Trap/door feature branch

[Nomad]

I disagree. Warriors need some reason to feel smugly superior to all the other classes. Let's throw 'em a bone.

Hey, I play almost exclusively warriors, so I'm all in favour of bone-throwing! It just turns out to be surprisingly annoying to keep encountering traps that don't actually do anything, considering you still have to disarm them (or at least use the W command) to progress.

[Nick]

Some much delayed thoughts on the latest trap branch.

Thanks as usual for this. I will use it to tweak traps when I come back around to them - currently I'm progressing toward having a working curse system.

[takkaria]

Some much delayed thoughts on the latest trap branch. And by latest I mean the April 30th nightly. (I finally resorted to cheating to be able to see all the new traps. I'm not a good enough player to test things that appear below level 40!)

Thanks for these! Nice to get feedback on trap designs I've made a bunch of the tweaks you've described and put them in a pull request. The rubble effect was something I hacked up as a first draft but it should always produce 1-3 rubble grids now. The wall to mud message is really annoying but I couldn't see an easy way to improve it since the code was refactored and I'm not that familiar with it anymore. I will leave that to Nick

[Ed′]

Since "glyph" currently means a terrain feature, and "rune" currently means an item feature, perhaps it would make sense to use "glyph" instead of "rune" in trap names?

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Since "glyph" currently means a terrain feature, and "rune" currently means an item feature, perhaps it would make sense to use "glyph" instead of "rune" in trap names?

That sounds good, although I don't think the distinction is as clear as you make out. At least in the name of spells, for a mage it is Rune of Protection whereas for a priest it is a Glyph of Warding.

[Ed′]

That sounds good, although I don't think the distinction is as clear as you make out. At least in the name of spells, for a mage it is Rune of Protection whereas for a priest it is a Glyph of Warding.

That's a fair point. I was thinking only of the terrain feature (symbol identification calls a semicolon a "glyph of warning") and hadn't thought about the red-book spell being named that way.

[Nick]

Since "glyph" currently means a terrain feature, and "rune" currently means an item feature, perhaps it would make sense to use "glyph" instead of "rune" in trap names?

The confusion with the ID runes is a good point. I think you're right that we need more consistency - at least we want to call "Rune of Protection" and "Glyph of Warding" the same thing, and probably name the traps consistently with that. Thoughts?

[Rowan]

No. Just no.

ToME 2.x has targeted teleport if you Possess an appropriate corpse (an example, some other classes get it too). Someone once descended 30 levels in the Nether Realms/Void by "abusing" targeted teleport on levels which a) are only populated by dragons/demons, aka. summoners and breathers, and b) are devoid of any walls, i.e. everything has LoS immediately, and c) has no air, which means constant (pretty hefty) damage every single turn. Said player may have abused other things, but targeted teleport was what made the whole endeavor even remotely feasible. All of this with ~1000HP, btw.

So... you don't think the idea could work because someone once abused it in a variant? To me it sounds like this variant's targeted-teleport was too unlimited. Using it over and over like that, it must have been a reliable and cheap spell, neither of which should be the case for something so powerful.

Which is not even asking the question of why does it matter if someone somewhere dives 30 levels (and most likely dies soon after)?

[Nick]

The latest build on the nightlies page now has takkaria's implementations of Nomad's trap suggestions, as well as removing item bonuses to searching.

[AnonymousHero]

So... you don't think the idea could work because someone once abused it in a variant? To me it sounds like this variant's targeted-teleport was too unlimited. Using it over and over like that, it must have been a reliable and cheap spell, neither of which should be the case for something so powerful.

No, I'm just using the variant as an example of just how powerful and balance-destroying teleport-to is.

Please don't try to put words in my mouth.

Which is not even asking the question of why does it matter if someone somewhere dives 30 levels (and most likely dies soon after)?

It encourages extremely scummy play and there's basically no downside to it.

[Huqhox]

So... you don't think the idea could work because someone once abused it in a variant? To me it sounds like this variant's targeted-teleport was too unlimited. Using it over and over like that, it must have been a reliable and cheap spell, neither of which should be the case for something so powerful.

