Ashenzari and Curse-Uncurse cycle

[Can-ned Food]

Although the benefits from bearing accursed equipment are practical and don't suffer if you remove curses, change gear, then curse the new items, the ease with which you can do so changes the idea of getting stuck with something into a management of how many scrolls you keep on–hand for each ability.

This has always bothered me; has this not been much noticed by anyone else?

I've worked out a quick fix which changes your piety to 0 if you remove the curse from any one item. That way it becomes a much more important decision to curse your gear, and especially so if you are utilizing the benefits of higher piety with Ashenzari. Et c.

Does anyone have any suggestions or better ideas prior to me introducing the code on Github?

[chequers]

Reducing piety to 0 stars seems quite cruel, it would take the player thousands of turns to reach full piety again. Perhaps putting the player in penance for a little while would be better.

[crate]

A big problem with making the penalty significant is that because of how Ash works cursing weapon is much more valuable for piety gain than cursing any other slot (especially a 2h weapon). However, the player often doesn't even have a good basetype weapon when she joins Ash, so she's basically required to uncurse it later to change basetypes.

So if you want cursing equipment to really be a commitment, first I think piety gain has to be reworked to allow for better piety gain without requiring a weapon curse.

[dynast]

I believe there are 3 consequences to scroll management:

1. You constantly swap gear and transfer knowledge to adapt to a better role.
2. You only swap gear for upgrades or for specific branches.
3. You walk around with some of your gear uncursed for convenient swapping.

Your proposal seems to get rid of the first, a little of the second and enforces the third one, which is the one i think its comepletely NOT how ash should be played(i believe the first one is how it should be played). Yeah, being able to swap all the time because of scroll abundance is dumb but it doesnt happen all the time and doesnt happen from the start of the game. The player has to weight his options throughout the game and figure out when is the time to adapt to something better.

I would propose that your equipped gear is always cursed and slips off when uncursed, but maybe thats just how i see ash.

[chequers]

Does anyone really use transfer knowledge? Maybe it should be an ability available at zero piety...

[dynast]

http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/Dynast/morg ... 200534.txt
Went from axes to polearms, then unarmed and from armour to transmutations. It sure is a fun ability and is usually kept in check by the cursed gear, which leads to interesting decisions regarding the use of scrolls, at least in theory.

[duvessa]

Making transfer knowledge available at zero piety wouldn't change the fact that transfer knowledge is fundamentally a garbage ability. By using it, you're saying "I screwed up and trained a skill too high, and I trained it too high by so much that I'm willing to lose 10 scries to get part of the XP back". So unless you made a serious strategic error, the only time it's useful is if you found an item that rendered one of your skills useless; in practice, the only time that happens is if you find a really good off-class weapon that you want to switch to.

[ydeve]

duvessa, do you think it's worth using manuals for garbage skills to transfer knowledge?

[duvessa]

Only if you hate scrying and are ok with your xp doing nothing for a while.

[Lacuenta]

If I understand your proposal correctly that would mean losing all benefits from Ash on switching equipment.

Thus some of your spells suddenly become uncastable, weapons are no longer at mindelay etc. for thousands of turns?

Would there still be a reason for players to choose Ash considering such severe penalties?
If instead they can choose other gods which will give huge benefits as well without having to lose everything when you find some good gear?

[dynast]

Being able to effectively use anything the dungeon throws at you seems like a nice ability.

[Can-ned Food]

Well, the idea that you can uncurse with no repercussions looks like failed concept to me. I'm yet working on a design for Ashenzari which does not concern cursed items at all, but admittedly my expertise lies elsewhere and so that may take a while.