I think this is an inherent risk with casting bouncy spells. Yes, it sucks when you accidentally fry yourself, but that's ADOM. There are no warnings for doing other equally stupid things.

I've fatfingered a few very promising characters into the high score list too, but I disagree with this due to the reasons JellySlayer already mentioned.

However, the question of why your bouncing bolts always hit you, even with attributes that would make 1% of enemy-fired ones connect, is a good one.

I think players don't dodge their own bolts because they aren't expecting them to come back and hit them, even subconsciously, and are concentrating too much an casting their own spell to react that fast.

You do have a point.. But... One could see similarities between what I suggested and how the game treats 'w'alking for example.. Seeing a hostile creature interrupts the walk so the PC can *choose* what to do (I admit this isn't a very good example). Or better, when moving onto a square with a friendly monster the game asks "Do you really want to attack *foo* Y/n". So the game places emphasis on the player's decisions and intentions, it's not just an action game where only the nimble of fingers wins. Well let's hear what Mr. Biskup thinks of this. :)

@Silfir
There might be situations where you intentionally want to use a bouncing spell to attack something, even on the expense of damage. In that case the PC "premeditates" the dodge so it would be totally logical.

I like bouncing bolt deaths. It's one of the more amusing ways to die, especially for high level wizards :)

Yeah, but bolts aren't sent out like missiles; they're like cones projected from the PC's position (visualized by the line getting longer, but still being connected to the PC for the duration of the spellcast). While they're sending out a bolt their movement might be restricted enough it's simply not possible to evade the spell. Think of it like the Ghostbusters; they have to hold steady the entire time, too, and if it bounced back on them I don't think they could do much about it without aborting the spell.

That's not to say the game's behaviour couldn't be changed, but I feel that magic should be hazardous to use in some respects. Also I agree that it's one of the funnier ways to go.

But in combat situations unintentional stuff happens often cause of the stress and tension generated by it. It's a good measure of coordinating the player with his character - if the player is nervous, it's easier for the character to make a decision a nervous person would [for example miscasting a spell], often with suicidal consequences for the character [and suicidal thoughts for the player]

I suggested this before, and it was rejected :http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=773

This was the Creator's reply:

I would like to suggest then that the game still queries the player under those circumstances.

Although, because wall beasts and living walls don't look like walls in the tile modes and the player can find them with the 'l'ook or 't'hrow commands when playing in ASCII; there isn't really a prompt necessary in those cases.

I agree. As I explained in a different RFE, I think the game difficulty should come from the game world, not from the UI. Being punished and dying to pressing a wrong key is not immersive.

One could argue that the difficulty does come from the game world - spells are powerful and dangerous, you have to control them properly, and if you die because, for some reason, you didn't manage to do that, you cannot in good conscience blame that on the UI - you're just a spellcaster who got sloppy and paid the price. That's on the same level as blaming the UI because you accidentally pressed the wrong direction key to move - do we need to add confirmation prompts for PCs walking into known traps, too? For staying in melee range against powerful monsters?

There's providing convenience, and there's outright coddling. Confirmation prompts are the exception, not the rule, for a reason.

What about wands of far slaying? If I put a massive charge in it, I can easily get a range of a couple hundred squares on it. Should I be able to use this prompt to be able to figure out the correct direction to zap the wand so I won't fry myself? Or is there an inherent danger to using a long range weapon where it is difficult to predict the outcome? What if I have a bolt spell with spellpower 200 or so where my bolts can have comparable range? What if my character has poor perception but normal bolt ranges, and there's a wall somewhere I can't see that will reflect the spell back at me when I attack a monster with it? Should I be able to use the prompt to protect my character against threats that they can't even see? What if I'm in darkness, blind, confused, etc.? What if I'm in the room where the directions are reversed?

