Friday, 25th May 2018, 15:31 by Zap-zapper
Cursed items, poisonous potions, scrolls with harmful magic. All that stuff came from other roguelikes - like NetHack or ADOM. But the thing is - Dungeon Crawl is different. It is vastly different. The main point of ADOM or, especially, NetHack is that it is more game itself which tries to kill you, not monsters. In NetHack, it is not unusual, to equip a cursed loadstone, and then, start to wildly read scrolls you found, hoping to uncurse and drop that stone, and as a result get crushed by a boulder. Moreover - most of the stuff which harms you in those other roguelikes can be useful. For example, if you drink unedentified potion of rust removal, you will get severly posioned. But when identified, it is actually a very useful tool. Potions of poison can be thrown at enemies or used to coat your weapon. Above mentioned scroll can be used to isolate enemies from you. And so on. Dungeon Crawl is not about that complex item or potion mechanic. It's about strategy. It warns you when you try to step in lava, or in range of Okhlob Plant. Prevents you to do stupid things. But, in Dungeon Crawl monster behaviour is wastly improved compared to other roguelikes. They work as a team. Some share damage with allies, some buff their allies or heal them, some has interesting abilites to lock you in a vault, so you can get gangbanged more easily and so on.
I written that paragraph to ultimately conclude - DCSS do not need stuff like potions of degeneration, scrolls of random uselessness, amulets of inacurracy, cursed -n equipment and so on. This stuff can mostly mildly annoy you at early game, and otherwise completely redundant. It's monsters who devastate you there, not items. It is not NetHack. So, that stuff should either be reworked to be not utterly useless (like scrolls of noise, which sometimes can be used to attract attention to the place you want to fight monsters, or to break mesmerisation), or completely removed.