Chests

This brainstorm is inspired by purge's tile submission.

• Chests contain items.
• The items are invisible to the game world until the chest is opened.
• You open the chest by moving on top of it.
  • No specific opening action.
• Once opened, the items are considered to be on the floor. They're now visible to you, available to monsters, etc.
• You cannot put things in the chests. If you drop an item on a chest, it'll be just like it would be on the floor.
  • No containers à la Nethack.
• Chests can vary in appearance (short and long descriptions can be changed (with a lua marker)).

• hides items until you are on top of the chest
• keeps items from monsters
• keeps items from Apportation
• keeps items from destruction
• can be used with triggers in vaults for variety of additional effects

• Player chooses between a consumable chest, book & staff chest and armour & weapons chest. After moving on top of one, the others are removed.
• It might make sense to store runes in a chest, if it was marked appropriately, so players couldn't just apport them. Perhaps even the Orb of Zot.

• They can provide flavour. They can have gameplay relevance in that the player has to get somewhere to assess the loot (also to spoil apporters).
• For fun, there could be spilling chests: you open them, and their contents spill around you. (But we never want trapped chests, of course — for that, simply place traps around a chest.)
• Why not make them closed ? This would make Traps&Doors skill more useful. As long as player can retry the opening action, level of T&D skill doesn't matter… So I suggest that a failure jams the chest permanently. If a chest is jammed, or you don't have the skill, you can just bash it open… but it's noisy and more importantly, will destroy most fragile items inside (scrolls, potions, possibly others). — b0rsuk 2010-02-14 20:23
  • Indeed. I guess this would be most interesting on portal vaults, where players have just one go at everything. — dpeg 2010-02-14 22:35
  • I like the idea of surrounding the chest with traps better. — evktalo 2010-02-15 12:03
• I personally would not like to see too many chests cluttering up crawl and do not like the idea of hiding the orb or runes, it is exciting for the player to even get a glimpse of things like these especially the orb for the first time. I do however love the idea of using them as a game mechanic to hide items in special vaults/portals - 'do you pick chest 1, 2, or 3'? After you pick one the others could disappear, the randomness would be fun. Even if the chest were labeled 'book, armour, weapon' you would not know exactly what was inside. — porkchop 2010-02-15 14:04
  • I agree on this point. Crawl is already unfriendly towards playstyles that can't fight their way through. Why complicate it more ? If Orb apportation is a problem, then make any Orb movement, not just picking up, trigger demon security. Still more fair than outright ban of Apportation. Runes in chests might be ok, but only for some runes, not all. I think current solution is fine, because you can see the rune in its natural habitat. — b0rsuk 2010-02-16 06:05
  • I think you should be careful not to nerf apportation too much–it's currently useful mostly for either retrieving ammunition or stealing things from vaults and special levels. Most should probably have either no chests or a mix of chests and loose loot, with exceptions for mostly thematic reasons. Sewers and areas where it's just water or lava keeping you from the loot should have no chests, for example (in the latter apportation should be no less viable an option than levitation), while ossuaries would be almost entirely chests. The Vaults, Tomb and Crypt could be almost entirely chests, while the Lair and Hive would have none at all. — brickman 2010-09-22 04:35