Lair Larrikin
Posts: 19
Joined: Tuesday, 21st January 2014, 09:05
Saturday, 29th August 2015, 21:55
Proposal: Automatic Doors
I think that doors are fairly uninteresting mechanically at the moment. Once you've opened a door while exploring, there's generally no reason to close it again, unless there's a tactically relevant time to do so (there's an enemy more than one square away that I want to get away from that can't open doors, or there's a ranged enemy that I want to make closer to me in safety) - in which case it's pretty much always the best thing to do. There's also two dedicated commands for opening and closing doors - which I feel is giving more interface value to them than they deserve.
With this in mind, I propose the following changes:
1) Doors can only be opened by entering their square (removing the 'O' and 'C' commands).
2) Opening a door takes no additional time.
3) As soon as there are no monsters, player, or items in the doorway, the door automatically closes.
4) For completeness, leaving a doorway takes no additional time.
This basically turns doors into permanent LOS blockers, which I hope will make for more interesting situations (or at the very least, not removing any currently interesting door-based situations, while removing two interface commands).
Some example situations:
You will be more exposed when opening a door (as you have to be standing on its square, instead of one away from it), and areas previously thought safe may now have a monster the other side of a door that you don't notice until you're much closer to it. This also fixes the "You close the door. An orc opens the door. You close the door. An orc opens the door." etc. version of pillar dancing.
Potential arguments against this:
1) This could make players drop stones in doorways, in order to wedge open doors that they want to keep open.
1a) All items could be pushed out of a doorway to a random adjacent square when the door closes.
2) This weakens ranged combat, as you tend to be closer to enemies when engaging them through doors
2a) This applies equally to players and monsters though - I'm not sure how big of an impact this will have.
This could also be modified to add a penalty to moving through doors (maybe 10 aut?), but I'm not sure that's necessary at this stage.
I'm happy to code this myself - I'm just wondering if it's a good idea or not.
With this in mind, I propose the following changes:
1) Doors can only be opened by entering their square (removing the 'O' and 'C' commands).
2) Opening a door takes no additional time.
3) As soon as there are no monsters, player, or items in the doorway, the door automatically closes.
4) For completeness, leaving a doorway takes no additional time.
This basically turns doors into permanent LOS blockers, which I hope will make for more interesting situations (or at the very least, not removing any currently interesting door-based situations, while removing two interface commands).
Some example situations:
Spoiler: show
You will be more exposed when opening a door (as you have to be standing on its square, instead of one away from it), and areas previously thought safe may now have a monster the other side of a door that you don't notice until you're much closer to it. This also fixes the "You close the door. An orc opens the door. You close the door. An orc opens the door." etc. version of pillar dancing.
Potential arguments against this:
1) This could make players drop stones in doorways, in order to wedge open doors that they want to keep open.
1a) All items could be pushed out of a doorway to a random adjacent square when the door closes.
2) This weakens ranged combat, as you tend to be closer to enemies when engaging them through doors
2a) This applies equally to players and monsters though - I'm not sure how big of an impact this will have.
This could also be modified to add a penalty to moving through doors (maybe 10 aut?), but I'm not sure that's necessary at this stage.
I'm happy to code this myself - I'm just wondering if it's a good idea or not.
