If there were no curses, and no scrolls of remove curse...

[Shtopit]

...you could curse equipment when playing Ash sacrificing scrolls of identify instead. Uncursing could be piety based.

Thoughts?

[chequers]

Ash is about restricting your equipment slots to gain power boosts. Losing scrolls of remove curse is something that restricts your equipment slots. Scrolls of identify don't really do that. So lore-wise, I don't think this is a good fit.

Mechanically, identify scrolls are very common. I would be able to curse a lot more items earlier than current, which means you'd need to look at piety gain balance and skill boost balance.

Alternate idea: when you worship Ash, all slots are cursed. You can pay piety to unequip an item. Piety gain isn't affected by your bondage level.

[tasonir]

Cursing and uncursing should be moved to god abilities with relevant costs, probably free/cheap to curse and medium/high cost to uncurse, probably mostly piety. Exact system would probably take some time to think out, but I'm sure it'll happen eventually, and the numbers can be tweaked pretty easily once it's tested. But no need to overload identify scrolls. If you did use identify scrolls, that would be more restrictive than currently, because while ID might be the most common scroll, it's already used for, well, identification. I almost always have far more remove curse scrolls at all points of the game because I am using ID scrolls to ID.

[mattlistener]

Is there consensus that the cursed item mechanic is bad? It creates a risk/reward decision space for some characters that need better defenses or killingness than they currently have, as opposed to just having full knowledge of all available equipment (via equip-ID) and using what's best. Later on, artifacts that recurse themselves make the mechanic still relevant.

[Siegurt]

Is there consensus that the cursed item mechanic is bad? It creates a risk/reward decision space for some characters that need better defenses or killingness than they currently have, as opposed to just having full knowledge of all available equipment (via equip-ID) and using what's best. Later on, artifacts that recurse themselves make the mechanic still relevant.

There is not a consensus, there is a camp that believes it is bad.

Note also that the artifact recursing mechanic is almost never relevant.

[watertreatmentRL]

Hellcrawl's solution to this issue of curse scrolls and Ashenzari was to remove curses and remove Ashenzari. This was a solid decision: A god that gives you essentially infinite experience makes no sense and can only be justified in terms of a degenerate difficulty curve where the game is won or lost in the first 30 minutes of a 4 to 6 hour game.

Ash is just a fundamentally bad idea and it would be better to drop the god entirely than figure out how to fix it in some future version of DCSS without curses.

[Siegurt]

Hellcrawl's solution to this issue of curse scrolls and Ashenzari was to remove curses and remove Ashenzari. This was a solid decision: A god that gives you essentially infinite experience makes no sense and can only be justified in terms of a degenerate difficulty curve where the game is won or lost in the first 30 minutes of a 4 to 6 hour game.

Ash is just a fundamentally bad idea and it would be better to drop the god entirely than figure out how to fix it in some future version of DCSS without curses.

I think you are mistaken somehow, ash doesn't give you any additional experience.

[Shtopit]

My pov is that Ash is a fun god. However, I think that curses outside of him don't have much reason to exist anymore, because they are far less incisive than they once were: once, you couldn't remove equipment covered by cursed items, or eat while wielding a cursed blunt weapon (unless you were a tengu). Now you just are stuck to that single item. Curses also become insignificant after the early game. The most important effect is with cursed artifacts, but it isn't something that comes up often enough to justify the mechanic (it's 3 extremely rare items, one of which you will throw away as soon as you have uncursed it the first time). A couple of significant cursed items are duplicated by a mutation (teleportitis) and by corrosion (inaccuracy). This is also true for all other normal cursed items (negative armour, negative slaying: corrosion; negative stats, loudness: mutations).

A game with a lot of mutations doesn't really need curses, because they already are permanent debuffs that require strategic resource management.

So since I'd like curses to be fully overtaken by mutations and I like Ash, I tried out thinking of a way to make him stay if the curse mechanic were removed outside of him.

I also don't like remove curse scrolls to be an inventory tax you have to pay just in case. With wands and fragile items, identify is always worth keeping around, so it would be an interesting choice (Ash doesn't identify wand charges, does he?)