What else should not be allowed in vaults?

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by fizzix

Turning off mapping I have little problem with. You will *see* the vault because there will be an obvious void in the dungeon, but you might have to work a little more to navigate around it if you haven't studied vault.txt . Turning off trap and door detection doesn't bother me either.

So you are saying that everyone should read vault.txt to figure out where traps are? I have played this game more than 20 years and I still can't remember trap layout of every vault. And now there are more of them.

Without reading vault.txt that means search(x10), step, search(x10), step, ad nauseum.

Even with reading it if you remove mapping you need to do that until you can recognize the vault.

Or casting remove traps for every single step "just in case" if you can. Floor grids with items are safe, so maybe you need to start throwing items in front of you to figure out if there is a trap there. That would be rather boring and dangerous: "Eeek, there is a monster I can't handle. I need to make side-step....except that there might be a trap there. -teleport-."

Not going to work unless you incorporate natural non-magical LoS trap detection with very high % of success for every class (and 100% for rogues). AND remove trap doors completely.

Basically you would make vaults disgusting places. Something to hate instead of getting exited about. I would probably just avoid all vaults. And soon after that avoid vanilla angband, and start playing some variant. Or maybe forget that there is some "development" -versions and stay playing 3.2.

Vaults are salt of the game. You are replacing salt with butanoic acid.

[Nick]

I pretty much agree with Timo here. Vaults are hard now, and frequent places for characters to die; on the other hand, standing outside the vault and destructing or banishing is pretty cheap. I quite like the idea of destruction in vaults only working on LOS - this maintains it as a lifesaving move, without making it a cheap way to wipe out everything but the artifacts.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Nick

I pretty much agree with Timo here. Vaults are hard now, and frequent places for characters to die; on the other hand, standing outside the vault and destructing or banishing is pretty cheap. I quite like the idea of destruction in vaults only working on LOS - this maintains it as a lifesaving move, without making it a cheap way to wipe out everything but the artifacts.

Destruction and mass-banishment are vault/pit abuses. Anything else is not. No need to remove anything else.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Nick

I pretty much agree with Timo here. Vaults are hard now, and frequent places for characters to die; on the other hand, standing outside the vault and destructing or banishing is pretty cheap. I quite like the idea of destruction in vaults only working on LOS - this maintains it as a lifesaving move, without making it a cheap way to wipe out everything but the artifacts.

Clearly fizzix needs some assistance here (looks around for someone else ...) ...

I *do* think detection needs to be *slightly* nerfed. The advances in UI throughout the 3.1.x series have made much much more info available to the player. Timo himself compared it unfavourably to the grittier experience of playing f-k, when you couldn't examine monsters to know whether that D was a white or an AMHD etc.

I think this is especially true for item detection. Being able to see all the items on a level, including those in vaults, is not strategic, it's just cheesy. I'd fully support a change that meant that the various item detection spells did not reveal items in vaults. You *know* there will be good items in vaults - there's no need to know exactly which ones unless you're going to go in there.

I do agree with Timo that this change should not be extended to monsters though.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Magnate

Clearly fizzix needs some assistance here (looks around for someone else ...) ...

I *do* think detection needs to be *slightly* nerfed. The advances in UI throughout the 3.1.x series have made much much more info available to the player. Timo himself compared it unfavourably to the grittier experience of playing f-k, when you couldn't examine monsters to know whether that D was a white or an AMHD etc.

I think this is especially true for item detection. Being able to see all the items on a level, including those in vaults, is not strategic, it's just cheesy. I'd fully support a change that meant that the various item detection spells did not reveal items in vaults. You *know* there will be good items in vaults - there's no need to know exactly which ones unless you're going to go in there.

I do agree with Timo that this change should not be extended to monsters though.

In old versions you could still see the items and monsters, just not examine them, so purple potion was just a purple potion until you could actually see it. Same with monsters. Red "D" was almost certainly a Ancient Red Dragon, but you could not tell the difference between Gravity and Inertia hounds unless you saw them.

