Curses

[snow]

Now that you can butcher with a cursed blunt weapon is there any real point in curses? They only really impacted the early game and now they don't really do that except for maybe a ring of teleportation (and even then only in the rare case where you have no remove curse scrolls).

I think this has been mentioned before: what if equipping a cursed item gives a "cursed" status effect that does something tactical or strategically relevant for a while and wears off after some condition (such as exploration, experience gain, time, or something else) is met?

There are implications with Ash but they don't run too deep: it makes more sense for binding and unbinding to be tied to abilities rather than scrolls anyway.

I have some ideas on what said tactical or strategically relevant things could be: teleportitis, hunger, hostile summons, temporary mutations, and such are all fun to work with. Random miscast effects could also work but I think it would be more fun to be given bad effect X for Y amount of turns/experience/exploration/whatever and play around that. Also random miscasts are sort of a contamination thing and not much of a curse anyway.

Remove curse scrolls could be made rarer (or removed!) so a player is forced to play with the negative effect for a bit and curses stay relevant all game.

[reaver]

It's been mentioned by devs before that Ash is the only reason curses still exist. I support removing curses, but I don't have a suggestion about Ash, which is why the situation is in a deadlock. I think any curse removal patch which solved the Ash issue would be accepted without problem. As mentioned in that thread, any attempt to make curses more relevant runs the risk of being another food reform, and nobody wants that.

[nago]

Give Ash two more powers:
1) bound any item - you can't swap it, like a curse. Free - ash likes you being bounded.
2) Remove bound - big piety cost/long cooldown/whatever.

Then get rid of curses, they're annoying and totally useless - except may a -6 ring of slaying or teleportation until you find your first rc scroll. Uhm, some artifact with +curse are interesting - but +mut can be used as substitute, it's a better designed property.

[1010011010]

getting rid of curses would promote getting rid of bad items, what's the point of amulet of inaccuracy existing, or a bad glowing axe. if curses was removed i would pick up every ego weapon in early dungeon (and perhaps all dungeon) hoping for venom brand.

[nago]

99% of times amulet of inac is uncursed.
You should already pick every glowing weapon on the floor which could be better than the current you have - only in a very minimal number of game you run out of rc (or ew1!) before finding a good branded weapon. The risk with early glowing weapons is distortion, non curses, seriously.

[1010011010]

inaccuracy was a bad example but tele, hunger and bad stat rings would be non threatening.

also I do pick up all weapons most the time but i do so knowing the risk, and a cursed bad weapon does affect how I play negatively.

the curse mini game is interesting and not all too tedious, not enough to remove it. getting rid of curses would be like having everything auto id on pickup.

[ontoclasm]

Then remove them. The only thing hunger or bad stat rings do right now are possibly make you mildly annoyed for like 5 seconds. Less if you have a remove curse scroll, which you almost always will because the dungeon is basically filled with them. Then you drop the ring and it will never be relevant for any reason ever again no matter what.

[Siegurt]

You know, it seems that there's a trend here to get rid of every challenge that's an inconvenience to the player, and I'm not sure I like it.

Victory dancing, gone, Secret doors, gone, Nausea, gone, Needing to find a bladed weapon to butcher corpses, gone, needing your un-bladed weapon uncursed to butcher corpses, gone, Consumable destruction, being worked on, now curses... What's next? carrying capacity? Needing to have spellbooks to memorize spells?

I see that these mostly resulted in some tedium, and can understand the impetus to remove tedious elements from the game, but I also feel like challenges that are *not* combat add richness to the game, to make it just a bit less hack-and-slash-y.

I'm not saying these features should not have been removed, only that I'm sad to see them go, if only for the alternate source of challenge I feel like they provided. I guess I'd like to see new things *added* which fill that gap, before we end up with a first-person-shooter-in-@-form.

If the game ends up being all combat I feel like we lose some of it's distinctiveness. Not to specifically target this suggestion, but it was the one I was reading when I decided to post this.

[Arrhythmia]

I'm not saying these features should not have been removed, only that I'm sad to see them go, if only for the alternate source of challenge I feel like they provided. I guess I'd like to see new things *added* which fill that gap, before we end up with a first-person-shooter-in-@-form.

