When a magic trap tames monsters, it should give a message beyond “You feel charismatic” - the scroll of taming “neighborhood is friendlier” message probably works fine here.
Magic traps can toggle much more types of intrinsics than just invisibility or see invisible. Probably not all intrinsics but at least many types of resistances.
A plan for magic traps to scale according to the depth they appear on. All these effects are still triggered just with the same magic trap - this isn’t adding new trap types.
Possibly remove polymorph traps as an independent trap type since it’s one of the options here.
| Effect | Dungeon level or branch |
|---|---|
| Magical explosion: HP damage, Pw increased to full, maxPw increase | Any (with fixed 25% chance) |
| Odd feeling (using standard odd feeling messages, no effect) | Any (with fixed 25% chance) |
| Grateful djinni, wish | 1 (with fixed 5% chance) |
| Remove curse (like uncursed scroll) | Outside Gehennom |
| Curse items (like harassment) | Within Gehennom |
| Horizontal teleport | 1-6 |
| Blinds for 1d5+10 turns | 3-8 |
| Hostile magic whistle; summons monsters that already exist on the level to appear around the player | 5-10 |
| Gain 1 charisma and charm surrounding monsters | 7-12 |
| Create a stinking cloud on the space | 9-14 |
| Polymorph | 11-16 |
| Randomly bless and curse inventory (like confused blessed remove curse) | 13-18 |
| Do both the blinding and hostile whistling effects above | 15-20 |
| Level teleport | 17-22 |
| Surround the player with Z that are buffed by having intrinsic monster detection, being blinded so Elbereth won’t work, and being hasted | 19+ |
| Surround the player with & that are buffed in the same way | Gehennom |
| Surround with nasties (like harassment) | Gehennom |
| Surround with nasties that are buffed as above | Gehennom |
Magic traps’ blinding and summoning monsters effects should be split up, since both at once tends to make them much more fatal, especially to early players. Alternatively, make the summoned monster selection with a lower-difficulty pool of monsters.
Split the blinding and summoning functions of a magic trap. Both still deafen, but no longer blind the player and surround them with monsters at once.
When a magic trap shakes your pack violently, any bells you happen to be carrying get rung. For normal bells this doesn’t do much besides awaken monsters, but the charged Bell of Opening will be rung, do its usual ring effects, and lose a charge.
When a monster triggers a magic (or maybe polymorph) trap, one possible effect is that they turn into a figurine of themselves with appropriate beatitude. However, the trap exploding on them is more likely, so that it can’t be used to farm figurines. A possibly evil addendum is that if the player would have otherwise died from damage from a magic trap, the bones file may contain a figurine of them instead of a corpse.
A magic trap that causes you to yearn for your distant homeland may instantly magic portal you to your quest home level (perhaps asking you first).
New or replacement (or hallucination-only) flavor-only message for magic traps: “Your spider senses are tingling!”
