traps all the time. Indy is aware of the traps because of his experience as an adventurous archaeologist (read: Rogue), but his companions do not detect the traps, which are invisible to them, and so constantly trigger them. So the films provide us with both scenarios, novice @s or non-Rogue @s exploring the dungeon and triggering invisible traps and experienced @s/Rogues aware of the traps, but still at times triggering them!

Indiana is aware of the trap in the beginning of Raiders where he needs to replace the artifact on the pedestal with something of the same weight so that when he takes the artifact it won't trigger a trap. So we see him sifting sand through his hands as he tries to guess at how heavy he thinks the artifact is. Of course he gets it wrong and he triggers multiple traps: (falling ceiling, firing darts, closing door-slabs of granite). He doesn't know what the traps that he triggers are until the traps have been activated. Of course, he has high DEX and is wearing the Leather Jacket of Hollywood and the Fedora of Indiana Jones so none of the darts hurt him. Indy, immediately after having escaped the pedestal trap and still in a frantic/adrenaline state, inadvertently steps on a floor trigger that unleashes a giant boulder that chases after him.

I guess I'm just trying to get some brainstorming going regarding what good traps are, and for me Indiana Jones is the best source for ideas/inspiration on the topic. Classically: you have poison darts that fire when searching the area for something (or stupid curiosity as is more precisely what happens in the films). Of course, it's a bit more tricky to have subtle cues for where a trap is (as in the films) in a simple ascii map.

In Temple of Doom we have some more fun/good traps. The main bad guy disappears into a trap door. You could have, instead of monsters teleporting away: "Saruman disappears into a trap door!" There's the ever-memorable crushing spiked ceiling (could have a random number of turns (say 15-25 turns) before the ceiling starts crushing you with a little turn counter counting down each time you take a turn as you try to figure out the best way to stop the trap (or escape the room), which would probably involve searching the walls or pillars in the room for a release lever "You found a release lever! The spiked ceiling retreats." or "You fell into a trap! You sink through the floor" or "You found a secret door!" Although in the film Indy requires the help of another person to release the trap.

There's a scene in Temple where a bad guy, hiding camouflaged on the wall, suddenly appears and attacks Indy. Could have monsters that are hiding invisible on the wall and then suddenly they become visible as they approach @ from the wall. (kinda similar to Lurker/Trapper but they are visible once they leave the wall).

You could have some open doors that look normal but when you walk through them they close behind you and are granite once they close (closing door-slab of granite). A trap that you could make only occur with doorways that are open doors, say 3% or 5% of the time. Would be used in conjunction with the crushing spiked ceiling trap, but could also just trigger on its own, making retracing your steps difficult if you don't have a means to dig through granite. So, the crushing trap might occur 1% of the time and a door that just closes as a granite slab coming down would occur 5% of the time. You'd eventually learn that doorways where the door is already open could be such a trap, and then you'd have to decide whether or not you'd want to take the risk of passing through the doorway. Since Angband is a top down 2D game, the trap could be seen triggering in-game as granite walls filling in the room, so the room becomes smaller, and the granite walls become thicker (the room could fill in from one wall (or two walls if it was a particularly diabolical DL98 floor and ceiling crusher).

In one of the Mummy movies there is a trap door that deals damage and drops you into a special room. You could have such a trap door inside of a crushing ceiling trap. Multiple combos of traps in this fashion keep the traps fresh, as sometimes to get out of the crushing ceiling room you'll have to find a lever to stop the trap and reset the room, or a secret door to leave the room, but sometimes the only way out is to fall into another trap in the room, either a trap door that takes you to another level or a trap door that drops you into a special room.

In terms of game mechanics, the special room would be its own dungeon level (so if you look at the map all you see is the special room and magic mapping would only reveal the exit out of the special room, which could be a hidden door that mechanically functions like teleport one level up (but back to the level you were on exactly as it was, NOT a random generated level, [not sure if this would be programmably problematic?)].

So if you were on DL47 when you fell into the secret room The "teleport level" secret door out of the secret room would take you to the other side of the crushing ceiling trap (where you were ostensibly trying to get to when you became trapped inside of the room with a crushing ceiling), but, mechanically, the special room would be located on a "different" dungeon level (so instead of falling through the floor to the next lower down dungeon level, you are falling through the floor into a special room, so instead of it saying DL48, it'd say Special Room, and the door out of the special room would actually be a teleport (but visually a secret door on the map) that would teleport you onto the other side of the crushing ceiling trap room (so back up to the DL48 you were on, exactly as it was).

Summary of trap types, what others can we think of?

