IDEA: It would be cool if there were monsters that could grab your actual equipped items similar to the way that kleptoblobbies can grab item-belt items
Cool. EDIT: BTW, Grabbing inventory items might be a good idea too (as it would remove a perverse incentive to put less useful items in the item belt).
Great, you realize you just asked for monsters that remove your pants? Brings to mind that clothes eating octopus from that one manga...
related suggestion: an effect that knocks your weapon/shield out of your hand and sends it flying across the room. EDIT: This could also be an instability effect.
I don't recall if this was in Rogue, Hack, Nethack or more than one of these, but I recall that if you opened a can to eat fom and it contained some oily sardines, or something like that, it could cause you to be unable to wield your weapon, and it would fall from your hands.
I don't know if it was in Rogue or Hack, but I know that some kinds of tins from Nethack (deep-fried [x] and something else) would cause your weapon(s) to slip from your hands. I remember another Roguelike with monsters that could do this. A lot of rooms in that game were bordered by water, and in that game it was a pain in the butt to be able to fly so if one of them knocked your weapon into the water you were pretty much screwed (and even if you DID have a way to fly, the weapon or shield would start rusting immediately so a +2 katana could be something like -3 if you grabbed it ASAP, and would be useless by the time you got it if you didn't have the means to fly on you. Granted, losing a weapon or a shield in that game was pretty much a death sentence if you didn't have a backup since your only equipment was just a weapon and a shield or a second weapon). Not sure how well something like that would work in DoD, but I think it's impossible for items to exist on water so IMO it would add a pretty interesting element to the game.
Items spawn in water just fine, like your ammo recovery drops. Loot on the ground doesn't seem to happen there... except for bergstrom's frying pan for some weird reason. Which also spawns on impassable and door squares. The frying pan just doesn't seem to care where it spawns.
Did not know that, since knockback effects don't push items on to water, though i've never noticed ammo drop on to water tiles. In that case, it's probably not a good idea because it's nearly impossible to fly over water (AFAIK only Vampirism lets you) so unless you have vampirism or can do shenanigans with Digging Rays/Bolts of Mass Destruction and a teleport skill, you'll lose your weapons a lot.
That brings me to another suggestion; namely, monsters with ranged spells/attacks to steal your items
That still makes things harder on melee attackers than ranged who can take out those monsters before they can cast
What about my suggestion to have a keyboard command to change rows on the skillbelt? I'm pretty sure Either you or another Gaslamp staff member said that that was a good idea too.