Issue: Wands can be thrown over blocking zot traps in Zot 5

[dowan]

Occasionally Zot 5 has both paths blocked with zot traps. Even more occasionally, a player is unable to blink past them, and is unable or unwilling to attempt randomly teleporting past them.
So in that case they must step on the zot trap. I don't like it, but that's not what this post is about.

One of the outcomes of a zot trap is your wands being drained. However, that means it's optimal to throw your wands over the zot trap before stepping on it. This is obviously an example of optimal tedium.

Solution: Zot traps drain all wands in LOS (preferably only the ones the player has touched, to prevent unlooted wands from being drained).

[duvessa]

That solution doesn't fix the problem, since you can just put them out of LOS. Better to get rid of wand charge draining, since item destruction traps are not interesting in the first place.

[dowan]

Ahah! I though of that. You can't throw a wand out of LOS, and still have it end up past the zot trap, unless you're willing to clear both zot lungs, in which case you apparently didn't need the wands past the trap in the first place.
It's fine if you drop them on the 'safe' side of the zot traps and they don't get drained, I wasn't trying to prevent that.

I don't think this situation ever happens outside Zot 5, at least, I've never seen it. So you would just never purposely step on a zot trap in any other situation, thus, there's no optimal tedium to be concerned with.


Removing the wand draining zot traps would also be fine.

[Rast]

FR: Remove the wand draining zot trap effect.

[CanOfWorms]

Ahah! I though of that. You can't throw a wand out of LOS, and still have it end up past the zot trap

use any source of LOS manipulation after throwing the wands (darkness, fog, steam)

[dowan]

Oh you clever bastard... good point...

OK then, I guess the wand draining effect just has to be removed. Otherwise it's wand throwin' time.

[johlstei]

FR: items thrown over zot traps trigger zot traps

[Implojin]

Alternate solution:

Add a large noise component to awkward throwing. Let players experience what happens next.

[Rast]

FR: remove throwing things that aren't throwing weapons

[Quazifuji]

FR: remove throwing things that aren't throwing weapons

That's a good point. Is there any case where item throwing is useful that doesn't fall into the "tedious but optimal" or "awkward and spoilery" categories?

That said, I'd also just be in favor of removing Zot traps. They're extremely complex, opaque, and spoilery (who can name offhand the full list of trap effects? Hell, I didn't know they could drain wands before entering this thread), and almost never interesting. If potentially extremely dangerous traps have a place in this game (I'm not convinced they do), then Zot traps could be reworked or replaced, but I think they're just a terrible mechanic as currently implemented.

[spudwalt]

I've thrown random items at wandering monsters in order to get their attention without shouting and potentially waking other stuff up. Obviously, I'll get their attention with an actual attack if I have one that reaches far enough, but sometimes all I've got is melee.

[dowan]

I agree that zot traps, and really traps in general should be removed. I really hate the zot 5 situation where I just have to walk into a trap (and in the case of a zot trap, I have to type "yes", leading me to believe the game doesn't think I should be doing this).

But that's a wider issue than I'm trying to address here. Obviously just removing the wand draining effect fixes this problem, and fixes other even more unlikely corner cases of optimal tedium like stashing all duplicate wands in case of zot trap draining. Removing zot traps also accomplishes that, although that's perhaps overdoing it, after all it's just one effect that's particularly problematic here. Stopping dual zot trapped Z5 entrances fixes the most likely cases of walking into a known zot trap, but doesn't fix the 'issue' of duplicate wand stashing.

Removing non throwing weapon throwing in general also fixes this particular problem, but does leave duplicate wand stashing.

[fearitself]

Get rid of zot traps blocking the orb entrance but bring back d2 shadow traps. Pack of gnolls ftw!

[Airwolf]

I've thrown random items at wandering monsters in order to get their attention without shouting and potentially waking other stuff up. Obviously, I'll get their attention with an actual attack if I have one that reaches far enough, but sometimes all I've got is melee.

May I recommend

  Code:

autopickup_exceptions += <stone


?

[Leszczynek]

Why would you have stones take one of your inventory slots when you can just throw one of your 25 scrolls of remove curse instead?

[spudwalt]

^Exactly. I have enough problems with hoarding stuff -- I don't need to be carrying around a stack of stones to get things' attention with when throwing literally anything else at them will accomplish just what I want it to do. Pretty much the only time I'll ever use stones is if I'm actually using Throwing weapons and haven't found anything heavier or if I know Sandblast -- untrained stone hucking does negligible damage to anything outside of the early game.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I dislike 2 things:
1) Throwing non-throwable things. My fat fingers made throw away my crossbow once (fortunately it landed adjacent to lava)
2) Throwing stones to attract attention when you are stealthy (here I assume that the target is as likely to shout if it notices me without my help). I don't have a solution here except make all monsters notice you instantly too and then we can have an ability to become unstealthy for 1 turn.

[WingedEspeon]

Ahah! I though of that. You can't throw a wand out of LOS, and still have it end up past the zot trap, unless you're willing to clear both zot lungs, in which case you apparently didn't need the wands past the trap in the first place.
It's fine if you drop them on the 'safe' side of the zot traps and they don't get drained, I wasn't trying to prevent that.

I don't think this situation ever happens outside Zot 5, at least, I've never seen it. So you would just never purposely step on a zot trap in any other situation, thus, there's no optimal tedium to be concerned with.


Removing the wand draining zot traps would also be fine.

Throw the wands over the trap, read fog, step on trap while wands are not in LOS due to fog, pick up wands.

[dowan]

You're right, but you're late to the party winged. Can of worms already spelled it out.

[VeryAngryFelid]

You're right, but you're late to the party winged. Can of worms already spelled it out.

I am not sure it is a problem. Personally I wouldn't waste a scroll of fog to protect myself vs one of various Zot trap effects. You can get Hell Sentinel or banished and now you don't have the wand.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

clearly the solution is to introduce a temporary -Wand status effect

[Siegurt]

Or zot traps could drain charges from all wands... in the game