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[LeoLeonardoIII]

Before I get started, I want to avoid the TL;DR;still gonna post.

Spoiler: I know about D&D Online (click to show/hide)

, and while it has good dungeons, they're still very linear. You mostly can't avoid obstacles, light isn't an issue, encumbrance never matters, and traps are generally "try to jump over it and die if you fail - which is usual, or let the Rogue click it and wait for the bar to fill up". AI is barebones. NPC conversation is virtually nonexistent. Town is boring. There's no conflict between players and no enemies ever go after you specifically - just monsters you fight in the dungeon while you're there. Finally, it's completely a theme-park MMO which means nothing you do matters because everyone in the world did it a dozen times already and you're just on the quest chain.

I like the DDO active fighting (although missiles should be more useful - I guess I should say melee should be nerfed) rather than turn-based, but I'm openminded on that front.

I'm thinking something more Spelunky-like?

I'm looking for a game that heavily utilizes many of the tools of old-school dungeon crawling. These would include:

50' Rope - can be thrown, lassoed, climbed, pulled, etc. Should be able to lasso a treasure chest and pull it toward you. Can also be burned/cut/etc. Weight limit before snapping. Damaged easier if under load.
10' Pole - for poking and prodding
Torches / Lanterns - used up, need to be carried in hand, lights things on fire, water/drafts extinguish them
Wall climbing - including sheer surfaces by Thieves
Hiding / sneaking / backstabbing / pickpocketing
Locks and traps, including on doors, treasure chests, etc., which in some cases can be dealt with manually using tools like sandbags and 10' Poles, but sometimes need to be finessed by a Thief with lockpicks. Also monsters can spring traps, but smart ones in their own territory don't.
Secret doors you have to interact with - pull the book on the shelf, press the stone in the wall.
Puzzles - whether they make sense in the environment or just "a wizard did it"
Gasses that disperse eventually unless refreshed, but disperse faster in a gusty wind, and have effects like suffocation / poison / sleep / flammable
Mounts, and pets that aren't directly controllable but you have to give general orders, and pack animals like donkeys
Tribal AI that responds to threats - kill enough wolves and the pack might leave or just hang around in the den, kill enough orcs and they mass for a showdown or escape with the loot
Conversations, AI friendliness and hostility, not all monsters are hostile and many can be negotiated with - Parley is as useful an activity as Combat.
Town is an adventuresome environment - muggers, gangsters, rowdy Vikings, wizards' mansions, shops that can be plundered if you're careful and prepared, factions that have their own agendas and pursue them with or without you.
Rival / friendly adventurers.
Hirelings - morale, secret goals, betrayal
Keeping your ear to the ground helps you catch rumors, which other people also pursue, and may conflict with you. You might find an unknown dungeon, plunder it, and if you let slip info about it (or let yourself get tracked back to it by rivals) other people may try to get that sweet loot before you.
Weirdo monsters like true gelatinous cubes slorping along, green slime and piercers falling on you, rust monsters, disenchanters.
 
(These first ones feel to me like environmental interaction things, which would need to be part of the gameplay / interface, unlike the below which could just be added to any game)

Hurled Flaming Oil - which helps prevent pursuit by animal AIs
Food - required to be eaten and if thrown down helps prevent pursuit by stupid AIs
Treasure - weighs a lot and can be cashed in at town, and if thrown down helps prevent pursuit by intelligent AIs
Holy Water / Turning Undead by Clerics
Magic-Users who have to find their spells as treasure
Intelligent "ego swords" with special powers
Some item crafting (like primitive knife+staff=spear, cooking butchered meat, branches+cloth=torch, etc)
Really difficult content that you might not ever be able to overcome, or must come back to later, or expend resources to overcome it at a low level


So? Any ideas? All this time people have been trying to put the D&D experience into a video game and pretty much ignored most of D&D in favor of "oh D&D is Hit Points and Experience Points and Gold Pieces and you fight monsters and get magic items" which is like saying milk is fat suspended in water.

[Sensei]

50' Rope - can be thrown, lassoed, climbed, pulled, etc. Should be able to lasso a treasure chest and pull it toward you. Can also be burned/cut/etc. Weight limit before snapping. Damaged easier if under load.

