ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

They always land you in storeroom and equal instadeath. My great roguelike archer just got instakilled because of this.

I think it is bad game design personally.

I can't see the point of them.

They'd be interesting if they only acted short-range and were always visible. Then you could use them tactically.

I do agree they can be slightly unfair. My own Cursed walked into one exploring outside area before water. Was teleported straight into boss room, in sight of at least 6 mages, unique, Worm that Walks and various others. Even if you were lucky and spawned kinda next to door, you would only manage to Movement infus walk to middle area, with even more mages aggroing you. I lived only through stacking Rampage with Movement that gave me 100k% speed or so. For any other char, it's gg no re.

Yes, it's almost always in the water north of the entry

Heightened Senses does have its uses...

Omega Blue wrote:Heightened Senses does have its uses...

This. Traps should be threatening. A majority of the traps are not. Teleport traps are not even necessarily threatening--I've had one teleport me when I was running away from an enemy and didn't see the trap to a convenient hiding spot where I had time to recover, and I've had them teleport me to the middle of nowhere--it's entirely random. Even if you don't have the survival tree, all you need is to be lucky enough to find and rescue *one* thief escort and grab a point in heightened senses so you can see the traps as you autoexplore; autoexplore naturally avoids them if you see them before triggering them if at all possible (though it has no qualms about walking right over them if there is no way to bypass them and you've explored every other area you can, sans areas behind closed doors).

While I do think it's unlucky to be killed by one as such, assuming you did have at least one thief escort, you really don't have an excuse. (yes, I know that there's a chance that even w/ a point in HS, you won't see the trap, but that's not very common, and the uncommonness of tele traps + the chance that they won't tele you somewhere dangerous combined with this makes it exceedingly unlikely you won't fall victim to an untimely death to one)

In that case, the game might as well roll a dice when you enter the zone and kill you based on the outcome. If Vor Armoury must have teleport traps, they should be changed to something interesting. Traps are pretty dull anyway.

The only problem that I have with teleport traps in Vor Armory is that the area in the main boss room (not Room of Death) where all the items are aranged around the pillars, sometimes I find teleport traps on the same tile as one of those items, basically making the item unobtainable unless your packing trap removal (which most classes probably aren't. Trap detection, sure, but trap removal?). This leads to tasty, tasty loot having to just be left and forgotten. Sadface...

Unless you've gone antimagic wands of trap destruction are actually very common though. Prox's lucky halfling foot will halt autoexplore anywhere near a trap too.

Which is a great argument for cutting the traps altogether. If they're trivial to locate and remove, then why have them at all? They're just an artifact of earlier versions of ToME nowadays.

Mewtarthio wrote:Which is a great argument for cutting the traps altogether. If they're trivial to locate and remove, then why have them at all? They're just an artifact of earlier versions of ToME nowadays.

If they are trivial, why would some players complain about their lethality? Everything is trivial to characters with the proper talents and stats, otherwise not so.

Because no one wants to have to zap every inch of Vor Armoury with a wand of trap destruction. Trivially easy, but incredibly boring and potentially lethal if you don't do it and happen not to have gotten a means of detecting traps.

I think traps are pretty well balanced as they are. They're rarely lethal by themselves but are significant enough that you can't just ignore them, usually. (If you know there are teleport traps in vor_armory, you need to take precautions, like being able to find them, disarm them, or having your own means of teleport handy in case you trip one.)

Bear in mind that some classes, (rogue builds, mostly) rely on traps and so the trap mechanic itself is not going away.

bricks: Most traps are faction-based and monsters won't trigger them.

DragonDai: There is no reason to leave loot behind in the vor_armory if you kill all the monsters first.

Maybe the large chamber should just be flagged as some kind of room or compartment, often built of or lined with steel, reserved for the storage and safekeeping of valuables, especially such a place in a bank. I've found out that it isn't the hard way through cleverly trying to teleport during the antechamber battle more than once. Gets me every time.

As for traps as a whole.. meeeeeh. More annoying than everything and never impedes the player progress in any meaningful way (except sometimes boulder traps in corridors, literally). Enviromental obstacles that cannot feasibly kill the player character by themselves outside of combat are just a waste of player time imo. One idea would be to remove the current traps entirely and add custom vaults instead. Except instead of marked entrances the player wouldn't even realize it was there until they were in the middle of it. And instead of treasure it'd contain certain doom. Of course, there's a host of practical problems associated with this approach as well, but it'd beat the current harmless implementations.

Hachem_Muche wrote:bricks: Most traps are faction-based and monsters won't trigger them.

Er, did I imply otherwise somewhere? My "tactical" comment was more in regards to using short-range teleport traps to reposition yourself, not to lure enemies onto the traps (which could also be cool, but I'd assume that the orcs would have some general idea of where they hid their traps).

Regarding rogue traps, those barely line up with dungeon traps (though presumably certain mechanics interact - it's hard to tell when mobs hardly ever use trap talents). Actually, enemies using a "teleport rune" or similar talent sounds pretty cool, and a lot more interesting. You'd end up with a constantly shifting battlefield.

Teleport traps could also be changed to only relocate you to a position within the trap's "field of view."