Trap Thoughts

[Netbrian]

I think there's a general consensus that dealing with traps should probably be made less trivial.

However, I think that this requires some thought as to what we want to accomplish by making scarier traps. If we assume that detecting them will be harder for some classes, then we need to balance the game around the assumption that people will be stumbling into the traps at fairly regular intervals. I don't think having people actively search for traps every step of the way is a particularly enjoyable game mechanic, nor do I think having your character or stuff regularly wrecked because you failed a trap detection roll is all that compelling.

One option that I find intriguing would be traps that work within a specific radius (I think NPPAngband does something like this?) The idea would be that if you set off the trap by getting too close, it activates an effect to make your life difficult until you can disarm it or get outside the trap's area of effect. Possible effects would be summoning monsters, shortening the duration of positive effects, healing monsters, aggravating them, etc. The idea is that the player has a chance to take an informed risk about how they want to handle the trap, and it changes gameplay in potentially interesting ways (for instance, you might have to deal with a trap that regularly spits fire at you while raiding a vault.)

The better a player's perception/dexterity, the greater their chances would be at noticing the trap from a distance, not setting it off, and disarming it quickly.

What does everyone else think? Would it it into Vanilla Angband well?

[Tiburon Silverflame]

One option that I find intriguing would be traps that work within a specific radius (I think NPPAngband does something like this?) The idea would be that if you set off the trap by getting too close, it activates an effect to make your life difficult until you can disarm it or get outside the trap's area of effect.

We don't have remote trap disarm, so you'll ALWAYS be subject to its effects before you can take care of it.

And, oh joy, won't this make being exposed to eleventy-hundred different traps *at one time* in many vaults, a whole lot of fun...

And Wormy's "create traps" might well become rather *lethal*.

[Derakon]

NPP has some traps that can fire bolts at you of various types (the "shimmering" traps). I generally find them to be a positive addition since you have to carefully plan around them or else carry wands/rods of disarming or trap/door destruction. Not all traps are ranged traps; that would certainly be a problem.

[Netbrian]

Originally Posted by Derakon

NPP has some traps that can fire bolts at you of various types (the "shimmering" traps). I generally find them to be a positive addition since you have to carefully plan around them or else carry wands/rods of disarming or trap/door destruction. Not all traps are ranged traps; that would certainly be a problem.

Right -- it would only be specific trap types. The way I envisioned it, if you had high enough stealth/stats, you wouldn't necessarily trigger the trap if you went within its radius.

[PowerDiver]

Originally Posted by Derakon

NPP has some traps that can fire bolts at you of various types (the "shimmering" traps). I generally find them to be a positive addition since you have to carefully plan around them or else carry wands/rods of disarming or trap/door destruction. Not all traps are ranged traps; that would certainly be a problem.

I wouldn't mind if the attacking runes were the only kind of traps, assuming sufficiently rare, but I found them far more annoying than interesting in the recent NPP comp. You go into an open vault with a bunch of traps, and you have to inspect every one to check if it is an attack rune. It's even worse when there are hordes of wimps interfering with the 'l'ooking. The number of keypresses was absurd. Then after all that, one zap with a rod of disarming and it's done. BORING.

[Derakon]

The attack traps shimmer, so if they aren't covered over by monsters then you should be able to pick them out fairly easily.

[PowerDiver]

Originally Posted by Derakon

The attack traps shimmer, so if they aren't covered over by monsters then you should be able to pick them out fairly easily.

Perhaps that depends upon the port or something else. They weren't always obvious to me, although sometimes they were, using -msdl on a linux box.

[nppangband]

Originally Posted by Derakon

The attack traps shimmer, so if they aren't covered over by monsters then you should be able to pick them out fairly easily.

The 0.5.3 working version of NPP at github has the shimmercolors option from Angband 0.5.2. When I got them to work on monsters, I was leasantly suprised to see they worked on the smart traps and other shimmering features as well, so they are real easy to spot now. Plus I realized the shimmering was limited to the 16 base colors, so I expanded it to use all of the NPP color shades. So the smart traps are real easy to spot now.

As for traps casting spells at the player, NPP features can be installed in Vanilla without turning vanilla into NPP. In NPP they cast when the player is in line-of-sight. That can easily be changed so they only cast when the player is withing 3 squares, or something like that.

[EpicMan]

If we have ranged traps like that, Rogues should get a ranged (bolt or beam) spell to disarm them so that they can immediately disarm a trap when they get attacked by one.

Some people have suggested trap-setting for Rogues, what about a Rogue-only spell that instead of disarming an adjacent trap 'converts' it so that it ignores the player but will attack monsters moving on to it.

You could also give the rouge a couple of spells that create one-shot traps, maybe a bear trap-style trap that prevents monster movement until they break it (copying the rune of protection mechanics), or a trap that prevents spellcasting for a few turns, etc, etc.