In the particular case of bouncing bolts, if there must be a prompt, my inclination would be to only have a prompt if the PC targets the bolt directly into an adjacent wall. There seem to be few enough circumstances where doing such a thing would ever be intentional, and minimal ways that it could ever be exploited that having a safety catch for that particular case is probably fine. If you're shooting into an empty square and the bolt reflects at some later point and hits you, well, tough. And it should be turned off in the room where the directions are reversed, because the whole point in those areas is that the UI is supposed to be screwing with you.

I also think this is enough. The idea is to prevent obvious deaths by pressing the wrong key, not relieving the player from making tactical decisions or giving him extra information.

What next, prompting the player "Do you really want to use a wand of ball lightning in a corridor? [y/n]".
Maybe "You are within 3 tiles from a banshee, surely you've wanted to 'e'at, not clear your 'E'ars? [n/y]".

You are going to open up a giant box of problems if you push for this particular change. Because people will then start making others, more elaborate than zapping a wand in a wrong direction with the argument "Come one, previous RFE was implemented!". And then ADOM will turn from an incredible sandbox into something bizarre.

If you can't handle the requirement for a necessary level of concentration which prevents you from deliberately killing your PC, why is this a UI problem?

I've executed myself with a MM in Bug Temple once and I've learned my mistake and experienced a unique situation. And you want to bar new players from it? I don't really get that.

Well, the thing is _Ln_, I have also not killed myself with a mis-directed bolt in over 10 years, but with this game going on Steam(or something along those lines) and the feeling is that many a new player will not accept this behaviour.
This is difficult for me to judge as I am not of the new generation. Deep inside I also want this behaviour to remain, because it keeps players attentive to what they are doing, but with the newly added mouse support these kind of misclicks are even more likely to happen than with a keyboard.

Edit - IIRC, the game already prompts you whether you want to clean your ears.

I don't see the point of those all-or-nothing examples. Yes, there will always be some situations in the game where the player can do something disastrous by misclicking. That doesn't mean that the game shouldn't try to minimize the chance of that happening by addressing the most blatant ones.

I personally wouldn't want very specialized RFE's like context-sensitive asking about cleaning ears, that would quite obviously be a lot of work for nothing. But the bouncing bolt dead is something that happens pretty often (see YASD section), and it's extremely easy to detect when a player is zapping a bolt towards an adjacent wall. Which is something that comes from a wrong keypress 99.999999% of the time (unlike a wand of wonder in a corridor, which is a risky gamble that could even have a good outcome).

What is exactly the drawback of adding a confirmation dialog if you are going to cast a bouncing bolt at a directly adjacent wall tile (without blindness, darkness, etc.)? Who is going to be inconvenienced by this, taking into account that it's something that you pretty much never do in normal gameplay unless you're suiciding? How can dying to a wrongly pressed key be experiencing a unique situation? Yeah, like losing a character to a power outage. Teaches nothing about how to play ADOM better, unless you think that buying a UPS, not playing on netbooks or being very careful with your finger are parts of playing ADOM well. In which case we have totally different concepts about what playing ADOM actually is.

The drawback is that magic being dangerous and able to kill you has nothing to do with power outages, are you kidding? It's something that's entirely within the player's control. The restriction to bolts cast directly at orthogonally aligned adjacent walls is something JellySlayer added. I guess, if you have to, you could add that version of it, but the game plain doesn't need it. Even now you will fatfinger your wizard to death once every thousand games and that's it. No one will stop playing ADOM because of that or blame anyone but themselves if it happens - they signed up for a classical roguelike, not a tea party. ADOM has well over a hundred ways to die and "killing oneself with magic missile" is one of the most memorable ones - that alone, to me, is worth more than any hypothetical benefit (I don't believe one of note exists).

Silfir does make a good point, if as a fresh player I use lightning bolt for the first time with one monster between me and a wall or a ghost right next to me at an orthogonally aligned adjacent wall tile; it damn well must not ask me for confirmation. Even to this day I remember the first time I cast a bouncing bolt spell. It serves to further ingrain knowledge and carefulness, which are the most powerful tools a player can possess.

I'm just waiting when someone makes a RFE that recommends no damage to the PC from own spells... Enough with the hand holding please.