Pandemonium Purger
Posts: 1283
Joined: Thursday, 16th April 2015, 22:39
what if take-off penalties 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.