Monsters that curse

[smock]

Crawl's current drawbacks to having cursed items when not worshiping Ash are limited. With many scrolls of detect and remove curse, the ID/curse minigame is not hard to win and so is not much fun.

A cursed weapon can make you start to death on D1. Other than that, there's nothing dangerous about curses. Cursed armour is almost always ignorable. At worse you have to return to your stash after killing a mummy. So it's death or burning scroll on D1, and ignorable or mild annoyance on after, say, D5.

A more interactive curse minigame would be desirable. Having ironic curses a-la Nethack has been discussed but I get the sense that Crawl will look for a different approach, most likely a consistent malus (33% chance of failure or whatnot) owing to curses. Once curses become bad for more characters, we need an interesting way to actually curse items. Finding items then casting detect curse at your stash is a "grindy" way to win the curse/ID minigame but it is currently encouraged by game mechanics. We can do better.

The goals are to make ?RC and ?DC a constrained resource for non-Ash players, and to make curses dangerous and fun. More ways to get curses aside from unidentified items would be nice. More randarts that re-curse is a good start.

dpeg sees monsters that curse items as one way forward:

A very early opponent could have the ability to curse an armour item it touches (and your weapon may get cursed if you attack the monster). Later opponents could curse your whole gear just by being around (think cursed toe, or a moth of curses) and you may drop non-used cursed items in its presence.

I think that having monsters that curse specific item slots (weapon, armour and jewelery) or are post-temple would be good. This would prevent a new player from arriving a the temple fully-bound, ready to abuse Ash's generosity. Some other mechanism to prevent Ash abuse would be welcome.

Monsters: Wraiths or some other midgame undead could curse upon hitting. Quasits could curse weapon slots; this seems like a good ability for a demon.
Other: Zot traps could curse gear. A dedicated trap (mummy summoning trap?) that curses would be fun. It could be a fitting spell for some "evil" opponents or uniques, like Boris or Mara (who would curse upon making your illusion; this would make wielding meat ration to debuff your illusion, which I hear actually does work, somewhat less attractive).

Any other ideas, either for monsters for interesting ways to get cursed items on to players, are welcome.

[roguelikedev]

Crawl's current drawbacks to having cursed items when not worshiping Ash are limited. With many scrolls of detect and remove curse, the ID/curse minigame is not hard to win and so is not much fun. ... Any other ideas, either for monsters for interesting ways to get cursed items on to players, are welcome.

How about sliding-scale curses? Kill a mummy, get one piece of equipment cursed; kill another mummy with that curse still active, maybe two things get cursed, or you suffer a light (wraith-level) drain; kill fifty mummies in a row, by the end of it you're getting tagged with torment, I-II summons, etc. Curses would become a very active threat.

Borrowing from Angband here-- how about priest smites cursing items? Something like:

  Code:

 Let SLOT be a random equipment slot on the player.
Let DAMAGE be the current range of smite damage.
If SLOT holds an uncursed item, curse it 20% of the time.
If SLOT holds an uncursed item, inflict DAMAGE / 3.
Else inflict DAMAGE.

Additionally, remove one cantrip slot ("eyes glow," "looks stronger" etc.) from orc priests and replace it with a duplicate smite slot.

If a low level character treats early priests with respect-- catching them alone, at the character's preferred attack range-- that character (in my opinion) deserves to win the fight. Under this scheme a low level character would have a much lower chance of getting arbitrarily chain-smited to death in the process. As with the mummy suggestion above, though, effects are cumulative; a single priest would do an average of twice as much smite damage per round to a character who has allowed everything he owns to become cursed. This would significantly extend the portion of the game in which orc priests matter.

[jejorda2]

I'd like to see remove curse scrolls made about as rare as vorpalize weapon scrolls. But have curses wear off in about the time it takes for hunger to consume a ration. Then you'd have a choice to make, instead of just always using a scroll if you have one.

[dpeg]

minmay: That is meta-whining. Let me explain: yes, casters have advantages over non-casters, like flexibility, access to ranged attacks and all kinds of boosts. They also have drawbacks: they're not just dead with 0 HP like everyone else, but often with 0 MP as well. They have a lot more xp to spend. They need to find books. They have less HP and can afford fewer items. You know all of that, of course.
It is not a universal rule that casters are stronger than non-casters. It requires a single, numerical change (think of max MP generation, spell slots or spell levels) to nerf casters across the board.

Here we are concerned with making the curse minigame interesting. Please stay on topic.

[dpeg]

It is an exercise to the reader to come up with cursing monsters that are more dangerous from a distance than in melee range.

[smock]

Monsters could curse using smite targeting.

One of my favorite ideas from the old RL Omega was counterspells. Basically, you had a chance of countering spells cast by opponents and opponents had a chance of countering your spells. If countered, the spell fizzled. You spent mana doing countering spell. Countering was not optional; it was instant and automatic. In Crawl, opponents that can "counterspell" your bolt or your confusion spell, causing it to fizzle, would be an interesting feature. (Or "riposteing" your spell, by reflecting it: maybe bring back the boring unique Michael, but let him counterspell your bolt and reflect it back to you?)

An opponent that punishes you for casting a spell by cursing you would be another option. This is like the spiny mutation but hurts casters. I think there's plenty of space here for fun stuff. Orc Priests could curse your equipment upon being targeted by your spell (though they're plenty strong already). It would be fitting for mummies, of course.

Another approach could be that high-AC blocks the curse, but EV does not. I can't think of the flavor behind this, but the mechanic would target Crawl's stronger character builds.