But DoomRL is really good

[reaver]

You know, it seems that there's a trend here to get rid of every challenge that's an inconvenience to the player, and I'm not sure I like it.

The only thing hunger or bad stat rings do right now are possibly make you mildly annoyed for like 5 seconds.

The major problem here is that curses aren't a challenge at all.

What's next? carrying capacity? Needing to have spellbooks to memorize spells?

I would love to see those two things removed from the game.†

I'm not saying these features should not have been removed, only that I'm sad to see them go, if only for the alternate source of challenge I feel like they provided. I guess I'd like to see new things *added* which fill that gap, before we end up with a first-person-shooter-in-@-form.

This should definitely happen. How about a new branch, maybe alternating with the Crypt and based on the spriggan monster set?

If the game ends up being all combat I feel like we lose some of it's distinctiveness. Not to specifically target this suggestion, but it was the one I was reading when I decided to post this.

I like the occasional non-combat puzzle too. Right now this gap is filled with strategic decisions- when to use enchant scrolls, what equipment to use, whether to save up for that treasure trove, etc. I think the major problem is that any choice like this needs a certain amount of "minimum complexity" to start being fun, and the easiest way to do that is to tie it to the combat system (As the aforementioned strategic choices do.)

†Assuming these are done in a balanced manner. By the spell book thing you mean "you can insta-memorize any spell in a book you've seen," correct?

[WildSam]

Victory dancing, gone, Secret doors, gone, Nausea, gone, Needing to find a bladed weapon to butcher corpses, gone, needing your un-bladed weapon uncursed to butcher corpses, gone, Consumable destruction, being worked on, now curses... What's next? carrying capacity? Needing to have spellbooks to memorize spells?

  Code:

A challenge is a general term referring to things that are imbued with a sense of difficulty and victory.

How victory dancing and nausea or whatever you called is related to challenge?

[Mankeli]

You know, it seems that there's a trend here to get rid of every challenge that's an inconvenience to the player, and I'm not sure I like it.
Victory dancing, gone...
...only that I'm sad to see them go.

You seriously miss victory dancing? The removal of it is probably one of the greatest and most loved things if not THE greatest single thing the devs have done.

Curses are just one aspect of the tediousness of item management (item destruction and overly swapping being two other offenders I can think of) and I'm glad to see that item management is getting attention.

[sanka]

I had an old proposal to change Ash. It's easy to change this proposal to not use remove curse scrolls, like nago suggested.

Basicaly curses with Ash could be a global status like slowness with Chei, and you only need the "lift curse" divine ability with piety hit and loosing any divine benfits for the duration.

https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6175&p=82545&hilit=ash#p82545

The annoying thing with curses a little bit the same like the it's with Ash: the curse minigame can be interesting in the very first few dungeon levels. Ring of hungers prevent me to try out every ring on D1/D2 until I identify remove curse scrolls, etc. But the same curse mechanic just makes the game more annoying after D4-D5.

It's the same for me with Ash: finding the good scrolls can be interesting early on, but once you bound yourself, it's just plain annoying, with a lot of annoyance and very little actual decisions.

[Lasty]

Leaving Ash aside for a moment, I think there's room for curses and remove curse scrolls to be interesting, but it's a radical departure from the current system.

The proposal is this: items that qualify to be glowing under the current rules (high enchantment or has ego or both) can also be cursed, an extra property which is added on top of the high enchantment or ego or what have you. This curse could be any negative effect, including:
* Already implemented effects like -stats, -slaying, -resistance, -AC/dodge, -cast, stasis, teleport/berserkitis, hunger, etc.
* New effects (-hp/mp, lose health/mp on kills, blurry vision, nausea (a new status which prevent potion drinking some % of the time), periodic "mislead" on enemies when they first enter LOS, "Sage" effect for a random skill, etc.)

So, for example, you might find a glowing dagger that, one equipped, would turn out to be a dagger of venom with a curse that gives -5 EV. The curse would auto-ID when its effects are applied for the first time. EDIT: the cursed items would not be sticky.

