Usable searching and disarming

[Lord Estraven]

I think it would be nice if searching and disarming abilities were actually useful in T2. Problem is I'm having trouble thinking of ways to make it work without breaking stuff or hurting game balance.

For instance, one could make Sneakiness and Disarming skills raise their respective abilities at a ratio of 25 to 1 or thereabouts (i.e. get_skill_scale(foo, 500)). This is how I handled it in my attempt at a ToME2 spinoff, and it does make those skills competitive... But it also makes it totally useless to raise them to more than ~15, which is broken behavior.

Or some other skill could be made to raise searching and perception - Magic Device maybe, or perhaps Combat or Magic. But I think this is putting too much power in one skill. And it makes Sneakiness and Disarming skills useless at what they specialize in, which is also completely broken.

There could be some kind of purchasable ability that gives you perfect searching and disarming. But that would again obsolete the relevant skills.

What do you guys think is the best way to handle this?

[Yottle]

The problem as I see it is that the skills are useless. Searching is available through various low level spells and cheap scrolls available in town. Disarm takes a couple of points of Conveyance to cast. Antimagic users have their own solution to both.

So what kind of character would want to put points into them?

The only thought that I have is that you might take the trap detection/destruction away from unbelievers (both effects seem magical to me) and force UBs to use searching and disarming. Then antimagic should raise the skills. UBs have it pretty easy anyway, so having something else to spend points on would help balance.

[Lord Estraven]

Carrying around a ton of scrolls of trap detection is annoying. Conveyance isn't available to everyone, and can't be reliably gotten from FF. Antimagic is good, but not if you want a warrior who can use magic devices; and rod tips of trap detection and disarming are uncommon. Staves cannot be relied upon at high levels due to charge draining.

Basically I find it tedious to deal with traps, and I think it would be nice to give players the option of not having to deal with them, at the expense of skill points.

[AnonymousHero]

Something which I haven't seen mentioned yet:

Given the deadliness of some traps (silent switching, scatter all Items, etc.), it must be possible to get 100% reliability at some point, i.e. not miss any traps nor fail to disarm. The only other option would be to get rid of all the "potential instant death" traps and perhaps rescale maximum trap damage to avoid instant death from leveled traps.

But let's take a little step back here and a ask a bigger question: Are traps an interesting game mechanic?

What would the game lose if they (and their related usless skills) were removed?

[Yottle]

I think that traps make life interesting for low-level characters. High level characters all have some way of dealing with them. I would not eliminate them.

[AnonymousHero]

Sure, high-level characters can deal with them, but AFAICT they only actually add tedium. How fun is it to have a "press key X periodically to avoid death" mechanic?

You do have a point about low-to-midlevel characters (EDIT: that is to say, they add a little flavor), but for them traps are essentially inconsequential... there's an extremely low probability of anything particularly dangerous happening when stepping on low-level traps.

Adding a birth option to disable traps might be interesting to test out whether they actually add anything interesting to the game in practise.

[Lord Estraven]

AH pretty much nails it IMO. I do agree that traps add flavor at low and medium levels, and can make the game a bit harder, but at high levels their unmitigated lethality makes them a nuisance to the player.

In retrospect though, I don't think the problem is perception and disarming not working; the problem is trap leveling. In V for instance the worst kind of traps you can find are summoning and teleport traps; whereas some of the traps in T2 can insta-kill a level 50 character.

Looking at the source code, it looks like almost all the traps have potency depending on the dungeon level, and the way it's done would make it rather annoying to change. But perhaps I'll try making a branch where all the traps are non-leveling.

[Yottle]

Getting rid of trap leveling would make me happy. I lost a character in the Void to a trap. Since you can't run there I was moving manually and moved out of the trap detection area. I am not sure what it was, but I ended up with several hundred negative hp.

[Lord Estraven]

(Sorry I haven't done anything yet, I've been a bit busy and I'm going off on a vacation today, so...)

Thinking a bit more about it... Making Perception and Disarming scale much better would make sense, if they had some other bonus at high skill levels. Can you guys think of any? Maybe they could make traps set by the player more powerful, or something else that would benefit Rogues?

Edit: Also, re disabling trap leveling... In that case I'd have to remove stuff like the Scatter Items traps.

The more I think about it, the more I feel in favor of making traps optional with a bit of skill point expenditure. I'm going to try making Disarming and Sneakiness boost player trap power at high levels, and apply a much better bonus to trap handling.

Edit again: Hmm interesting, it looks like wand and staff traps can never work? WTH?

[AnonymousHero]

The only high-level bonus I can think of would be something like auto-detecting (100%) all traps in a small radius every turn. Disarming should reach 100% with no chance of failure.

[Lom]

Maybe high level searching/perception could have effects similar to Hengband's Rings of Warning as well as improved chance of outright detection of traps/doors.

Higher level disarming, maybe add one or more other traits:

- reduce time taken to disarm, maybe with 3 disarms per turn at max skill level

- have a chance of avoiding setting off a trap on a failed disarm that increases with skill level. I'm not sold on 100% disarm success rate, but a max 100% failed disarm avoidance rate combined with say 80% disarm success rate sounds good to me.

[AnonymousHero]

I'm not sold on 100% disarm success rate, but a max 100% failed disarm avoidance rate combined with say 80% disarm success rate sounds good to me.

Right, that's actually what I meant: It has to be possible to be completely sure of avoiding the negative effect of failing to disarm.

[Lord Estraven]

Huh, now that actually sounds like a pretty good idea. That way traps can still pose an obstacle in combat without being hugely lethal. I'll see if I can implement it, it doesn't sound too hard.

Edit: though that doesn't solve the issue with Sneakiness skill. Hmm.

Edit again: I'm going to see if I can have trap detection in a small radius depending on Sneakiness. Umm maybe a stupid question, but how might I go about making the radius a circle instead of a rectangle? The current method is to use a pair of for() loops to check for traps in a radius 1 square around the player, but we want a circle, and nested loops like that are wicked inefficient AFAIK... Is there already a function for this floating around in the code?

[AnonymousHero]

If it's just a radius of say, 3 or 4, I wouldn't worry about the inefficiency.

[Lord Estraven]

Gah, I got a much simpler and better idea...

Ignore Disarming and Searching completely. Instead, make the stealth ability (skill_stl) allow the character to bypass traps without disarming them. Above some arbitrary level of stealthiness, the chance of bypassing a trap would be 100%.

I like this because it would penalize some of the more powerful races - Rohanknights, Trolls, and the like have abominable stealth. Also, it would make Berserker/Running tactics less viable at high levels, at least from a convenience standpoint.

Edit: oh wait, this would require you to deliberately blunder into every trap to work. Major annoyance factor there.