Spell-loaded traps/glyphs

[Siegurt]

So I was thinking about this for a while, and one thing I think would add a good amount of design space (particularly in regards to vaults) would be traps that fired spells.

Here's what I have in mind:

You can add a trap to your vault design that has any spell loaded in it, with a target, that can also be set. Once fired, the trap goes away.

A spell *could* be fired at the player or monster on the square, but that's fairly boring, I'm thinking of things like digging or disintigration spells that open up sections of walls to reveal more monsters, invis or haste spells which mobs use to power up their fellows, lightning bolts that are set to fire around corners, force bolts that shove players/ monsters into a disadvantageous (or advantageous) location etc.

Randomly generated such traps would be weird, but not I think particularly interesting, but I can think of a lot of spell effects which would be interesting when activated by either the player or the monster in a vault designed around them.

Thoughts/Comments?

[dpeg]

This definitely has potential. Be aware that there is a trend to remove trap-related stuff from Crawl. I think that shafts are awesome, and that some kinds of traps work decently. Also, I wouldn't like levers -- this comes up sometimes, but I don't think it's worth the effort (on the interface alone).

What you say does have uses despite all of these, though. Spells that modify terrain (e.g. by casting a Firestorm in your back, or Ledafying the neighbourhood) or that affect monsters (e.g. inner flame, confusing touch) can work. There are also positive examples: preidentified glyphs, ready for the player to use. (It's a localised, one-off spell, and the player's task to make the most out of it.)

As always, there are two problems: making vaults prone to spoilerage, and overuse. So this has to be carefully moderated. Perhaps instead of providing the infrastructure first, we're better off coming up with a few cool, unchallenged concepts first.