Scrolls of remove curse would be quite rare and would remove a curse effect from one item (your choice).

Some of the situational curses (mislead, blurry vision) would probably need to be restricted to armor to prevent over-swapping, or else only expire when the weapon is unwielded and some amount of XP is gained.

EDIT: The goal behind this proposal would be to create more items which have distinct and interesting tradeoffs, and also to create a new valuable but rare item to potentially turn an item with trade-offs into an item of treasure. It might be said that this overlaps with artifacts, but because the items would remain mutable and are guaranteed to have exactly one good and one bad property, I think there is a significant distinction.

[TeshiAlair]

I really like the idea of curses having special effects, I think it adds a lot more flavor and makes cursed randarts actually matter that they are cursed.

EDIT- but I think cursed items should still be sticky, there are enough items in the dungeon that you can just ignore cursed ones once you find the curse. Alternatively, the curse could stick with you even after unwielding.

[Bim]

You know, it seems that there's a trend here to get rid of every challenge that's an inconvenience to the player, and I'm not sure I like it.

I completely agree. I understand about nausea being annoying and I'm not too sad to see it go, neither am I too sad to see the end of secret doors, but some of the other changes have just made crawl a lot easier/simpler. For instance, not needing an edged weapon for butchering was one of the main fears of curses, but now curses are hardly an issue because of it unless you pick up a tragically awful weapon, as you're:
a) going to only pick up cursed weapons in your weapon school - so unless it's like -4 -5 you'll probably be ok for a while.
b) have a very good chance of picking up a non cursed/better weapon.

Getting rid of curses would mean that you'd have literally no fear of items - why bother ever having a -5 strength ring or an amulet of inaccuracy if you can just take it off? This would mean we'd have to drastically cut down on items, which would take away the fun of looting.

I'd prefer to see cursed weapons be worse/have some minor side effects (like mentioned, but I think should be on the tamer end with things like -2 dex or level one blurry vision), and rcurse scrolls be slightly less prevalent. This would actually negatively effect you instead of just being an annoyance, and with 20% less rcurse scrolls you'd have to be more careful what you pick up. Ash conduct could stay as is, but he could negate the effects of the curses. If a few more items had +curse, this could lead to some interesting tradeoffs!

[Siegurt]

Well, certainly it's all that stuff is tedious *now* but I remember being rather satisfied with myself when I finally figured out how to train spellcasting as a fighter, or managed to find a knife for the first time on a character who both didn't start with one, or managed to finally rid myself of a hunger ring, or a teleport ring (Back when I didn't know how to mitigate the effects, and everything was new)

Now those things stop being challenges after the first few times you do them, and become pretty boring and tedious pretty quickly given how many games you have to play of crawl before you get proficient enough at the 'meat' of the game. Which is why those sorts of things aren't challenging after a while, they lack the serious replay value that crawl players require.

Before I knew it was even *called* victory dancing, and I had never logged into a forum or looked at a spoiler or had any idea how to train most skills without starting with them, figuring that stuff out was fun, and admittedly only once, and also admittedly, not for all situations. Once I'd figured out the puzzle of how to get my experience to go where I wanted it to, doing it over and over and over again was tedious.

Right now this gap is filled with strategic decisions- when to use enchant scrolls, what equipment to use, whether to save up for that treasure trove, etc. I think the major problem is that any choice like this needs a certain amount of "minimum complexity" to start being fun, and the easiest way to do that is to tie it to the combat system (As the aforementioned strategic choices do.)

The "strategic" challenge has always been there, and it hasn't changed substantially, and it's a good solid mechanism and doesn't need to, but having only one dimension (combat) makes this and any game feel flat and uninteresting. It's why in RPGs there's side-quests and mini-games and why you can craft and collect sets or solve puzzles, because game designers have known for a long time, that having a solid combat-only game makes for a less fun game.

I'm not saying Nausea or Victory dancing should come back, only that I'd love to see *something* take their place. Problems to solve that do *not* directly advance you towards the game's main goal of killing monsters and gaining runes then exiting with the orb.