This sort of thing represents the pie-in-the-sky goal of all computer gaming. Along with all the other features you mentioned, you won't find a game that does this well. Hundreds or thousands of "be-everything" games have turned out to be shallow and terrible, or just fallen apart under their own weight and never been released. There's a reason computer DnD games are mostly combat; that's the part a computer does well. Being able to use your realistically simulated 50-foot rope ANYWHERE for ANYTHING? Not so much.

If you want a DnD PC game, I'd recommend the old Neverwinter Nights, with expansion packs. There's a lot of fun fan-made campaigns with the game's editor, but it's not the impossible game you're describing.

If you REALLY want to play what you're describing... well, you need a human dungeon master. Just use Maptools or a similar program to simulate a tabletop DnD game over the internet.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

50' Rope - can be thrown, lassoed, climbed, pulled, etc. Should be able to lasso a treasure chest and pull it toward you. Can also be burned/cut/etc. Weight limit before snapping. Damaged easier if under load.

This sort of thing represents the pie-in-the-sky goal of all computer gaming. Along with all the other features you mentioned, you won't find a game that does this well. Hundreds or thousands of "be-everything" games have turned out to be shallow and terrible, or just fallen apart under their own weight and never been released. There's a reason computer DnD games are mostly combat; that's the part a computer does well. Being able to use your realistically simulated 50-foot rope ANYWHERE for ANYTHING? Not so much.

Black and White (2001) did lassoes, and I believe there was a firefighting game that had trailing hoses. Thief: Dark Project (1998) had climbable rope arrows. A Quake mod had grappling hooks you could swing from in 1997. This is 2013 and we can have ropes.

Played NWN1, liked it, and this kind of stuff could be modded in. But playing it now, and playing NWN2, they're just so SLOW and the camera sucks and I feel like I'm playing Ultima Underworld or something. So, if you can suggest mods that do this stuff in NWN I'm happy to hear it. Particularly, interactive traps and secret doors should be possible, although I recall NWN being built very statically, so anything with moving parts would kinda have to be a custom animation. And it didn't support opening a secret door into a previously unknown room without an area transition (which is kind of a bummer). Generally NWN is a very static and prim game. She is an ice princess: pretty but stiff.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I've been tying myself in knots trying to find such a game.

[ductape]

I dont think it exists, but when I was crazy one day I wrote this: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=120664.msg3887492#msg3887492

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Does anyone remember Pyramid of Ra for oldschool Apple? Like when the computer was yellow-beige and had a built-in handle for carrying around - although it wasn't actually a portable.

The game featured nets you could throw on animals to trap them, planks to cross pits, lantern with fuel, food, variable movement speed, mapping, poison and cure (HOLY CATS that stuff burns going down!!). I suspect PoR's descendants Eye of the Beholder / Legend of Grimrock / etc. would be a good format for producing this game. Because you're more limited, you have fewer special cases to code for. Four directions, doors always in expected places, etc.

For example, you could implement spiking a rope at one side of a pit. If you walk onto a pit from a spiked side, you still go down but you don't take falling damage. If under a pit that has a rope, you can climb up, and appear in the open pit's space, but can only walk in a direction that has a spiked rope to leave the pit.

If you had a Levitate spell you could just step off anywhere.

If you faced a wall and attached yourself to it by climbing, you could sidestep across the pit (making a climb check, falling in if you fail). If you turn away from the wall you fall.

Dungeon Master II had ALL KINDS of cool coding, like when a door closes downward it crushes whatever's under it, minerals you can mine from the walls, need to fill bota bags from water fountains, etc. Lots of cool ideas could be taken from Ultima Underworld also. I remember being so excited that combining corn + torch made popcorn, and that I found it out all by myself! Also rune combinations making spells, which was also done in Legend of Grimrock but not very well, and you started out with all the runes instead of finding them as you went.

I think that kind of game would work best if you just had one character instead of a party. It's problematic to split a group when the Thief climbs across a pit or something. Also then you have to manually deal with picking up dead party members. It would be pretty sweet to implement a system where people can enter a square if they're friendly but not if there's an enemy, so you could conceivably do multiplayer / hirelings / summons / pets.

Just an idea anyway. That type of game tends to be the closest to what I want already. But instead of feeling like the dungeon is a set of puzzles I need to overcome, it would be nice if it were just a big-ass environment with cool stuff to explore. Exile, for example, had that feeling for a long time.