Curses

[SirDinkus]

Well I offically abandon my original suggestion and I throw in with the Xom-like randomly activated effect of cursed items. But I still think they need to make Scrolls of Remove Curse rare or nonexistent for it to work. It wouldn't change much otherwise. Players could still uncurse everything like they do now. Just make cursed items droppable and unequippable but rarely uncursable and I'd be ok with this. It would still keep the moment of choice in "its a really good but do I want to deal with this curse that could hit me at inopportune moments". I can live with that.

[Siegurt]

Part of my proposal is that remove curse scroll becomes "suppress curse" which temporarily suppresses the curse effects.

[galehar]

Well I guess I'm baffled as to how keep any sort of challenge present in (any) game by making absolutely everything "fun". Dying (for every other gamer besides a Dugeon Crawl player) isn't fun. Taking damage isn't fun. Missing attacks are annoying. Meat spoiling isn't fun. Hunger isn't fun because it gets in the way of winning! On and on and on...

It's a game, of course we're trying to make it fun. Challenging is fun, grinding is not.

Any attempt at making curses more significant and interesting should probably start by reducing the frequency of ?RC. I think we should even start by that without changing anything else at first. Ash can take the nerf just fine.
So I'd avoid designing curse effects around the premise that ?RC are common. Also, curse effects triggering by just carrying cursed items sounds really awful and unfun.

[savageorange]

@Galehar: Fair enough point. I certainly meant to present that idea as simply that, an idea -- not anything that I was pronouncing as something 'good', just an ingredient to help the discussion eventually reach something good.

[TeshiAlair]

I think this is an idea similar to what people are saying, but taking it a step further- What if curses were like temporary negative mutations/status ailments that disappeared upon exp gain/scroll reading? Kind of like classic curses like the Hope Diamond curse or King Tut's curse. I'd imagine them to be things that wouldn't thematically work as mutations.

Ideas:
Curse of Greed: All gold gains are halved.
Curse of Paranoida: you randomly get misleading messages.
Curse of Clumsiness: -2 to hit
Curse of Coughing: makes less noise than shouting, but lets monsters track you while invisible, and makes sleepstabbing very difficult.

?RC would be less common, and Ash would: 1. call curses "Bindings" instead. 2. Be able to turn all scrolls into binding effecting curses. Would give a reason for scrolls of noise, immolation, random uselessness, etc to exist.

[SirDinkus]

Eh, I don't mind just reducing the frequency of Scrolls of Remove Curse as a start...but random Xom-ish negative effects happening because your carrying a cursed item with you doesn't sound fun? I disagree there. If you wait until items are marked as cursed after ID or equip (as they are right now), then it becomes the players choice to continue to carry that item (if they weren't programmed to stick anymore). Either because it has a benefit to them or it might in the future. And they are willing to risk some bad luck every once in a while because they'd just drop it if they weren't. This sounds totally fair. You can't completely remove the "negative" from "negative effect" and still make it have meaning...so there is going to always be someone saying that this isn't "fun". I don't know what more people could ask for. This approach completely removes the "inventory micro-managing" that is despised so much and gives players the choice to be cursed, only that now players may choose to risk it because the item they really want/need is too good to give up. If you wanted to play the game and completely avoid any and all cursed items, you'd have the freedom to do so.

[savageorange]

Personally I do not support the more unambiguously negative effects; I'm pretty sure that would be unfun. My suggestion was aimed at effects that make you CHANGE your behaviour. For example, Xom has an effect where he casts Inner Flame on one or more nearby enemies. According to how careful you are and how close the enemy is, this can be a very helpful or a very unhelpful thing. Either way it makes the battle suddenly take a 90 degree turn.

Triggering could also be via a different means -- perhaps when you take a related action (melee or un/wielding for weapons,changing or enchanting your armour for armour, changing your rings for rings) which would effectively mean you have some control over what risks you take.

[galehar]

random Xom-ish negative effects happening because your carrying a cursed item with you doesn't sound fun?

No it doesn't. If I want to be randomly and funnily screwed up, I worship Xom. If I want to beat the game, I don't. And if cursed items did that, I would probably never carry any.

[mumra]

I have to agree having effects happen just from carrying things in your inventory would be bad. Whatever system we have needs to be simple and non-annoying, otherwise we end up with something like food reform / nausea all over again.

