Most of the joy I get from DROD come from analyzing a room and planning out how to solve it, but often when I do, especially in complicated monster manipulation or maze puzzles, the following happens: I figure out that the goblin needs to be at
this tile and the roach at
that tile, I start to set up the situation, but on the way I forget which tiles
this and
that refers to. Or I finally find a path I believe leads out of the maze, but before I reach the end of it, I forget where I planned to go next. I find this very frustrating, and it often leads me to solve puzzles though trial and error, rather than using the solution I had previously found...
Therefore, almost every time I play DROD, I wish for a way to directly record my plans while analyzing the board. I could of course use a notepad, or screencap the room and edit it in MS-paint, but in most cases I find these alternatives to be tedious and breaking my immersion in the game.
I think an ideal solution would be to have a planning mode, activated by pressing a hotkey on the keyboard, which brings up a little toolbar, along with the ability to add and remove simple symbols (like arrows, letters, digits, and colored lights) to and from the board. When pressing the hotkey again, the symbols and toolbar would be hidden until you reactivate the planning mode.
Here's how I picture it:
Click here to view the secret text
×From the “Flood Warning” hold (not fully filled in as to avoid spoiling the solution).
Similarly to unlimited undo, I think the addition of this feature would feel liberating to many players by allowing one to focus purely on the puzzle at hand, rather than having to memorize coordinate numbers, the exact length of a fuse, whether two tiles are diagonally connected or not, and so forth...