Treat stepping into traps with WASD like clicking on adjacent traps with the mouse.

If you try to step on a trap with the arrow keys or WASD you should either get the same dialog box that you get if you try to step on it with the mouse, or at the very least automatically try to disarm it before stepping onto the square (or at the very very least you should at least automatically disarm traps that you have a 100% chance of disabling).

On a similar note, there should be a way to use the mouse to step onto a trapped square without trying to disarm the trap; maybe a third option added to the dialog box, or perhaps alt-clicking the square or something.

 

Wouldn't this make trap sight radius >1 pointless? (Kiting monsters into them aside...)

Automatic disarm of anything that doesn't pose risk is probably the furthest this should reasonably go, but even then... if this is about the behaviour of click-to-move in comparison, changes might be better there instead.

 

Wouldn't this make TRAPS pointless? How could you ever trigger them if you can't step on them by clicking or by using WASD? Am I missing something?

 

It would work if: when you DIRECTLY click on a trap square it disarms, but when you
click beyond the trap square, it activates: a trap is one square to my right,
so if I click two squares to my right, as I walk on it, it activates, yet if I click ONE square to my
right, I attempt to disarm it.

 

Trap Sight also allows you to see invisible monsters at a distance, which makes them a lot easier to deal with for non-warrior builds and a lot easier to flee from with any build.

Sometimes there's no way to walk around the traps, as in the cases of the 20x20 Large Treasury, Trapped Weapon Racks, Unfair Spirals, Watery Hall, Zap Hall 2, ew sauna hall, Watery Crossroads with traps, Traps for Treasure, Cube Sanctum, Lobster Room, and others.

That's a terrible idea, it would do nothing but add extra clicking and make the game more tedious.

 

This is true, but still,traps are in other, open rooms to punish those who aren't paying attention and/or those with no trap sight. If anything, click to move shouldn't avoid traps in my opinion.

 

Indeed! And as tedious as the idea might sound, it will make the careless players get attacked by traps
on mouse mode!!

 

Using metagame considerations (such as relying on the player's inattentiveness to activate traps) to balance the game is bad and obnoxious game design!!!

EDIT:
Also, whi is it that so many people here seem to want the game to be more tedious?

 

But *why* is it bad design? I'm not persuaded it is.

For me, increasing the tedium of any game comes not just from requiring grind to advance, but also by removing challenge. The lower difficulty settings are there to dial this back through parameters if the player prefers (reduced quantities of spawned traps, lowered enemy stats and headcount) but when mechanical alterations make victory more or less a foregone conclusion with little influence from player skill or insight... there's no uncertainty involved in the outcome and the fun evaporates.

Removing things that obstruct fun is a fair design objective, but it can be taken too far for a game's own good, I think.

 

I play exclusively with WASD to move. Click to move is disabled. Sometimes traps block the path and there is no way to disable them and no way to get around them. Gotta step on them.

 

Bohandas: just because you don't like a particular mechanic in the game doesn't mean it's bad game design or tedious. Traps are in the game to punish the inattentive player for being careless which is what the entire roguelike genre is all about.

As for metagaming information, all the knowledge you learn about creatures, all the weapons you find out about and know of their existence, picking skills before you start the game and knowing what makes a good and bad class is all metagaming information. Knowing you have to be careful because of traps is tactical information, not metagaming.

Tedium comes from doing the same thing over and over, or doing trivial tasks endlessly. If the player disarmed through walking and you could win just by walking around, watching enemies kill themselves on you, that would be tedious. I find the fact that I actually have to be aware of my surroundings takes some of the tedium out of exploring.

Also: The best solution would be if you had to hold shift-WASD to disarm, but it prevented you from moving. Then you could disarm traps with the keyboard, but you would still have to be cautious.

 

If I could like this post once for each of these quotes, I would.

I'd like to add that testing player reflexes and attentiveness and whatnot is really not all that alien a concept in gaming. Any FPS will do this. Many puzzlers will (consider Tetris), etc.. Pretty much any game does this at SOME level. Otherwise, it's just knowing facts and reading numbers, and that's kind of boring.

 

It's a pretty clear difference in terms of controls, though. If one method gives you the warning but another doesn't, that's not exactly 'fair'.

But my signature comes from somewhere.

 

But it's inappropriate for a turn-based game.

 

Regardless of which route it might be implemented, I really like the idea of being able to disarm traps w/o using the mouse. I think Parthon's idea (using shift-WADS) would have the least impact on the role traps play in the game while still allowing the attentive player to quickly remove the threat without having to get the mouse involved (or in my laptop's case, the dreaded touchpad *shudder*).

I don't really see anything wrong with Bohandas' original suggestion either though--personally, I feel like I have fully experienced the Death-By-Trap-I-Saw-50-Turns-Ago-But-Stepped-On-It-Anyway-Because-I-Got-Hasty aspect of the game after 400+ hours played, and I wouldn't mind if the game automatically disarmed traps that I would normally auto-disarm with a mouse click--or at the very least allowed me to walk over them safely if my Trap Disarm skill were high enough. Most the time I'm not like "Arrrrgh! Another wily trap, what a surprise!" It's more like "**** me. What a waste of time."

 

Thank you.

I think you expressed that more clearly that I was able to.

 

This is exactly my opinion. In a real-time game (FPS, RTS, etc.) I expect and welcome the challenge of appropriately dividing my limited attention among several tasks on a moment-to-moment basis. However, I don't welcome that kind of challenge in a turn-based game. Instead, I want to save all my attention for interesting things like skill selection, level-up order, gear management, and so on...you know, the stuff that's (at least potentially) different in each play-through.

I don't want to spend my mental energy or my time, both of which are finite resources, on answering questions like "do I want to step on this debilitating trap, or disarm it for guaranteed free money and experience?", several hundred times in every game.

 

I have to disagree with this. What is or is not bad game design is subjective, and basically means "things I don't like". I'm with Bohandas on this- traps just make the game tedious by forcing you to move one or two steps at a time at all times. Step, check for traps, step, check for traps, ad nauseum. If you have a trap sight of two, that means you get to move 2 steps without stopping. YAY!

It would change them from traps for the player into traps for the player to lure monsters into/chances for the player to get exp and traps for the player to lure monsters into from disarming traps, at the risk of setting them off instead. Which isn't too different from what they are now.

If some people don't want it, then it could still be an option the player could choose to turn on or off, like auto loot.

 

If traps are in danger of becoming pointless, then I wouldn't be opposed to an increase in the frequency with which they actually block your progress unless you disarm or trigger them. Reward or punish me based on my skill choices or cleverness in getting monsters to step on the trap, not for micromanaging my movement.

 

This idea I like that's a good compromise.

Also more invisible monsters and/or more swarms of the currently existing invisible monsters; more invisible monsters would help replace any loss of relevance to the trap sense stat too.