Now on a more positive note, how about this suggestion for curses:

Possibility #1:

Curses have an overlay effect which has a powerful drawback

The "just plain bad" items which show up now would be removed, but their effects would be part of the curses themselves, and manifest after using the cursed item for a while.

Some examples of curse drawbacks:

Haunting, Rotting, random teleport, Marking (alarm trap style), inverting the +'s on an item to -'s temporarily, hunger (Rather than the current 'over time' this would be an immediate loss of a significant chunk of nutrition on curse activation), stasis, mutation, binding (sticking to you like current curses do), forced rage

The idea being that the curse would manifest itself some time randomly after you start using the item, and (depending on the type of curse) not forever. You wouldn't automatically know what kind of curse it was (unless you worshipped ash) when wearing it. The randomized timing on the effects would cause bad things to happen when you weren't always in a position to go fix it (i.e. in the middle of combat)

Remove curse could be downgraded to suppress the bad effects of a cursed item for a while, more of a 'suppress curse' but cursed items would be fundamenetally cursed forever. (I would also make this an Ash power, so praying over scrolls wouldn't be giving up a long-term useful resource)

Curses would also have benefits (whose effects would also be suppressed by suppress curse scrolls) typically although not always evil-ish which would be *added* to the base item, making in effect a mini-artifact (cursed artifacts themselves wouldn't let you know which property was associated with the curse, you'd have to figure it out by suppressing it pretty much anything but holy weapon or rN

Some examples:
Vampirism (regeneration for jewellery/armour), +Rage, +Invis, +venom (rPois for armour/jewellery), +sInv, resistances, etc. etc.

[Utis]

The annoying thing with curses a little bit the same like the it's with Ash: the curse minigame can be interesting in the very first few dungeon levels. Ring of hungers prevent me to try out every ring on D1/D2 until I identify remove curse scrolls, etc. But the same curse mechanic just makes the game more annoying after D4-D5.

Why "annoying"? After a certain point, I'm not trying out weapons all the time, but only if they look really promising. The occasional cursed one is a mild inconvenience, not annoying. This is nowhere near secret doors or nausea. Or eating, for that matter. I'm too of the opinion that curses are interesting on the first 4-6 floors. I don't see the point in giving that up for dealing with something that is but a mild occasional inconvenience later on.

It's the same for me with Ash: finding the good scrolls can be interesting early on, but once you bound yourself, it's just plain annoying, with a lot of annoyance and very little actual decisions.

Huh? Ash worshippers have a huge need for curse related scrolls, what with having to uncurse and re-curse also your cloak and your gloves if you want to change body armour or rings. For Ash worshippers they are a scarce and valuable commodity. I'm thinking this involves a lot of actual decisions about whether and when it's worth to change equipment.

[mumra]

Siegurt's idea (or something very similar) has been proposed before: https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5553

It's certainly something that would be very cool to see if we had a solid proposal and someone willing to code it.

Regarding some of the other comments: Curses are something I'd definitely like to see changed rather than simply removed, they add something interesting to the game. Nausea added constant annoyance with no gameplay benefits. VD wasn't much better but I'll concede being able to simply choose what skills I train feels too easy at times. However I'm not sure if it's even possible in Crawl to come up with a fair system that bases your skill training on the actions you take, without making VD possible for some skills (I can imagine something that's close, but it's really complicated and there are still some questionable skills).

I'm not convinced the proposed item destruction changes are an improvement either. But development is generally in the direction of removing boring/meaningless challenges and replacing them with interesting ones.

[Siegurt]

Well, if it's on the table, I could probably code something up. I am not on the dev team, but do have 30+ years of coding *and* game design experience and pretty good familiarity with the code base (In a strictly looky-loo kind of sense) The reason I haven't offered before is that I don't have a lot of spare time to devote, but if there's no timeline I could branch something off, just to give the concept some flesh and bones as it were.

Having the structure in place at least makes the concept more viable, even if someone else takes it over and fleshes it out more fully and integrates it with the code.