Perhaps there could be some scope for a targeted teleport if spells inherit a characteristic that's already in Angband for rods and activations: recharge time

So once you used Teleport To you couldn't cast it again for another 50 turns (or whatever). Or it can only be cast with full mana (although obviously postions of restore mana would break this, unless they restored to max mana - 1)

That could also be a useful way of nerfing the other 'overpowered' spells such as Teleport Away and Banishment?

Just a thought

[Ed′]

One thing that stands out to me is that I’m hardly triggering traps at all: I’ve set off just two of them this playthrough, and @ currently has both disarming skills at 100%, which I assume means I won’t be tripping any more unless I fail to detect them.

Relatedly, I was sent away by a quylthulg and did not detect a trap next to the square where I landed, so I stepped on it unawares. Is that behavior intentional or a bug?

The traps I have hit have been interesting: the first sounded an alarm right after a deep descent; the second summoned a lich that I only survived by TOing.

Also some bugs probably unrelated to the trap branch:

When I equipped what I would eventually learn was a lantern of true sight, there were two oddities: (1) after pBlnd took effect but before I knew all of the runes, pBlnd had a “+” in the character screen but was still dark and (2) inspecting the lantern told me “No fuel required” up until the point where the lantern was fully IDed.

Inspecting a ?ID gives the ungrammatical “When read, it Identify a single unknown property of a selected item.”

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Re targeted teleport, is everyone discussing the same idea? I thought when Calris introduced it, it was a targeted-teleport trap, one that would try to plop @ in a vault.

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Perhaps beyond the scope of this branch, but I think certain traps could add a lot more tactically if monsters could choose to set them off, and the AI occasionally used this ability. E.g., I wake a room of orcs, and one or two of them make a beeline for the summoning trap.

[Chud]

I also suspect targeted teleport is going to be way too powerful to be realistic. But, if you did want to go there, how about making it a potentially dangerous, last-resort thing to do?

Say, using it makes all forms of teleport unavailable for some number of turns (this to include teleport, phase door, blink, recall, everything, and from any source---rod, staff, scroll, spell, all will be broken for a while).

Or, maybe it reduces you to 5HP. Sure, you can heal on your next turn, but if some creature happens to have spawned within range of your destination and gets a move first, RIP...

[Nick]

One thing that stands out to me is that I’m hardly triggering traps at all: I’ve set off just two of them this playthrough, and @ currently has both disarming skills at 100%, which I assume means I won’t be tripping any more unless I fail to detect them.

That sounds a bit low, even if you're playing a hobbit rogue.

Relatedly, I was sent away by a quylthulg and did not detect a trap next to the square where I landed, so I stepped on it unawares. Is that behavior intentional or a bug?

Bug.

When I equipped what I would eventually learn was a lantern of true sight, there were two oddities: (1) after pBlnd took effect but before I knew all of the runes, pBlnd had a “+” in the character screen but was still dark and (2) inspecting the lantern told me “No fuel required” up until the point where the lantern was fully IDed.

Inspecting a ?ID gives the ungrammatical “When read, it Identify a single unknown property of a selected item.”

Thanks for those.

Perhaps beyond the scope of this branch, but I think certain traps could add a lot more tactically if monsters could choose to set them off, and the AI occasionally used this ability. E.g., I wake a room of orcs, and one or two of them make a beeline for the summoning trap.

That's a thought. Some variants have monster traps that the player can set; it may be possible to change the monster-trap relationship in a number of interesting ways.

[Nomad]

Perhaps beyond the scope of this branch, but I think certain traps could add a lot more tactically if monsters could choose to set them off, and the AI occasionally used this ability. E.g., I wake a room of orcs, and one or two of them make a beeline for the summoning trap.

That's a thought. Some variants have monster traps that the player can set; it may be possible to change the monster-trap relationship in a number of interesting ways.

How about adding some code so that when a monster with the SMART flag is fleeing or at low HP and steps into a square with a helpful trap (alarms, summoning or teleport) it activates the trap?