ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Just wanted to get a thread going for us to put our trap ideas in.

Lets try to avoid instagibs and permanent destruction of character stats or gear and keep it to interesting effects that do damage, put the character in interesting situations, or give him temporary debuffs that make him miserable.

Because you all know how much I love time manipulation effects I'll get the ball rolling with a couple of chronomancy effects I think would make for interesting traps.

Destabilization Trap
This trap destabilizes the actor's connection to the Spacetime Continuum for the next 3 turns. While Destabilized the target teleports (range 11) at random each turn and suffers X temporal damage every time it's teleported.

Inertial Leak
When the trap is triggered all actors in a radius of five around the trap gain X% global speed. For each actor so affected the actor that triggered the trap loses X% of its global speed. Effect lasts Y game turns.

And a couple resource based effects...

Burn-Out
The actor that triggers this trap gains X stamina or mana per turn at the expense of X*2 hit points per turn. Effect lasts Y turns.

Energy Leak
Actor loses X stamina or mana per turn for the next Y turns.

Energy Burn
Actor loses X% of his stamina or mana.

That destabilization trap forced phase door is far more dangerous than the temporal damage it causes in my opinion.

For the inertial leak, that sounds ridiculously dangerous. If I understood your post correctly, then if there were ten enemy in a radius, then each of those enemy would get a speed boost (already very dangerous), but also that the player's speed would be decreased by ten times the usual speed penalty. That could get out of hand real quick.

Nethack's rolling boulder trap is pretty awesome. Although you'd have to add boulders to support it.

What about the traditional "crossbow-in-a-wall" trap? When you trigger the trap, an arrow flies out of a nearby wall. It could hit you, but it could hit some other creature closer to the wall instead..

You could even have magic versions, like a manathrust trap.

bigfoot wrote:That destabilization trap forced phase door is far more dangerous than the temporal damage it causes in my opinion.

That's actually the idea. The damage should be lower then a comparable trap.

For the inertial leak, that sounds ridiculously dangerous. If I understood your post correctly, then if there were ten enemy in a radius, then each of those enemy would get a speed boost (already very dangerous), but also that the player's speed would be decreased by ten times the usual speed penalty. That could get out of hand real quick.

The % should be balanced with that in mind, I was thinking 10% as a decent baseline with a + or - 5% variance based on how deep the trap is. Ten enemies probably isn't a reasonable number to balance around though, maybe four. Also if you have that many enemies in an area odds are one will trigger the trap before you do, giving you the speed bonus

I have a few movement ones in mind. First, a simple bear trap that doesn't allow an actor to move for Y turns, but otherwise can act. Second, a tentacle trap that when triggered spawns tentacles that draw actors in radius X toward the trap (reverse knockback). Both could have physical resistance checks.

The ressource based ones should probably be only one and affect all ressources.

The inertia one sounds neat but yes the number of considered actors should probably be capped so it does nto spell instadeath.

And yufra, does your tentacle trap have a bonus against japanesse schoolgirls ?

@DG: It's even worse! The propability that japanese schoolgirls randomly summon and instatrigger a tentacle-trap is directly proportional to the ratio $size_of_breasts / $length_of_skirt. Jeez... we need the jap. shoujo class (sic! pun intended!) ... Mushroom? Can you prepare nice tiles for that? That would be a reason to finally turn of ASCII-mode!

Lol I have to do a HentaiRL module ?

[OT] Just add a quest finally explaining how female dwarves look like: gigantic breasted sexy jap idols (by the way, that would be a good reason why they never revealed them to the world)

Oh goodness, I have inadvertently derailed this thread.

Hentai references aside...

I like the Bear Trap idea and the Reverse Knockback idea, maybe something other then tentacles should be used though >.>

Thought of another way to do resource burn.

Burning Curse
Trap inflicts the actor with a Burning Curse. Whenever a resource is used the actor takes damage equal to the amount spent. Burning Curse lasts until X damage is inflicted. (Can be removed by effects that remove magic, might also be a good curse idea for corrupters, I'll cross post it.).

And here's some more generic traps.

Net Trap
Pins the actor for X turns or until it suffers Y damage.

Thunder (sound) Trap
Inflicts X damage and dazes the actor for Y turns.

yeah remember we try to keep these forums clean *cough cough*...
status effect traps

• Disarm
• Blinding light - does light damage and blinds the player
• Psi bolt trap - does arcane damage, but also gives the player temporary esp against a random type

Deeper darkness - does darkness damage, blinds the one who sets it off, and casts the darkness spell
Steal Item - removes a random item from the player inventory and places it somewhere on the map (maybe have a 5% chance to just destroy the item )

Steal items wouldn't be bad as long as it was inventory only (not equipment) and couldn't target artifacts (losing a quest artifact to a trap would really suck).

Another thought on blinding traps would be a plant that releases spores in a radius of 1 when triggered. Blinding everyone.

Some sort of pinning trap would be a neat addition. Could be a bear-claw trap set by hunters meant for animals, could be set by orcs looking for a meal, could be some sort of vine or quicksand. Would also be nice if seeing something trigger a trap caused you to see the trap yourself.

Edit: Ooh. Or something that leaves the victim unable to heal for a moderate duration.

On that same note a rusty bear trap could give someone tetanus!!