idea for a new variant with a simple, but radical change

[nobody]

I was thinking about vanilla, and how it's gameplay was rather static, and thought of a great idea to totally shake gameplay up with a simple change.
Two words...

No Detection

no detection spells, no detection rods, staves, no telepathy, nothing. I think this simple change would make for some interesting playing, although I guess it certainly wouldn't help the hard early levels for mages. compensation for no detection? I'm undecided on that.

[Sirridan]

You would pretty much have to eliminate all forms of insta-kill then, survival in V is pretty much detect and evade that which can kill you quickly.

Either that, or play in such a way that you must be 100% sure you can survive the floor below you before going down a bit.

[PowerDiver]

Well, go ahead and test. It is easy enough. Just play V and don't use any detections. Post your chars and comment on things so we can see how it goes.

I think you would probably need to make at least one coding change to make it playable. There are situations, vaults and treasure rooms come to mind, where there are lots or perhaps *LOTS* of traps. You'd need to tone down traps in vaults at a minimum. If you don't feel comfortable coding, you can manage vaults by modifying lib/edit/vault.txt. You could also change object.txt and artifact.txt and ego_item.txt to set the frequencies of all detection items to 0.

[buzzkill]

You could always search for traps. Items with +searching would certainly hold more value. Though it wouldn't yield perfect results, you could find many of the traps.

I think that imperfect detection would be more viable, than no detection at all. A detection scheme that works very well near to you and becomes progressively more imperfect with distance.

[Derakon]

In order to make this work, you have to make individual monsters much less dangerous. Currently there are vast numbers of monsters out there that can lop off huge chunks of your hitpoints with one action, and if you can't see them coming then you're toast.

What I'd suggest is that you change the game from one of small-scale battles, between which the player is expected to largely recuperate, to one of moving engagements, where the player doesn't get any chance to breath until he moves on to the next level. That way you can massively tone down the amount of damage individual monsters can do (and thus the threat of an unknown monster nuking you). They're still a threat, but they aren't instantly deadly. In order to accomplish this, I'd suggest in addition to removing detection, that you also remove resting (including natural regeneration) and healing spells. Give the player bonus hitpoints/mana every time they kill a monster (or have monsters drop items that heal you on pickup), and scatter some fixed healing items about each level.

Of course, this is no longer a simple change, and it's starting to look a lot like Diablo...

[fizzix]

I'd recommend trying this in DJA. It has proto-sound so you can get by without detection for a while.

I personally think the first 30-40 levels should be detection free. This means you can detect, but you shouldn't need to and it's not normally available. In fact, this is about how my warriors go, I'll start carrying a staff of detect evil around dlevel 25-35 until I pick up rods of detection.

[Zikke]

This sounds like almost every game of V I play... I am really bad about forgetting (or just being too lazy) to detect.