ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Escort quest. Second one the character'd had. Both got hit with poison by unavoidable poison traps (in the starting corridor of the map). First escort died due to about 40 snakes and being brought down to 0 hp by the trap.

The second escort, though, this freaking thing! Repented thief. Escape portal was in the first bloody room of the map. The thief gets one step. ONE STEP AWAY. One step away from the portal. I get... this:



That was cold, ToME. Freaking cold. I'm sitting where the thief died, and I can't even see the bloody tree. THERE WILL BE VENGEANCE

Sometime tomorrow. I quit, man, I give up. Today is not a good day to play.

Agreement with no-escort on boss levels, here. Also, squelching fire and poison traps on escort levels would be really freaking awesome.

I feel with you - although there is a way to take the traps upon yourself, instead of the suicidal escortee. But that's for the spoiler forums, I guess.

just swap positions with him.

Dervis misses bandit.
Bandit hits Dervis for 37.31 physical damage.
Bandit hits Dervis for 19.11 light damage.
Bandit performs a critical strike!
Bandit hits Dervis for 34.13 physical damage.
Bandit hits Dervis for 19.11 darkness damage.
Bandit deactivates Stealth.

Found this guy in the Old Forest... Can anyone tell what he's carrying?

Objects of astrological import!

That's not very cruel of the RNG, though. Unless you're not playing a knife user. Even then, it's good money. Putting it on something squishy like a bandit is quite kind of th'bugger. Much nicer than putting Wrathroot in shooting distance of an escort portal. Mutter, mutter, grumble.

Yep, just needed somewhere to drop this and it wasn't worth it's own topic.

I once had an escort killed by Rantha's breath while I was standing in front of it, that one was annoying too.

I escorted a repented thief yesterday to the portal, where he died because there was an undiscovered trap under the portal

Not fair, referee

Predawn

Okay... yeah, that's one-upping my Wrathroot encounter. Barely, but it's certainly a trumping.

Maybe escort levels should just squelch traps entirely but up monster numbers a bit? I might call that fair.

I can see a check that a trap isn't generted under the portal, but other than that, I think changes to the lvl based on escort generation aren't necessary. However, smarter escort ai [now instead of being manabolted I'm mindblasted... great] and the ability to heal/recover burn/poison from your escort would suffice. Hell, just being able to recover effects would probably suffice.

A "hold still while I go kill these guys" option would probably solve 90% of the troubles involved in escort quests. A "go to this point first, i.e. around the trap you now-bleeding idiot" directive would solve the other 10%. Putting both on a cooldown would make it non-abusable -- the escortee would see it's a good idea to hold a second or go in a different direction for a little while, but not loiter around until you've xenocided the entire map. Best of all possibly worlds We know all this already

As for the trap thing, it's mostly just the problems with unavoidable traps that irks me. It's entirely possible for a 100+ damage trap to be sitting in an unavoidable 1-tile wide corridor. That, and that alone, kills probably 75% of the escorts I have die on me.

The other 24% is monster pits. How th'blazes am I supposed to keep that bugger alive when there's 50 ants on the screen and the idiot just slipped past me into the open? Phase door and time prison -- yes, yes, shut up mage.

The last 1% is stuff like Wrathroot sniping my doods. That's viciously annoying, but rare enough I can forgive, if it's been an otherwise good day.

In the other hand, when you do manage to save the guy from overwhelming odds it feels quite epic... like that time I managed to finish off all fragmented essences AND Harkon'zun before our friend got killed.

In some ways, I rather like the idiocy. It makes me feel like I've actually *earned* the reward.

Mind you, there is a difference between "idiocy" and "patently unfair". Having the escort AI route around discovered traps when relatively easy to do so, and making sure that the gate is not itself on a trap both seem like reasonable things to put in. Possibly up the monster generation on the level to compensate.

Frumple wrote:A "go to this point first, i.e. around the trap you now-bleeding idiot" directive would solve the other 10%.

That could also be fixed by (1) sharing the player's knowledge of traps with the escortee and (2) making the escortee AI avoid traps if it can still path to the portal around them.

Even the player running AI goes over perfectly avoidable traps. Both need fixing in my opinion.

The player running AI stops if it's about to step on a detected trap. Sure, pathing around them would be even better, but it's not horrible as is.