ToME WikiRight now, your options for dealing with a trap are to
- Ignore it, and suffer the consequences
- Try to disarm it, suffering the consequences if you fail badly, and otherwise clearing it.
The first option seems a bit harsh to me, especially for the more physical traps. It seems to me that it should be possible to dodge certain trap effects, much as you could dodge a melee attack or (if missiles weren't "spells" in this game) a ranged one. Hence I suggest that it should be possible to move through a trapped square, and only occasionally suffer the consequences. Some possibilities:
- Dagger, bolt, arrow traps: the trap makes N melee attack attempts, with its to-hit based on the dungeon level. Only successful hits deal damage.
- Magic bolt/ball spells: may potentially be negated by antimagic shells (more useful when Unbelievers aren't high enough to nuke traps anyway)
- Magic bolt spells: may be reflected
- Pits, trapdoors: levitation already provides immunity to these
- Piety drain: get a saving throw based on your Prayer skill?
- Poison, paralysis, genderbenders, height changers, and any other gas traps: CON-based saving throw
- And so on.
Additionally, high levels of Dodge would significantly improve your ability to dodge any trap type, assuming of course that you weren't too burdened.
Another possibility, unrelated to the above, is that traps could misfire occasionally, either jamming outright or having various random effects. This would mesh well with the occasional spell failures that spellcasting enemies suffer.
ElCuGo: What i would really like to see is that monster could get affected by the traps. It would open interesting new tactics.
Derakon: It would also require changes to the monster AI, most likely. Additionally, you'd pretty much have to make them immune to vault traps; they're so thickly-spread that the monsters would be chewed to bits before the player even got inside (and, in the process, would have triggered so many traps that modify the dungeon that half the vault would be gone). In any event, that doesn't have much to do with how traps can affect the player.
ElCuGo: Hmm didn't think about that. I guess it make sense that since both the traps and monters are guarding the Vault then the traps wouldn't affect the guardians. The same thing could go for special levels.