This is something I would like to see in angband now. I'm not quite sure how to play with ESP though. Some part of me says that you should know what the monster is with ESP without seeing it, but part of me says that it is too much and just increases the power of ESP over detection too much. Maybe if we stop using the word "Telepathy" for ESP and really use ESP then latter could make sense.

Part of me also would like to revert all uniques to match some lesser monster, because they are not their own race, just unique creatures of that race. But that would probably be a bit too much and would in some cases cause a really bad surprises.

[TJS]

I really don't like the idea of game rules changing for no particular reason in certain parts of the map, it seems totally arbitrary.

New players will try to use the same techniques they've everywhere else and then find them not working inside vaults for no apparent reason.

If banishment and destruction need to be changed then it should be consistent across the whole game. I like the changes suggested with banishment only working within line of sight and monsters having a saving chance against destruction and all items getting removed if caught in the blast.

[buzzkill]

I was under the impression that, and I'm not sure where I got this from, the vault's outer wall could be detected from outside the vault. Just the interior would remain unknown. Also, once inside the vault, mapping and detection would reveal the layout and contents of the vault. I've got no problem with that if it is as I've described it.

I've always thought it was a bit cheesy that interesting rooms and vaults could often be found without any form of mapping by detecting traps. A large concentration of traps is probably worth checking into.

If you're talking about cheesy vault abuse, add TO to the list. A wand of TO, commonly available before most vaults start appearing, can eliminate 50%-100% of the threats depending on the layout.

[ewert]

Make destruct remove artifacts too, and use the fizzix "push beyond boundary or destroy" save type of destruction. Destruct "fixed" for vaults/pits.

Not sure about banishes ... I mean yeah, especially mass banish is abusomania concerning vaults, but how to modify it. LoS mass banish would work, but that makes the whole spell a glorified weak escape. In this case I think the move to having "icky floor" (vaultspace) protect from both banishes would work.

Teleport other requires you to move into LoS (barring LoS abuse, which is altogether another issue). I have lost a good char to a druj due to this once, so IMHO it is NOT such a big abuse thing. If TO is changed to bolt instead of beam, it smacks TO itself quite hard, so moving TO to bolt would also maybe be an answer.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

So you are saying that everyone should read vault.txt to figure out where traps are? I have played this game more than 20 years and I still can't remember trap layout of every vault. And now there are more of them.

Without reading vault.txt that means search(x10), step, search(x10), step, ad nauseum.

Sounds to me that you think the current trap detection/searching system is broken. By the time you're cracking GVs you are probably around clevel 25-30. I'm guessing a normal player with +3 - +4 searching at this level *should* be able to detect traps at something like 95% effectiveness every turn. (not that they do now, just that this should be the ability we aim for) If this *still* isn't good enough for reasonable trap avoidance without too much tedium, perhap's ewert's LoS trap detection should be poached.

Just so we're on the same page, I think searching through vault.txt is a poor solution and should never be encouraged.

[d_m]

I fully support making vaults immune to destruction and mass banishment. I am not sure whether standard banishment gets abused with regard to vaults... certainly warriors are not in a great position to do so but priests might be.

I think the detection discussion is a tangent. For now I would leave detection and vaults alone, because there are a lot of changes that I think most of the devs are on the same page about:

1. Moving ESP from a on/off ability to something like searching (ESP +1, +2, etc) to limit its effective range in some cases and expand it in others.
2. Creating something like ESP but for one monster type (orcs, demons, etc)
3. Making ESP (or certain kinds of ESP) give less precise info (e.g. only presence/absence, or only base monster kind, or something)

EDIT: I don't want to go too far into speculative territory, but you could imagine all kinds of other sensory abilities, like danger sense, knowing that kinds of monsters are nearby without a direction, knowing that certain monsters are on the level without knowing where, etc, etc. Many of those are more appropriate for variants but it's worth thinking about.

There are other things which tie into reworking detection, like:

1. reviewing the mage/priest spell lists
2. reviewing how common/rare detection items should be
3. reviewing the actual detection effects (e.g. which types of things should be seen with which spells/effects and at what range)

For what it's worth, something like searching LOS sounds nice.