I would actually propose a much simplified version where: an item can have one or more curses, when you wield/equip the item any curses are instantly transferred to you. A remove curse scroll lets you pick one curse to remove. Scrolls of curse foo always cause a sticky curse on that slot (and possibly another random curse). Both cursed items and remove curse scrolls should be rarer than currently. I think this is all we need.

With regards individual curse effects: I think the Curse of Greed is really good, that's exactly the kind of direction we need for these. Note, we would have to generate all gold piles with half as much in them, rather than deduct the tax when you pick it up; otherwise the player would leave all the gold until they removed the curse and then go back and collect it.

More ideas in the vein:

Curse of Hunger: either like current ring, or makes all food provide halved nutrition
Curse of Curses: items you find are more likely to themselves be cursed
Curse of Misfires: magical devices seem to always go wrong for you; evokable items have a (low) chance to fail, sometimes this will waste a charge, will never directly harm you
Curse of Fogginess: your mind is foggy and it is harder to learn; 10% reduction in XP earned
Curse of Phobias: you are irrationally afraid of [foo]. Whatever [foo] is will innately cause the Fear effect against you while you have this curse. [foo] could be spiders, rats, "the colour blue" (all blue glyphs), "the letter 'd'" (all d glyphs, possibly too fourth-wally however, also bad for tiles)
Curse of Transposition(?): Reading a scroll will sometimes randomly have the effect of another scroll (it's possible to get more cursed this way).

[Galefury]

I like Siegurt's idea. Having a positive effect along with a negative one and no way to remove curses would make cursed items quite a bit more insteresting.

One minor effect not talked about so far is the same item having different possible curses. If you have a cursed ring of of rF that gives additional rF and occasionally drains you (new draining), and a cursed ring of rF that also gives +6 slaying and occasionally gives you -cTele for a few turns, that might get a little confusing, or lead to very long autoinscriptions. People could also curse duplicates they find on purpose with curse scrolls, hoping to get something nicer. This is neither good or bad in my opinion, just something to consider.

Generally having two random effects means a lot of additional complexity. I think I would prefer the good and bad effect to be tied together. This allows much more thematic combinations, and helps prevent the downside from being irrelevant.

Related to what galehar said: random crap happening to you when wearing a cursed item is much better than getting xommed just for carrying things, but still pretty bad IMO. I would prefer if each kind of curse had a designated trigger. This can still be random, but being tied to certain events would prevent curses just pointlessly triggering during autotravel, without involving tension.

To illustrate my points, here are a few curse suggestions, which might be terrible because they are just quick suggestions I didn't fully think through:

Curse of speed: your move delay is reduced by 1, but every monster gets a small chance to slow you while it is in LOS (either as per the spell's effect, or just movement). MR does not help, stasis might (not sure).
Curse of fire/other resists: you get rF, but every time you get hit by fire damage there is a 30% chance to lose one point of rF after the damage is done for 200 aut (20 standard turns). Without any other rF items, that means rF0 after it triggers once, rF- if it triggers twice.
Curse of sneaking: an appropriate stealth bonus, but the item screams loudly whenever a monster shouts (or does its shout equivalent thingy).

[Silk]

I like Siegurt's idea. Having a positive effect along with a negative one and no way to remove curses would make cursed items quite a bit more insteresting.

I agree. We do have this philosophy already with the distortion brand and I think there is potential for other double-edged brands:

- Rework anti-magic to make it a bit more punitive even for nonmages. What about having it deal Int damage over time AND on unequip.
- Use the new plutonium sword drawback as a regular brand (Maybe combine it with the Orb effect to increase the duration of contamination while equipped?)
- Weapon of Noise (singing sword), casts sentinel's mark on you when unequipped.

And those are just the immediate ideas. There really is a lot of untapped potential here.

[Siegurt]

I like some of the curse effect Ideas that have been proposed so far.

The framework I'm writing now keeps the curse attached to the item, the curse can "activate" randomly or have a persistent effect, and only affects you if the item is equipped. It could just as easily transfer to the character with some minor tweaking, although personally I feel like having curses attach themselves to the character feels too much like just a mutation variant, once I submitted the code of course the community will (or will not) do what it see fits with it.

