More thoughts on traps

[Fendell Orcbane]

Originally Posted by Narvius

I think traps would be generally much more interesting if there were NO DAMAGE TRAPS. At all. Because those are boring. Basically either lethal (and thus require perfect TD) or negligible (in which case they are redundant).

Instead:
teleport
summon
whole-level aggravation
item steal traps (item dropped SOMEwhere on level, with possible restrictions being "outside vault", "within x of trap")
trap doors
destruction (kind of a mixed-blessing. Someone who finds one of these may very well want to walk into it strategically)
earthquake
melee-block curse (can't melee for some short time)
spell-block curse
item-curse (only sticky curse)
unbuff (removes all current buffs)
slowing
elemental weakness
temporary stat drain (this one could be annoying, so temporary drain that times out after a few hundred turns. As recompensation, they would ignore sustains)
manadrain (all SP, plus temporarily no regen)
fumble curse (can't use devices)
+ basically everything that temporarily disables some subset of @ skills.

These are all potentially disastrous, but not by as brutishly direct means as instakill damage traps.

Damage traps only make sense when damage is hard to remove - this isn't the case in Angband. Here, you can sleep next to a bunch of giant fire demons for a few minutes and all your severed limbs will grow back.

I think these are all very cool traps!

[Therem Harth]

Narvius: got to admit, my first thought there was "Oh no, not melee blocking." But now that I think about it, this could be really cool, as long as the effect is limited to an area or kept to reasonable duration.

Actually I have some ideas about antimagic/antimelee stuff that aren't strictly trap related, so I think I'll post those in another thread.

[andrewdoull]

Originally Posted by Therem Harth

Yeah, ranged traps sound good. But again, lethality has to be kept in check IMO, or it's just another way to die through no fault of the player. e.g. in Unangband there are a lot of hugely damaging ranged traps in the early dungeons; you can stumble into one and get instakilled on level 1.

I think 'most' of those are buggy boulder-style traps.

[Therem Harth]

"Boulder-style"? I wouldn't know about those, but I did have a character instakilled by a poison gas trap.