Tartarus Sorceror
Posts: 1698
Joined: Saturday, 18th June 2016, 13:57
Make All Amulets Fragile, Remove Anti-Swap Downsides
amaril wrote:If swapping amulets is undesirable, just make them all fragile and ID on sight. Bonus: if you did this there would no longer be a reason for mostly harmful gimmick amulet id traps to exist.
I think that Amaril's proposal is really good. The positive effects I see:
-- It makes things much easier to learn for new players.
-- It introduces decisions with lasting, definitive, easy-to-recognize results.
-- Late- and early-game swapping gets about the same weight; right now, the danger of swapping Harm is very different between the early and the late game. Since the game already is unbalanced by making early game more difficult, it would be a step towards correcting this problem.
-- It makes certain odd cases rarer, like Harm draining undead characters.
-- Turns amulets into a new kind of item: consumables with constant effect.
I don't see many difficulties in the implementation. Clothes with the same ego as amulets don't need an anti-swap mechanism, because they already take 5 turns. (AFAIK the only non-artifact amulet effect found on armour is Spirit Shield; some artifacts have regen, possibly more I am forgetting.)
I think that, if this were the road taken, then amulets of the same kind should stack, like all other consumables I can think of.
It can still be argued whether auto ID is OK or not, and whether cursed Inaccuracy should remain, but those are side issues.
Any opinions?