• Ranged dart trap
• Stat loss dart
• Crushing ceiling trap
• Multiple kinds of Trap doors (for @ and monster escapes)
• Spiked pit
• Miasma (gas trap)
• Ambush monster trap

Some links:

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Traps#Magic_Trap

From films:
The Boulder trap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr-8AP0To4k
The disappearing trap door: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuh8nrhAqhQ
The leap of faith "trap": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5VjZ1ORS8Y#t=8s
Pillars, no floor, enviro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zwPRGbmrow#t=50s

Some search results including Minecraft Indy traps:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=indiana+jones+traps

[mushroom patch]

The drawbacks of shouting down people who say flavor should not be an important consideration in game design...

[Tarrasque]

The drawbacks of shouting down people who say flavor should not be an important consideration in game design...

Flavor doesn't have to detract from gameplay. That said, If I had to choose I'd pick gameplay. Bad gameplay makes it harder to enjoy flavor anyway.

Sil's magic system where you turn spells "on or off" is pretty neat.

Detection spells could be changed to have a duration. If the radius was reduced on detect traps the duration could be pretty long even without changing the total area detected. You wouldn't reach the edge of the detection zone as quickly when going in one direction. Detect monsters could last a short time and keep the same radius. This might work well if the rod of probing was changed to work on monsters out of your LoS, but only one at a time. I like filling monster memory. I don't feel like I'm required to do it but I can if I want. It's like pokémon.

Frustration or tedium for no reason, or Unavoidable and unforeseeable killing or crippling of a character is bad, but I like having to deal with unfavorable events. In Angband, ignoring death or loss of an artifact, nearly all setbacks are temporary. Boredom is risky, but in-game the more tediously and carefully you play (rest, detect monsters, repeat, grind at DLevel 1 to CLevel 50) the less risk you're in at any one moment.

Working through difficult situations can be fun. As an extreme example that I think everyone would agree on, keeping hunger the same but moving satisfy hunger to the first spellbook and reducing the SP cost to 1 would be awful, but so would adding a super rare undetectable monster that hits for 5000 damage.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Having to make meaningful tactical trap-related decisions make you pay more attention to traps. That increases flavour, I find, if traps are interesting and believable.

[mushroom patch]

Boredom is risky, but in-game the more tediously and carefully you play (rest, detect monsters, repeat, grind at DLevel 1 to CLevel 50) the less risk you're in at any one moment.

This is not at all what people mean when they say you never have to take risks in angband. What they mean is that with careful play (which absolutely includes spamming detection -- and if you don't use detection consistently, you're bad at this game, sorry) you will never be surprised by what happens and you will never be in a position where you cannot easily avoid dying.

Careful play does not mean scumming level 1, it means identifying threats before they can affect you (for example, consistent use of detection), correct decision making about what is worth fighting and/or picking up, and use of spells and items in ways that do not leave you vulnerable (e.g. teleporting within a level when you have woken up dangerous monsters elsewhere would be a case of leaving yourself vulnerable through misuse of items).

In my opinion, lingering at shallow depths has a problem of "too many moving parts" and slow accumulation of useful items. This is one of the primary problems of angband: It is natural for moderately experienced players to conclude that the "safe" or "conservative" strategy is to slowly build up by clearing levels at relatively low depths. That's what you would think based on experience with almost every other CRPG. Since angband players essentially never see each other play, they get caught in this pattern. They don't know anything else through actual game experience! So you see suggestions like "well, if you're one of those crazy careful players who scums 50 ft. until xp level 50..."

[Tarrasque]

This is not at all what people mean when they say you never have to take risks in angband. What they mean is that with careful play (which absolutely includes spamming detection -- and if you don't use detection consistently, you're bad at this game, sorry) you will never be surprised by what happens and you will never be in a position where you cannot easily avoid dying.

Careful play does not mean scumming level 1, it means identifying threats before they can affect you (for example, consistent use of detection), correct decision making about what is worth fighting and/or picking up, and use of spells and items in ways that do not leave you vulnerable (e.g. teleporting within a level when you have woken up dangerous monsters elsewhere would be a case of leaving yourself vulnerable through misuse of items).

In my opinion, lingering at shallow depths has a problem of "too many moving parts" and slow accumulation of useful items. This is one of the primary problems of angband: It is natural for moderately experienced players to conclude that the "safe" or "conservative" strategy is to slowly build up by clearing levels at relatively low depths. That's what you would think based on experience with almost every other CRPG. Since angband players essentially never see each other play, they get caught in this pattern. They don't know anything else through actual game experience! So you see suggestions like "well, if you're one of those crazy careful players who scums 50 ft. until xp level 50..."

Who said I walk around where there might be a trap? My suggestion for trap detection is meant to be on the conservative side, reducing tedium without having to change traps at all or even increase the average area you cover with each cast.

