Stopping Stairdancing

[Shtopit]

This is a proposal to stop stairdancing; by stairdancing I mean a form of luring that exploits the fact that only enemies adjacent to the stairs will follow you when you go upstairs. This allows to break up groups with relative safety.

My proposal is to always generate a visible Zot trap near a descending stair.

Since the trap is visible, the player will avoid it. However, enemies stairdanced by the PC may step on it. This disincentives stairdancing without rendering escape impossible.

[kuniqs]

Nah, better to just invoke Xom wrath every time player goes up/down stairs with anything adjacent.

[Sprucery]

The easiest way to stop this kind of stairdancing is just to make it impossible to use stairs if something hostile is next to you. Invisible hostile monsters would also be applicable, but their location would not be shown (unless already shown).

[Speleothing]

If you want to stop stairdancing, I guess you also have proposal that doubles player damage and triples survivability? And are willing to go through every single vault in the game to rebalance them?

Stairdancing is baked into the gameplay. You're better off making a whole new game than trying to stop it.