I think I'd like the "half gold' curse to happen to a gold pile as soon as it enters LOS, with a message to the effect of "some the pile of gold vanishes in a puff of smoke" Both because I think it would be a little more crazy-making for the player, and because that way they can't stash gold piles and not pick them up (Yes it would mean that Ash players could avoid potential treasures while cursed if Ash's passive mapping showed them one, however I'm actually pretty OK with Ash worshippers being able to use Ash's divination to avoid some of the curse's effect)

Here's how what I'm working on is shaping up:
1. Curse is attached to item.
2. Curse doesn't do anything unless the item is equipped.
3. Curse will have an effect at random intervals (or constantly)
4. Curses do not generally bind equipment to an inventory slot, rather they give a random bonus to encourage general wear, Equipment binds while curse is active.
4. A given curse will always have the *same* effect.
5. "Remove Curse" scrolls are replaced with "Suppress curse" which temporarily prevents/removes active curse effects (both benefit and drawback)
6. Curses have different "levels" generic curses are randomly generated, however a curse may be generated "stronger" or "weaker" and you may get a "stronger" or "weaker" version of a given curse (I think stronger mummies should probably generate stronger item curses when they do curse your items)
7. Over time, the likelihood of a curse activating increases, it starts out with very very low probability of activating and then builds up until it activates, then resets, meaning you probably won't have the same curse activating multiple times in a row, but you never know when it will activate.


I'd like curses to be fairly varied in the types of effects they can create (other than the curse effect should be negative but having each curse have a "set" effect means you don't get the Xom-like randomness of "something" happening randomly every so often. Once you know what a given curse does, you can decide if it's effects are worth it, and if you have a way of dealing with it when it rears it's ugly head.

Right now there's no triggers exactly like you mentioned, although using the curse's bonus does increase the likelihood of the curse triggering (thematically, you're actively using the curse's power on a cursed item, what did you think was going to happen? I'm looking into other possibilities for increasing the likelihood of curse activation when it's "relevant" (As opposed to randomly during auto-travel.

Also currently the curse's active malus isn't in any way related to the bonus given. Actually having two random effects is easier for me to code than generating a list of paired attributes, unless you meant complexity for the player (it also lets us have a curse whose effects are unknown until triggered)

[galehar]

4. Curses do not generally bind equipment to an inventory slot, rather they give a random bonus to encourage general wear, Equipment binds while curse is active.
5. "Remove Curse" scrolls are replaced with "Suppress curse" which temporarily prevents/removes active curse effects (both benefit and drawback)

This proposal sounds quite interesting, except for those 2 things. I think it would be better to stick (heh) with a simpler version with sticky curses and no random bonus.

[Siegurt]

Well, I'm trying to write fairly general purpose, it should be easy to test several variants and implement the one that's the best

One of the things that started this thread was the notion that curses are not really relevant to gameplay, because they're easy to remove late-game and have no real effect on late game players, and (with the exception of Ash-users) they're universally bad, with no upside.

The idea behind providing a small upside is that rather than the curse being *inflicted* on you, the curse is trying to *tempt* you into using it (Anyone see the old Friday the 13th show from the 80s? (Not related to the movies) where there were trying to recover cursed items before the possessor used them enough that their soul was swallowed up? That kind of thing was the flavor I had in mind)

At one point I had thought about the curse benefit slowly growing the more you used it, and it's downsides becoming progressively more severe.

Nevertheless, the "incentive" based curses could easily be turned back into current "sticky" curses, making them just like the current curses, only more unpleasant

[Tiber]

The idea behind providing a small upside is that rather than the curse being *inflicted* on you, the curse is trying to *tempt* you into using it (Anyone see the old Friday the 13th show from the 80s? (Not related to the movies) where there were trying to recover cursed items before the possessor used them enough that their soul was swallowed up? That kind of thing was the flavor I had in mind)

At one point I had thought about the curse benefit slowly growing the more you used it, and it's downsides becoming progressively more severe.

While that's not a bad basic idea, I don't think item curses are where to do it. The obsidian axe and scythe of curses are a bit like that, and there are god proposals out there that use that basic idea. I think coming up with a flavorful fixedart might be a better route for that idea.

