Monday, 15th February 2016, 05:52 by Quazifuji
The way I see it, traps have two conceivable purposes in the game: 1. To put the player into unexpected and unanticipated situations, and 2. To be terrain that has tactical significance. Traps do not need to be hidden to serve purpose 2, and I think if traps were intended to serve purpose 2 they are failing spectacularly and need to be reworked. So clearly, 1 is the current purpose of traps. It puts the player into unexpected and unanticipated challenging situations. I think this is a nice goal. It makes the game more interesting, and potentially more challenging in a good way, if the game sometimes forces challenges on you that you were't expecting.
The problem is simple: traps don't feel fair. It doesn't necessarily even matter if they are fair on paper: they tend to feel frustrating, as the numerous complaints about them indicate. And frustration tends to make the game less fun. In general, I think an essential quality of Roguelikes in general, and DCSS is definitely included, is that you learn a lesson from every death. Ideally, you feel like every death, or at least the vast majority of your deaths, were your fault, and that by improving your play you can avoid such deaths in the future. It's a fundamental part of what makes games where mistakes can erase hours of progress enjoyable games: the sense that, while the character you spent hours on is dead, the knowledge you've learned and can apply to your next character is its own form of progress.
And stepping on a trap randomly, that you had no way to avoid whatsoever, does not go well with that goal. Sure, plenty of times, there *was* something you could have done to survive after the trap, but that doesn't change the feeling of frustration that you were punished for a perfectly reasonably action. It makes your death feel less like a learning experience, and in turn makes the game feel less fun. And of course, there's the discussion that's been going on for ages, that one of the ways you can avoid traps is the mind-numbingly tedious exercise of tracking tiles you've stepped on. The problem is the proposals that remove that as a tactic - making traps trigger on sight, or entirely randomly - also makes them feel even more arbitrary and frustrating.
So ultimately, I think hidden traps should be removed. If the purpose they served - occasionally thrusting the player into unexpected and challenging situations (and Zot traps and any sort of damage traps don't even accomplish this well in my opinion) - is valuable, it would be good to find a new mechanic to accomplish this that is less frustrating to the player.
The other purpose - tactically interesting terrain - is a cool idea, I think. Discussions about traps always seem to include mentions of luring enemies onto shafts or making good use of teleport traps as great moments that players love. But I think those situations do not require traps to be hidden, and creating more of them requires rethinking how traps are handled in the game entirely in my opinion.