ToME WikiKhymChanur: The dagger traps as they are now are too easilty scummable for ego daggers. While scumming arrow/bolt traps for ego arrows and bolts is fine, ego daggerw can give you things like resists and ESPs when wielded. Additionally, ego daggers can be worth a lot, so if you get a pile of 3 Spectral Daggers from a trap, then you can sell it for a lot of money.
One way to fix this would be to prevent egos for daggers made by dagger traps. I think a better way would be to replace the dagger traps with something else, since a trap hurling daggers at you seems a bit strange to me. The dagger traps could be replaced by pebble/shot traps, which would have the other advantage of letting players who use slings or catapult trapkits to trap-scum for ego/artifact ammo. Broken dagger traps would be replaced by "Lesser" or "Weak" pebble traps which have no damage multipler, so they'd have the 1d2 damage of broken daggers, while non-broken dagger traps would be replaced by pebble traps with the normal (x2) multiplier.
There could also be iron shot and mithril shot traps.
NeilStevens: Too easily "scummable?" Using that Angband epithet doesn't make this molehill into a mountain. Money is no big deal, if you're far enough along in the game that you can safely take a hit from a multiple-dagger trap. I say leave the dagger traps alone, but go ahead and do add more traps besides.
"Too much" money isn't a problem as long as we don't do things like add new uses for money, so don't get too worked up about cash sources. Especially when anyone can turn on random quests and get a Spectral dagger from a princess at BDw 50'.
Thinking again, you could also solve this a different way: Change the traps to generate each dagger separately, instead of creating one and duplicating it. That would solve the problem of getting triple the number of egos you're theoretically entitled to get.
FeathinSilyar: Having each generated individually makes the traps more useful, since as already noted, it is less for monetary value, and more for actual usefulness of the daggers. Assassins love dagger traps, but don't care whether they get one or three of a dagger. So if a trap throws three daggers at them, all different, then they have three times the chance of getting a useful dagger out of it that they would if it threw three identical daggers at them.
Also, this scumming possibility has been partially addressed by the patch not allowing tripping a trap when you have auto_disarm off, unless the "blunder" command that I thought was just in FuryBand is actually in ToME? Admittedly as long as a char doesn't have anything in Disarm they will probably get a good number of shots at the trap, but not hundreds, before they disarm it rather than "accidentally" tripping it.