Tartarus Sorceror
Posts: 1698
Joined: Saturday, 18th June 2016, 13:57
Curses As Clock
Curses limit the amount of swapping you can do with the *curse artifacts. Not a big deal.
More importantly, curses are needed to give a reason to the ID system to exist. If there were no curses, you could just use-ID everything except artifacts, distortion, and Harm.
This way, curses turn into a clock, because you theoretically cannot ID every item in the game, because scroll ID is limited by ID scrolls, and use-ID is limited by curse scrolls.
In practice, I don't think it really changes anything, because I don't remember a game in which I couldn't ID an interesting item for lack of remove curse scrolls. The only exception are Gnolls, I guess.
Curses have something of a role for Ash, but Ash could be simpler, like causing distortion/Zot trap effects when you change your equipment. Or costing rations. Or drain.