Need fellow mage guild help

[MrSparkle]

I haven't played this game in ages so I forgot just about everything about it. However, there's 1 thing I didn't forget, and that's the difficulty my human mage in the mage guild had doing random dungeons. It prevented him from completing many quests.

The problem was when he'd take stairs down to a new level and find those stairs either fully surrounded by monsters or monsters on top of the stairs so he'd appear in a nearby square, totally blocking off his escape route and guaranteeing death (my memory might be faulty and monsters never actually appeared on the stairs, though no matter because monsters surrouding them had the same result - death before I could go back up the stairs). It happened at some point in every single RD. For some reason there was nothing to prevent monsters from immediately appearing either next to or on the stairs back up, and he'd die every single time.

It was totally frustrating and I eventually just stopped playing the game. Many quests use either RDs or dungeons that look like RDs, and I couldn't complete them because of it.

What do other human mages do to prevent this? How do you guys explore further and further in a RD when taking stairs down might mean instant death? Or has there been a change in the game where the stairs are guaranteed to be clear of monsters when you first descend them? I did read that it's recommended that people designing areas make their stairs and the squares surrounding them so monsters can't move onto them, but I guess this doesn't extend to RDs.