TomeNET

(4.7) Traps & trap kits                                                         
-----------------------

About traps:
------------
At the beginning you will encounter traps that can do little damage, some will
decrease your stats temporarily, they are annoying but not a big danger.
However, later on traps will become extremely nasty and you should either get
a very high searching skill or make sure that you have staves, spells or
scrolls that can detect traps. If you encounter a dangerous trap do not try to
disarm it if you are not very sure that you can do it without setting it off,
or if you don't at least know that setting it off won't have too bad effects
(some traps aren't very harmful, so you can just keep trying to disarm them).

If you manually disarm a trap (ie via the disarm command instead of relying on
magic spells or magic devices that do the disarming for you) you will get a
certain amount of experience points depending on the trap type; it can pay off
to disarm a large patch of traps.

Disarming traps will become an essential part of the gameplay later on. Vaults
will have *lots* of traps and if you haven't got superior disarming skills (or
wands of disarming / trap destruction) every single move of your character will
have to be planned! This can be especially annoying and dangerous if there are
multiplying or extremely tough monsters inside the vault. If your searching
ability is 'Heroic' or 'Legendary' you will discover most traps instantly just
by coming close to them without having to explicitely search for them.
If you look at an object that is on an already detected trap, you will be
notified about the trap by an ^ symbol in front of the item name and the trap
type appended to it in { } brackets. It looks like this:
^ A potion of Constitution {Chaos Ball Trap}

Trap symbols ('^') come in different colours. Here's an overview:
    blue            stat traps (STR/INT/WIS/DEX/CON/CHR) in three difficulties:
                    1) only reduces an attribute temporarily, heals on its own.
                    2) reduces an attribute, requiring you to use restoration.
                    3) permanently reduces an attribute. Counter with stat
                       potion.
    bright white    teleport traps
    orange          dungeon/trap rearrangment traps
    violet          summoning traps
    yellow          item-affecting traps
    red             character status-affecting traps
    green           elemental bolt traps
    light blue      elemental ball traps
    light red       arrow/bolt/dagger traps
    white           miscellaneous traps


About trap kits:
----------------
The 'Trapping' skill allows a player to set up 'monster traps'.
The ability to set up a trap can be accessed by pressing the 'm' key
or by utilizing the macro wizard (press % and z to start it).

A monster trap consists of
-a trap kit
-an item (or a stack of items) to load the trap kit.

Each kind of trap kit requires different items serving as ammunition:
Catapult Trap Kit       -       Sling ammo (fires with 2x base might).
 (orange)
Arrow Trap Kit          -       Arrows (fires with 3x base might).
 (red)
Bolt Trap Kit           -       Bolts (fires with 4x base might).
 (bright red)
Fumes Trap Kit          -       Potions. The effects are very similar to the
 (dark blue)                    effects when throwing a potion at a monster,
                                the trap will greatly increase the potion's
                                effectiveness though, by generating a thick
                                fume that envelops nearby creatues and
                                possibly gets inhaled as well.
Magic Trap Kit          -       Scrolls or runes. Even scrolls that are usually
 (violet)                       only used on other items might have effects on
                                certain creatures.
Device Trap Kit         -       Wands/Staves/Rods.
 (slate)                        The charges of wands and staves will be
                                decreased by 1 each time the trap sets off.
                                Rod-traps will have timeouts, same as the rod
                                itself.

A normal trap kit can be loaded with 1 item of the according ammo.
After it went off (and is out of charges for device traps) you can pick up the
trap kit to use it again.
If it was a catapult/arrow/bolt trap kit you can often recover the ammunition
too, in case it didn't break. (Magic ammo and artifact ammo never break).

Trap kits can have special (ego) powers:
(prefixes:)
Automatic       - Can set off up to 99 times, with a 20% chance each time of
                  ceasing to function. Requires the according amount of ammo
                  though, if it's not a device trap kit.
Fully Automatic - Sets off up to 99 times.
                  Requires the according amount of ammunition if it's not a
                  device trap kit.
Well-hidden     - Makes it harder for monsters to spot the trap.
Complicated     - Trap gets an extra AC bonus, making it harder to disarm.
Obvious         - Curses the trap and makes it practically useless.

(suffixes:)
of Extra Might  - fires with +x (bonus shown in round brackets) extra might.
                  ("It fires missiles with extra might.")
of Extra Shots  - fires +x (bonus shown in round brackets) extra shots/round.
                  ("It fires missiles excessively fast.")
for Dragons     - Only triggers against dragons. Especially hard to spot.
                  Fires extra shots.
for Demons      - Only triggers against demons. Especially hard to spot.
                  Fires extra shots.
for Animals     - Only triggers against animals. Especially hard to spot.
                  Fires extra shots.
for Undead      - Only triggers against undead. Especially hard to spot.
                  Fires extra shots. May damage or destroy ghosts.
for Evil        - Only triggers against evil. Especially hard to spot.
                  Fires extra shots. May damage or destroy ghosts.

Trap kits can also have two special properties in addition to the above:
Kill Ghosts     - trap kit will also harm creatures in wraithform (those are
                  all creatures that can pass solid walls). Trap kits without
                  KILL_GHOST flag cannot hurt wraithform creatures.

Teleport-To     - after triggering, if the monster is still alive, it will be
                  teleported to the player (TELEPORT_TO).

If monsters notice a trap they can try to disarm it:

A pval (that's a number in round parentheses, eg (+2)) increases the trap's
"stealth", making it well-hidden and therefore harder for monsters to notice.

The "armour class" bonus of a trap kit, given in brackets (eg [+8]) increases
the trap's complexity, making it harder for monsters to disarm the trap.

Trap kits and ammo that were disarmed by a monster cannot be recovered.

You can disarm your own traps to get back the trap kit (and ammunition).


Hints for quick and easy handling:
----------------------------------
It is a good idea to inscribe trap kits and their loads.
For example you could inscribe all trapping-related items  !=  so you will pick
them up from the floor automatically when you want to retrieve trap kits that
went off.

Also you could inscribe the ammo/load items  @m1  so you can macro them easily.

In the macro wizard you could even make a macro that prompts you for which trap
kit to use if you enter a blank line (just hit ENTER key) when it asks you
which item you want to load a trap with.

Last but not least when your trapper is low level and you pick up all sorts of
bad potions you could make a macro to load a fumes trap kit with a potion
inscribed  @m1 . Now make another macro that lets you inscribe all the bad
potions you pick up  @m1  so you won't have to do that manually for each of
them. That inscribing-macro could look like this:
{-@m1\r
where the '-' will cause the { inscribe command to prompt for inscription first
and the item afterwards, effectively simply asking you to specify the item.