Two new rings

[Lord Estraven]

Inspired by V's mixed blessing items: an idea to make T2 traps a little less godawful nasty, in a hopefully not so cheesy way.

Ring of Forethought
This ring can warn you of hidden dangers, at the cost of making you more timid.

Subtracts 1-3 points each from to-hit and to-dam. When worn, it can be activated for trap detection every 150 turns.

(This is simple hedge magic, and should be available from the Magic Shop for ~100 GP.)

Ring of Passage
This ring can disarm any trap, but derives its power from the wielder's life force.

Drains experience. When worn, it can be activated to disarm traps on all adjacent squares every 10 turns.

(This should also be available from the Magic Shop, but more like ~1000 GP.)

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Does this make sense, or would it be better to just sell rod tips of Trap Location in the Magic Shop?

[Yottle]

I would switch the activation times. 150 turns may be too much to wait for trap detection.

On the other hand, unless you are dealing with a vault, disarming doesn't need to be repeated very often. That also makes it harder to just switch it on and off when you need it.

[Lord Estraven]

Hmm, good point...

The thing with traps for me isn't that they're responsible for lots of character deaths, so much as that they're just a nuisance to deal with. Classes that rely on trap detection items end up having to carry around a stack of scrolls for a while, and that really limits their range and makes early gameplay slow.

(This is why my preferred race is Petty-dwarf for everything other than priests.)

Right now I'm thinking it wouldn't be too unfair to extend the range of trap detection scrolls (and maybe other detection scrolls for consistency) so that they detect across the whole level. That would make a stack of them last longer, which (I think) would be good for low-level warriors.

[Yottle]

Extending the range of trap detection seems like a good idea to me. The scrolls aren't worth carrying around now- I generally don't worry about traps with a warrior type character until I get through the BD, then I look for a rod tip of trap detection.

[Lord Estraven]

May do... Though the way I've handled things in my own fork (and in Neoband) is to just make all traps visible by default, and I have a mind to eventually remove them entirely. At the moment they do three things:

1. Provide flavor
2. Make vaults hard to get into
3. Possibly kill your character if you don't cast detection every hundred yards

(1) can be handled by other flavorful things. (2) should be unnecessary because vaults are already full of monsters. (3) is just stupid. Really the trap mini-game is unsuited to Angband IMO.

Ideally, I think traps should be handled as monsters - non-moving, non-living monsters that start pounding you with ranged attacks when you get in LoS. Conceptually boring perhaps, but it actually makes sense from a gameplay standpoint.

[Yottle]

Traps do one more thing- make it harder to get into chests. That is about the only useful thing I can see about them.

[Lord Estraven]

Ah, correction: I was talking about floor traps. I haven't made any changes to traps on chests.