[SirDinkus]

I'm still down with the random curse effects for held items, but I really think curses shouldn't have positive effects. I think that Scrolls of Remove Curse (much much more rare then they are now) should still exist so people who fret about carrying any cursed items can safely cleanse a few here and there, while people willing to risk the occassional ill effect (or worship Ash) will have a broader access. If its balanced, players could easily completely forgo ever picking up any cursed equipment and still be able to play without being gimped. Not even a third of spawned items should be cursed, so I don't see people being too hampered. Finding a sweet equip that is cursed will either be passed up by a player who doesn't want to risk it or picked up and used until they find a Scroll to uncurse it. Or if a player thinks they can survive without it until they find a Scroll of Remove Curse then they can backtrack to pick it up. It takes longer and is possibly more dangerous but it also is the safest way to get your cake and eat it too. It supports whatever play style you want.

[SirDinkus]

And I can imagine the people disagreeing by saying "This discourages players from picking up cursed items and is no fun!" also used to say "What? You mean if I put on an unidentified item it could be cursed and stuck to me? Well that'll just make players wait until they have a Scroll of Identify before they try on anything. They'll be forced to carry it all around until then! Inventory management! Backtracking! That's no fun!"

I swear, that argument could be used on anything and in my mind it's not valid. If a player chooses to play that way, then fine. But most won't.

I suspect most players would only find a handful of cursed items they might even consider carrying with them, and only suffer through until they find a scroll to remove it. I don't see most players being burdened with an inventory full of cursed items the whole game unless they purposely make it that way.

[savageorange]

I swear, that argument could be used on anything and in my mind it's not valid. If a player chooses to play that way, then fine. But most won't.

I think it's more accurate to say that we don't know how they will choose to play. With the current curse system, I avoid putting on anything that is not a 'type' upgrade (from empty slot to filled slot, like finding a cloak; or from leather armour to plate armour) until I have a nice big collection of scrolls, enough that I trust that rCurse will be among them; and avoid putting on rings/amulets entirely until then.

Whether this behaviour will hold if we change the characteristics of curses -- in particular, having the 'temptation' theme where they have a significant upside as well as a significant downside -- is unknown. Other factors could also change including frequency of cursing, variation in severity of curses effects.. I mean, now that we are looking at them in terms of effectively being an additional ego-type on the item, there's a huge scope for changes that will effect how players choose to behave around them.

The idea behind providing a small upside is that rather than the curse being *inflicted* on you, the curse is trying to *tempt* you into using it (Anyone see the old Friday the 13th show from the 80s? (Not related to the movies) where there were trying to recover cursed items before the possessor used them enough that their soul was swallowed up? That kind of thing was the flavor I had in mind)

At one point I had thought about the curse benefit slowly growing the more you used it, and it's downsides becoming progressively more severe.

While that's not a bad basic idea, I don't think item curses are where to do it. The obsidian axe and scythe of curses are a bit like that, and there are god proposals out there that use that basic idea. I think coming up with a flavorful fixedart might be a better route for that idea.

OT-ish: That reminds me of this weapon from FF5 whose power changes according to the proportion of battles you have run away from (vs amount of battles won). Might be interesting to implement in terms of "If you hit a given enemy with this weapon, you have to kill them. Killing them boosts/maintains weapon power, failing to kill them (within a certain timeout, say 500 turns) reduces weapon power.", since this would effect your tactical decisions on both whether to engage, and whether to keep fighting when things are getting hairy.

[TeshiAlair]

Silly cursed weapon idea- Mace of Midas
Golden mace
All items you pick up have a 50% chance of turning into 1 gold.

[savageorange]

Silly cursed weapon idea- Mace of Midas
Golden mace
All items you pick up have a 50% chance of turning into 1 gold.

That's not bad actually, I think it needs tweaking slightly to be tempting though:
All non-artefact items you pick up have a (60 - (value/12))% chance of turning into max(1,10% of gold value*) gold. Items in a stack are treated individually (so a stack of 20 stones might turn into 20 gold, but more likely, 60% of them (=12) would turn into 1 gold each, and the remainder(8) would stay items.)

* the value they would be assigned if generated in a shop. I'm not sure if this varies according to the character -- for example lightning scales are considered low-value when generating the dungeon if you're not a naga, and high-value if you are, but I don't know whether this difference is reflected in shop prices.

This would make low-value items (eg stones) have about 60% chance of becoming 1 gold, with higher value items (< 1200 gold in value) having a decreasing chance (59% at value=20, 1% at value=1180) of becoming up to 119 gold (1 gold at value=20, 119 gold at value=1190); with items above value=1200 having 0% chance.

