Making cursed items more interesting

[WanderingBlade]

Hi! I'm a newish player, so forgive me if this is a dumb idea...

I was browsing through the Wiki and came across this topic.
I thought it made a very good point about how inconsequential item curses are unless you're worshiping Ash. They only have one effect (being sticky), and they're trivially easy to remove with the commonly-found Scrolls of Remove Curse.

So here's my idea to make them more interesting:

Convert all item curses to an autocurse property (*Curse) on the items.
Increase the frequency of cursed items or greatly decrease Scrolls of Remove Curse.
When a cursed item is unequipped, suffer a minor negative effect. Something like:

20% - Small HP rot
20% - Light magical contamination
20% - Small (& temporary) Stat loss
20% - Loud noise ("It utters an eerie shriek!")
20% - Fail to unequip the item ("It sticks to your hand!")

Basically... Curse is a property on an item. Using a Scroll of Remove Curse naturally removes the *Curse property from the item. You can still unequip and re-equip cursed items without using a Scroll, but not without some minor consequences.

I also think there should be (maybe obscure?) ways to benefit from curses without worshiping Ash.
One small suggestion of mine is to add a new good mutation. Something like:
Attuned to Curses

Rank 1: +1 INT while a cursed item is equipped, Ignore unequip effects 50% of the time
Rank 2: +3 INT while a cursed item is equipped, Ignore unequip effects 100% of the time

Anyway... what do you think?
Maybe it would be too tedious/annoying? Are cursed items fine as they are?

Thanks for reading.

[Majang]

I like it.

[duvessa]

There's no need to have 5 different unequip effects. If you're going to go that route, pick a single, simple unequip effect.
That mutation would promote hoarding cursed items in case you get the mutation later, as opposed to right now when you can safely discard -2 flails. Benefitting from curses would not be an improvement, for that reason.

In general, Crawl isn't really set up for mechanics like identification and curses to work well. Even the original Linley's Dungeon Crawl was mostly focused on combat with very little in the way of item and dungeon interaction, and DCSS has only gone further in that direction (and rightly so); if anything I would expect identification and curses to be removed eventually, rather than expanded. The beatitude system is a decent fit for a game like NetHack that is mostly about discovery and item interactions; not so much in a game like DCSS or Tome4 that is supposed to focus on challenging monster encounters.

[watertreatmentRL]

Along the lines of what duvessa said, the focus of the game is combat, not item interaction. Making item interactions "more interesting" is bad because it disrupts the focus of the game. Item interactions are already unnecessarily complex, cumbersome, and distracting. The goal going forward should be to continue toward a cleaner, more pure hack and slash style, not making empty gestures toward tradition or a balance of styles that would require a rebuild of the game from the ground up to achieve.