Luckily I had teleport so I didn't have to use the stairs, but if those stairs weren't there and I didn't have some kind of teleport I'd be in trouble.
Yes you would. It would be nice for some levers to be unpushable but at the same time it's really a nice feature to be able to make an escape lever by pushing it far out of the room. Of course they could be rather easily made unpushable.
This happened to me once with the same room type. Except there were no stairs and I had no way to escape. I was so mad.
I think knockback only pushes things away from the player. Not that I try a lot, but I've never had any lucky using it to move things closer to me.
Yeah, knock is basically away from you, period. There's another effect ('suction') that teleports monsters (only, I think) up to you, but no backwards equivalent of knock.
I had this happen once with the "circle of short teleports" special room. The nasty part was that it was the demonolgy level one skill, not telekenesis, and it was my first character using that skill and I hadn't quite realized that the spell acted as a generalized push as well as smiting. So that gnome cost me the game.