It seems somewhat grindy though since it would somewhat encourage picking up 'useless' items like skeletons, 'pickup->drop->' cycling until an item converts, and well.. 'item completionism' in general.

[Siegurt]

It seems somewhat grindy though since it would somewhat encourage picking up 'useless' items like skeletons, 'pickup->drop->' cycling until an item converts, and well.. 'item completionism' in general.

that could be solved by only rolling one time for each item when it it's picked up

[Galefury]

You could still get gold by backtracking and converting any useless items you found, which is boring. And just giving newly generated items a chance to convert would make no sense at all and be very intransparent.

[1010011010]

Items in your inventory have a chance of turning into an appropriate amount of gold when the mace is in your inventory when exp has been gained in the last x turns, where x is dependent on the experiance gained. this is the least exploitable method i can think of.

[ontoclasm]

That's... even worse. It encourages you to carry around piles of junk. And then go back and hoover up more junk whenever it all turns to gold.

[mumra]

It sounds illogical but the way to do this is flag all items that first enter your LOS while the curse is active, these items then permanently have a chance to have already turned to gold when you pick them up.

I do think this is a cool thematic curse idea but the implementation might be a bit difficult and complex to justify the result.

[TeshiAlair]

That's why I suggested 1 gold. Thematic, yet useless.

I'd also make it so that it didn't work on ammo, that it would just turn to useless gold dust.

[savageorange]

@TeshiAlair: As others have mentioned, if it's just plain useless, it's a mere irritant. I thought we'd implicitly agreed that curses need to have balanced effects, including both incentives and disincentives so there is a real decision to be made. With it generating useless amounts of gold, I would just immediately add it to my drop_filter.

@mumra: Makes sense to me, but that would create the conditions where you could see items (say, as part of a dangerous vault), go somewhere else to improve your character and drop the mace somewhere during that process, then come back 300 turns later and get those effects on pickup even though you had long since got rid of the mace. I guess that could be resolved by ignoring that flag if you haven't got the mace. Geez that is indeed sounding complex already.

[TeshiAlair]

@Savageorange- The incentive would be great stats. I'd also give it Sticky* so that you can't just swap it out every time you find an item. But yeah this idea is sounding more trouble than its worth.

[mumra]

I'm not convinced that curses should be double-edged, in fact that goes against the idea of a 'curse'. We already have the double-edged thing with mutations and with many artifacts. If ?RC is in short supply then the decision comes down to which curses do you most want to get rid of. They shouldn't really be things you'd ever actually want.

[DracheReborn]

If we're still brainstorming curse effects, how about this angle: cursed = unlucky

I was just thinking how much of the dungeon is randomly generated. So if a player is cursed, then floor items generated can be weaker or fewer, monsters are stronger or more, and maybe they drop corpses less often. Have you ever felt that the RNG is out to get you? In this case, being cursed can make it literally true

This also opens the opposite possibility, of something that positively affects your luck, like a talisman of luck or even a god of fortune.

On second thoughts, affecting monster generation might be too gamey, but I'm sure there are other possibilities.

[Tiber]

If we're still brainstorming curse effects, how about this angle: cursed = unlucky

I was just thinking how much of the dungeon is randomly generated. So if a player is cursed, then floor items generated can be weaker or fewer, monsters are stronger or more, and maybe they drop corpses less often. Have you ever felt that the RNG is out to get you? In this case, being cursed can make it literally true

This also opens the opposite possibility, of something that positively affects your luck, like a talisman of luck or even a god of fortune.

On second thoughts, affecting monster generation might be too gamey, but I'm sure there are other possibilities.

I dislike the weaker item generation part of this idea, but a simple way to introduce "luck" is to roll twice and take either the best or worst result. Apply that to something like AC or EV, and you have a simple curse.

[1010011010]

That's... even worse. It encourages you to carry around piles of junk. And then go back and hoover up more junk whenever it all turns to gold.

It was an attempt to make grinding as hard as possible, as a deterrent to try and abuse the system but on reflection this brings tedium and is the wrong way to go about it. a simpler system would be a chance gold transformation on item use, how much gold being price of the item except crap items which give 1.

[savageorange]

I'm not convinced that curses should be double-edged, in fact that goes against the idea of a 'curse'. We already have the double-edged thing with mutations and with many artifacts. If ?RC is in short supply then the decision comes down to which curses do you most want to get rid of. They shouldn't really be things you'd ever actually want.

