what if take-off penalties were XP-gated?

[Pollen_Golem]

*meaning if the property that gives the penalty were XP-gated, rather than if the penalty incurred by taking off the item were XP-gated.

This thread is about *contam, *drain, *fragile, *rot, and maybe other properties I forgot, but not faith. It does not matter how long you've been wearing the artefact - the penalty for taking it off is the same whenever you take it off. But what if instead, the take-off penalty decreased as you gained experience while wearing/wielding the item, until you could take it off without penalty? If you equip-ID a bad *drain artefact, there is almost never any reason not to take it off immediately, and *contam artefacts tend to be frustrating because you often can't do anything about it. Making the penalty XP-gated would get players to play around with bad gear for a while. Of course, putting the gear back on should restart the timer. Negative take-off properties could even replace curses, as in, make curses and ?rc redundant and thus prime candidates for removal. After all, the only time that curses work as they're supposed to is when you have to run around with the cursed object for a while. XP-gated take-off penalties are just a softer version of the early-game scenario where you put on a cursed item and have no ?rc. The only thing you'd need to take into consideration is Ash, and maybe figure out a way to give bad properties to blue items.

I'm just not sure if this idea would introduce consequences worse than the problems it solves.The thing I'd worry about most is the interface for letting players know when the article is safe to remove. I suppose you could have *CONTAM become *CONTAM or *contam, and these could perhaps be status symbols on the status bar in addition to part of the item's description. Or you could wildly randomize and hide the timer from the player if you're evil.

[twelwe]

first post hell yeh three times

[Pollen_Golem]

to be bumped by twelve

the humiliation

[amaril]

This could be an interesting alternative to remove curse scrolls: curses just wear off with time. curse scrolls could even still exist, but there could be fewer of them so using one would be an actual choice. Assuming curses are worth keeping, which they might be--I often wear-id gear early (because the potential upside is good), and I find it kind of interesting to be stuck with a bad cursed weapon or a ring of teleport for a floor or so.


edit. ideally there would still be enough rc/id scrolls to make id-ing the miscellaneous junk you find lategame feasible

[Siegurt]

What if that's what curses *were* cursed item had one of a specific list of XP gated removal penalties, then you could remove remove curse scrolls entirely, and you could either take the item off and suffer the consequences, or work off the XP penalty to remove it with no penalty eventually.

Then Ash's conduct becomes "you have to keep cursing stuff as the curses wear off, and you can gear-switch at XP gated intervals" which seems like actually a more interesting conduct than Ash has now.

[Pollen_Golem]

Then Ash's conduct becomes "you have to keep cursing stuff as the curses wear off

Actually Ash would be more interesting if Ash maintained curses instead of letting them wear off, forcing you to suffer the consequences of taking cursed items off unlike everyone else.

Ash could have a active ability to curse any item you want, and to keep it interesting you could
a) make Ash choose a random curse to bestow on the item
b) make Ash curse only items that you already have equipped

In this case Ash should appreciate you holding a distortion weapon too, since it also has a take-off penalty.

[daggaz]

This would be so much betterr for the early game, in those instances where you wear/wield ID a cursed item and the RNG just flipping refuses to load a remove curse scroll. Thats an interesting challenge but it starts to wear thin after a while, this change would allow you to work off your debt, so to say, so you know you are guaranteed to be able to drop an item provided you can gain XP. Also it clears up an inventory slot from an otherwise entirely worthless and pointless item.

10/10. Do like, would implement.

While we are at it, lets get rid of ?identify as well. Now you have to use-ID and accept the risk to gain the knoweldge, unless you worship Ash who honestly needs the boost. You could bump the loading percentages for some of the rarer consumables up a tiny bit if it was actually important, but it's not.