Friday, 15th April 2016, 16:33 by svendre
To follow up on my idea of block stairs when monsters are in LOS, I had not considered invisibility - which is somewhat of an issue. On the point of someone using a wand to make a hostile monster leave LOS to use the stairs, I think that is almost so extreme it should almost be forgotten and let it happen if it does. It's not easy to have a wand of invisibility and one with enough charges, and also assuming it's not resisted if there is an MR check (?) It sounds like quite an effort to escape.
The bigger problem with invisibility that I see is that if there is some other kind of automatic aura mechanic that blocks stairs if an invisible monster is in range, is that you're basically giving a free see invisible to let the player (who didn't intend on leaving anyhow) know that there is an invisible monster near them.
Another slightly different idea to compensate for these issues which I have seen used before (I can't remember where though) is that actions taken against (or by) hostile monsters generate some sort of in-combat flag, which prevents the use of exits (stairs in this case) until the flag wears off. So in the case of making something invisible for the purpose of escaping, it wouldn't help much because then they would just be forced to have an invisible monster beat on them indefinitely until they killed it or fled and had time for the combat flag to wear off.
If you use a timed combat flag instead of monsters in LOS to block stairs:
* players could leave if there was an invisible monster that hadn't taken a swing at the player yet
* players couldn't leave even if they couldn't see an invisible monster which started an attack on them
* stealth has value in the case that you want to leave, but there are monsters in your LOS - but they haven't tried to engage you yet (thus no combat flag yet)
* the player wouldn't have any idea if there was an invisible monster 3 spaces from them (with nothing else in sight) after coming down some stairs due to the status of the stairs
* players using stairs for the first time ever into some horrific scene which was unfair death would have a better chance to simply bail back up the stairs (before a combat flag was created) preventing some very unfair deaths, but repeated use of the stairs over and over to split packs would still fail. Initially I was joking a bit with the LOS idea, because it would make going down a new set of stairs very frightening, but at the same time the danger would make the game very exciting. I just think that the initial time you come down, because of RNG there still needs to be some chance of backing out of RNG created atrocities at least the first time.
I would have the combat flag created whenever a melee or ranged attack is used on a player or whenever the player targets a hostile monster (invisibility wand I'm looking at you.) Since it takes time to go up the stairs, and the only way to get a pack split is to have them adjacent to you while you're next to the stairs, trying to use the stairs when a monster is right next to you but before a combat flag has been generated due to a lure would still result in a failure since the combat flag would be created by an attack in the time you spent trying to go up the stairs.
If there was a combat flag blocking stair usage, there would need to be some amount of time associated with it... what would be appropriate is anyone's guess and probably would need some testing, but I think something like 5-10 turns should be reasonable enough to get the job done without being too terrible. There might also be some added conditions to where it was always instantly cleared, but then we get back to the troubles with invisibility and auras so that would have to be more carefully considered... or not at all - and leave it to the more simple time-out.
Finally, I would turn off this functionality when the orb has been picked up. The flavor is easily there in that you already have this "special" orb aura, implying the orb has some kind of power making it worth all the trouble to steal.. rather than simply being a monster summoning door stop.
Last edited by
svendre on Friday, 15th April 2016, 17:42, edited 1 time in total.