This is a good point. However, if we don't take that approach, what approach -do- we take? We've already agreed they are currently just irritants, with very little "decision value". And we've already rejected 'randomly-triggered effects while in inventory' as being too similar to Xom. I'm not sure if siegurt is proposing 'constant effect while they are in inventory', 'constant effect while they are in use', or what. I also proposed that they could trigger on use (weapon: successfully hitting an enemy; armour: successfully being hit by an enemy, rings: wearing or invocation, etc.).

Or to be less incoherent: Curses themselves don't need to be doublesided, but the item does, otherwise the item is purely infuriating (rather than merely risky)

So I guess I've answered my own question by saying that an item which has a curse should often be useful enough *already* that the curse just makes it less useful or less reliable (but not enough that it's usually a no-brainer to ignore the item.)

A simpler system would be a chance gold transformation on item use, how much gold being price of the item except crap items which give 1.

Doesn't this incentivize the player to behave perversely (that is, to attempt actions which they actually hope will fail), as well as changing the game's economics dramatically? (this was why my formula scaled value down to be within the range of gold amounts that can already be generated semi-randomly.)

[Siegurt]

I'm not sure if siegurt is proposing 'constant effect while they are in inventory', 'constant effect while they are in use', or what. I also proposed that they could trigger on use (weapon: successfully hitting an enemy; armour: successfully being hit by an enemy, rings: wearing or invocation, etc.).

Actually I'm proposing no constant impediment. What I'm proposing is *on equipped items only* "Randomly triggered short term negative effects" and "The likelihood of the impediment triggering is increased by use" also "Once the negative is in effect, you can't remove the equipment until the negative effect is over." I do have some curses in my list which are "constantly in effect while the item is equipped" (and the code I'm writing allows for that) but I'm not sure that those curses will survive to the end.

[mumra]

Effects that are "happen only while an item is equipped" are just item brands and we have them already. Curses should be something different IMO since we already have many very interesting items with both plusses and minuses. We also already have both cursed-once and recurses-over-and-over items, I don't see a reason not to keep that distinction.

[1010011010]

A simpler system would be a chance gold transformation on item use, how much gold being price of the item except crap items which give 1.

Doesn't this incentivize the player to behave perversely (that is, to attempt actions which they actually hope will fail), as well as changing the game's economics dramatically? (this was why my formula scaled value down to be within the range of gold amounts that can already be generated semi-randomly.)

I see my wording is pretty bad here; by item I mean consumables: potion, scrolls, even wands and other evokables, not weapons and armour. It'll be similar to the blurry vision mutation but worse, but also easily removed/prevented (unweild the weapon/ don't equip it in the first pace). how much gold is not too important as long as unwanted consumables with temporary effects don't give away too much gold and gold cannot be grindded.


To return closer to the topic,
does anyone think remove curse scrolls shouldn't be rarer? so far everyone thinks there are too abundant.

inverting the +'s on an item to -'s

how about cursing an item inverts it's properties

I really like the idea, although I think it might be a bit overkill if rubbish uncursed stuff can be made good. I certainly like the idea of scrolls of remove curse could temporarily flip the enchantment on cursed items for a limited amount of time. This could lead to some interesting strategic play if combined with slightly less remove curse scrolls.

If this might become too abusable (I can't really see how), the items could vanish after being uncursed.

It's a unique idea and I really do think it'd add a lot of strategic play.

Whoa, I forgot I posted this sorry for the late reply. I don't think it'll be overkill since it's self balancing, sure a -5 ring of protection will become a +5 one, but you either had to waste a (now much rarer) scroll or wait out the curse. also It'll be interesting with other egos, ring of fire can swap to ice by reading a scroll.

although a possible exploiting method would be to corrode a weapon against a jelly and the remove curse for a ridiculous enchantment, unless corrosion damage is added after curse.

[rosstin]

I think double-edged curses would be pretty interesting. Giving curses more opportunities to be mildly useful supports more gameplay options and avoids the no-brainer of uncursing everything. Novice players would curse everything and more experienced players would learn that swapping is better for some slots.

The real problem would be designing enough fun curses to implement double-edged curses.

[Siegurt]

So far I have 24 designs, (25 if "Midas's touch" gets shaken out to be a solid design that's also implementable)

Of course more can always be added later if they're thought up.

