"cursed" items

[grisamentum]

Can someone elaborate on the state of the whole cursed mechanic? Maybe I just don't get it anymore, but it feels like a gutted-yet-antiquated holdover from Nethack that no longer has much relevance in this game. And we have plenty of item properties that act as actual "curses" (*rage, *tele/-tele, can't cast spells, etc). "Can't unequip" is itself an occasionally interesting "curse" but 99% of the time it just comes down to "read a scroll of remove curse." I can see the occasional "interesting problem" where you need to swap items in combat and have to decide if you can risk reading a scroll AND swapping items, but my sense is that that's a marginal example.

(Obviously Ashenzari is a curse niche god, but being unable to swap gear is the mechanic there, and Ash isn't central to cursing itself.)

Maybe scrolls of remove curse could be removed/rarer, and there could be more variety of "curses." Like "curse: can't unequip until it kills something" for weapons (eg Tyrfing) or "cursed: ponderous if you're less than Full" for an armor. Not that those are necessarily great ideas, but I just don't see what cursing really does anymore.

[johlstei]

It's all about that obsidian axe.

[KittenInMyCerealz]

Imho curses fine as a mechanic but ?remove curse should be rarer

[Brannock]

?remove is far too common right now for cursing to ever have any chance at being meaningful, unless you're trying to frequently swap between selfcursing gear.

[PleasingFungus]

Much like other roguelike traditions (e.g. the ID game), it's much more relevant at the start of the game, where you can easily get stuck with a cursed amulet of inaccuracy or -3 spear for several floors if you're reckless in equipping items.

Later on it's not very relevant for most non-Ash characters who aren't using self-cursing items, yes.

[crate]

honestly if you want to keep sticky curses probably the best way is to make cursed items completely unremovable (maybe an exception for Ash characters)
this would also mean you'd have to pre-ID all cursed items (I hope it's obvious why you'd want to make this change), and cursed items would either have to be good (but not fantastic), or they could be very good but have drawbacks

but something like even an unremovable +4 ring of protection would be a pretty interesting item imo, certainly a lot more interesting than current crawl curses

(and then at this point, you might as well just pre-ID all equipment, since the cursed items would already be identified, and personally I'd take this opportunity to just remove identification altogether but that's a separate topic)

Anyway sticky-but-removable curses don't really work because it's not fun when they do things (rchandra has a topic on this on the first page) and it's silly to have them when they don't do things.