If I go in one direction for a while I'm probably not trying to fight something. So in addition to having to cast detect traps more often in fewer turns the turns take less time IRL and aren't as interesting since there's more running down corridors and less combat. Covering less area per cast when staying in one area won't be too bothersome because the time between detections will probably be broken up by combat or going through items or whatever.

The average area one detects per cast doesn't have to be kept the same though. That was me trying to be conservative. The spell could last long enough so that a cast usually detects at least the same area as now even when you spend turns standing in one spot for a while. I don't feel like detecting traps is super tedious, I think I'd only adjust it so I had to cast it around half as often. I'd increase its mana cost a little bit too.

I mentioned Sil beacause my initial thought was how It might be interesting to have a very small MP pool used for continuous effects so you would have to pick and choose which spells you're casting. I made a less radical proposal instead. Limited duration spells instead of continuous effects while keeping traps and magic as close as possible to the way they are now.

Level 50 at 50' was obvious hyperbole. I'm not the borg. Tedious play (especially when it's repetitive, boring, easy, obvious, or frequent) being less risky is a negative. I know what you mean when you say you don't have to take risks in angband I said I like games that make you have to deal with unfavorable (but not impossible) situations. I clear vaults while feeling plenty safe with a wand of TO. Spamming detect traps and scumming low levels are contrasting examples of what I think is tedious. I don't think I dive (though that imaginary crazy careful player might think I do). In my current game my CLevel is 26 and my max depth is level 44 (I actually slowed my descent recently, but I'm on my way further down again right now). I'm not scumming super shallow levels, except, occasionally, for potions of speed (why are they so common at 50 ft?)

[quarague]

I just wanted to mention brogue for some inspiration/ idea stealing.
Brogue traps have no guaranteed way of detection but there are ways to improve you chance of seeing them and you can search for them, if you want to.
Brogue also has different terrain types like: chasm (can be floated over with special items or jumped down), water (can be swum through but makes you loose items), lava (can be floated over but is otherwise deadly), bushes (block like of sight but are destroyed when walked over)

[bio_hazard]

I just wanted to mention brogue for some inspiration/ idea stealing.
Brogue traps have no guaranteed way of detection but there are ways to improve you chance of seeing them and you can search for them, if you want to.
Brogue also has different terrain types like: chasm (can be floated over with special items or jumped down), water (can be swum through but makes you loose items), lava (can be floated over but is otherwise deadly), bushes (block like of sight but are destroyed when walked over)

I was going to mention Brogue- also for the puzzle room traps. if you haven't played, Brogue has treasure vaults on some levels that require a key to enter. The key is in another room on the level, and picking up the key often triggers something bad to happen, like a torch falling off the wall onto flammable terrain or the room flooding. In these cases the nature of the trap can often be guessed, and the effects can be deadly. However, the rewards are often very good. I'd rate it high both for flavor and for tactical interest.

[Nick]

How would you feel about having some traps that are invisible until you move next to them? Then it is your choice whether to continue moving into that square or do something else, but it's still an unexpected surprise.

The thought has occurred to me that if all traps become visible and magical detection is removed, there's the choice of whether to make traps detected by mapping, clairvoyance, etc. If the answer to that is no, then the player will only discover traps on coming into LOS of them, which seems reasonable.

[debo]

You should add orc peons to the dungeon, and let them upgrade the arrow traps to more powerful ballista towers if they spend enough turns next to them. "Job's done!"

[Derakon]

You should add orc peons to the dungeon, and let them upgrade the arrow traps to more powerful ballista towers if they spend enough turns next to them. "Job's done!"

All joking aside, I think a roguelike that had the player as a hero unit trying to infiltrate and take down RTS bases is a concept that shows promise. If you got detected too soon of course you wouldn't stand a chance against the base's forces, so you'd have to sneak around committing little acts of sabotage until the base is weak enough for you to be more overt.

Not really suited to Angband though.

[Nick]

I would be totally against any system that requires mages to manually deal with traps. They've spent their lives trying to learn to do everything with magic instead of their hands.

I think for mages it should be a little like melee - they don't plan to, but sometimes choosing to is the best option.

Avoiding the problem is a good substitute for disarming it, but you could also have a temporary magic jam on the trap that prevents it triggering.

Priests would be requesting their deity gives them a temporary increase in their skill to disarm or avoid the trap, I feel.

Yes, this is the sort of thing I was thinking of.

Any other opinions for or against my proposed system?

[Derakon]

I don't think that magic should be a straightforward bypass of traps. Why should mages not have to deal with traps when other classes do? The only class with a clear bias towards having an easy time with traps is the rogue.

I mean, I'm not opposed to giving mages some kind of toolkit to help them cope with traps, since their entire shtick is "horribly weak, but has spells to help out". But it shouldn't just be "cast this spell to make traps irrelevant" unless we can find some way to make that interesting. Unfortunately I'm short on ideas right now.