[rosstin]

Sieg, where are they posted? The wiki? This thread? Maybe I missed them. I think it's an extremely interesting idea, I'd love to read your proposals.

EDIT: Nevermind, I see them earlier in the thread. Interesting stuff.

[Siegurt]

Well, and not all of them are mine, I lifted several from other posters in this thread and poked around the forums looking for other ideas.

[prozacelf]

I haven't read the entire thread all that diligently, so if someone already mentioned this, sorry for stealing your thunder, but why not have equipping a cursed item inflict one of the predefined curse statuses on the player, who is then free to use or discard the item but the curse persists until remove curse is found? (Alternatively, they could be time or xp dependent as well, but it's probably simplest to keep rc scrolls and adjust their frequency accordingly.)


The only immediate downside to this I can think of is that it might require a significant reworking of Ash mechanics.

[Siegurt]

Yep, that's been suggested.

[galehar]

We've already agreed they are currently just irritants, with very little "decision value".

Have we? I thought the consensus was more that they are mostly harmless and pointless. Reducing ?RC frequency and giving some more active bad effects is enough IMHO. Curses should stay a minor bad effect, most of the ideas suggested here are overcomplicated.

avoids the no-brainer of uncursing everything.

it's a no-brainer like eating and killing monsters are no-brainers. Curses are bad so removing them are good. But you have to choose what to uncurse (or what to try) because ?RC is a limited resource (well, it would be if it were more scarce anyway).

[BlackSheep]

I think I remember this being mentioned before, so forgive me if this is repetitive. Instead of reducing the frequency of ?RC, make it single target?

[galehar]

I think I remember this being mentioned before, so forgive me if this is repetitive. Instead of reducing the frequency of ?RC, make it single target?

Indeed, I remember this, I almost coded it at some point. Would make identifying item targetted scrolls a bit trickier. There was an issue with mummy curses, there would probably need to be reworked or tomb and mummy zig levels could be very annoying.

[some12fat2move]

What if mummies don't actually curse your stuff but just inflict a status condition wherein you can't unequip any of your equipment (like temporarily cursing all of your stuff, except the status is on the player rather than on any items)?

[Sandman25]

What if mummies don't actually curse your stuff but just inflict a status condition wherein you can't unequip any of your equipment (like temporarily cursing all of your stuff, except the status is on the player rather than on any items)?

That would not hurt much. When players do Tomb they usually have a great gear without many swaps. Maybe the curse (I mean curse from death curse only here!) should unequip the cursed item (except weapon) and make it impossible to equip for some time but that could be too harsh (fighting without any armour/jewelery is barely possible for most characters).

[Bim]

MAJOR NOTE: One of the primary draws of a roguelike is new loot - don't make it undesirable to pickup/use loot.

This being said, Curses are useful because they sometimes add a bit of a challenge/mix stuff up (they also mean you have to use id scrolls on them rather than potions/wands) - they shouldn't be debilitating or something that you just groan at.

The mechanism for cursing is fine - it makes sense, it's easy to understand and it is reasonably balanced - magic items can be cursed if not identified (and some monsters can curse stuff) whilst scrolls remove curses - it makes sense/is what is expected. Things turning into gold/randomly sticking in your inventory and so on become a bit difficult to convey and tend to be tedious.

In my opinion the only thing that needs to change is that curses become harsher through effects that last until you remove the curse from the item. This makes cursed items not just unweildable, but actually detrimental - it doesn't need to be anything more complicated.

[sanka]

Currently curses have the following effect:
- if you have a remove curse scroll: nothing
- if you do not have a remove curse scroll: they reduce available items.

Reducing the number of remove curse scrolls and/or increasing the bad effect from the cursed item could make this situation even worse.

[galehar]

Currently curses have the following effect:
- if you have a remove curse scroll: nothing
- if you do not have a remove curse scroll: they reduce available items.

Reducing the number of remove curse scrolls and/or increasing the bad effect from the cursed item could make this situation even worse.

With this logic, the only reasonable thing to do is remove curses.

But you've oversimplified. What curses do is make you choose what to try, because ?RC is a finite resource. You may also want to use ?id if ?RC is made sufficiently rare. If there is no risk of curse, you might as well try every single piece of junk for the remote chance that it might be enchanted.