[Siegurt]

Oh, and I had a second Idea for curses I don't like it quite as well, but it's not bad, and I thought I'd share:

----
When you equip a cursed item the *player* becomes cursed (with one of the negative effects) remove curse functions similarly to cure mutation and removes a selection of curses from you randomly. In my head, cursed items bestow their curse upon you only once (Except for artifacts with the recurse attribute which can keep giving you more and more curses)

The item would retain it's 'cursed' attribute, so Ash would be happy, but other than that, have no effect on the item.
----

The whole 'interaction with Ash' portion would need to be more fleshed out, but it seems like a plausible direction to go.

[mumra]

You are welcome to try it out; constributions from non-devteam members are often accepted. The best recommendation is to make a public clone of crawl (e.g. on gitorious) so people and see and test your changes.

I prefer the idea of a curse being something that is temporarily transferred to the player, but I think this should actually remove the curse from the item (except for 'recurse' items of course). How to handle monster usage of cursed items I'm not sure, since obviously you don't want them removing the curse (and any obvious curse side effects would give away that the item was cursed). Maybe for monsters retaining the current behaviour is fine.

[Siegurt]

constributions

Is that a combination of "consternation" and "contribution"? If so I think it's wholly appropriate

[Siegurt]

My only concern about it being transferred to the player is it seems a bit too much like mutations. Not an overriding concern, but it is one.

[1010011010]

inverting the +'s on an item to -'s

how about cursing an item inverts it's properties eg ring of sustenance becomes a ring of hunger when cursed, +3 ring of protection becomes a -3 ring of protection
This also means already bad items can be made into good items therefor giving curse foo scrolls a use outside of Ash.
this setup has problems unless you restrict player control on the curses; so in addition curses now are have a timeout which a curse will wear off and scrolls of remove curse are made less abundant.

Overall:
-curses invert attributes of an item
-curses wear off
-scrolls of remove curse are rarer

-brings dynamic equipment properties
-bad items can be made good for a period of time (no more floor food)
-strategic play with currently mostly useless scrolls

[Bim]

inverting the +'s on an item to -'s

how about cursing an item inverts it's properties

I really like the idea, although I think it might be a bit overkill if rubbish uncursed stuff can be made good. I certainly like the idea of scrolls of remove curse could temporarily flip the enchantment on cursed items for a limited amount of time. This could lead to some interesting strategic play if combined with slightly less remove curse scrolls.

If this might become too abusable (I can't really see how), the items could vanish after being uncursed.

It's a unique idea and I really do think it'd add a lot of strategic play.

[dpeg]

I don't have time for a detailed reply right now (sorry about this; will come later) but I want to mention that the topic was discussed befor, mainly between evilmike and me. See the dev wiki for what we came up with. I quickly scanned over the page, and it seems to be still valid and especially relevant for this thread.

Regarding changes in general: I recall that I was unhappy when autoexplore was introduced... it changed the nature of the game so much. And like all changes, there were drawbacks. Another anecdote: there was a time quite recently when developers somehow agreed on removing cTele outright (now, that wouldn't have been a removal for interface reasons but still...), when evilmike came up with a thorough analysis and a proposal (all on the c-r-d mailing list), and then cTele stayed. So it's not an automatism!
For curses, I think that they could provide actual choices. Agreed, currently they don't -- but they could. In contrast with many other bits in Crawl, there are actual ideas how to get there (see this thread, or also the wiki page I linked). In my opinion, the curses minigame for Ashenzari works reasonably well, and that is a good sign. In order to make normal curses relevant, the crucial points (in my opinion) are: (1) only sticky-curse is very rarely sufficient to trigger choices, basically just for some artefacts; (2) we probably won't get an interesting situation if curses are static, i.e. only come pre-generated on items or from Curse Foo scrolls -- that's not so bad, though, we just need to be more clever with cursing monsters (the death curse of the plain mummy is probably not clever enough).

More later.

[Siegurt]

I'm actively working on something to submit right now, here's what I'm working towards (This is not going to happen very quickly, but I do have a little extra time over the holiday weekend, we'll see)

The thing I'm working on looks like this:
1. An item is cursed, you know it's cursed when you pick it up, or when it becomes cursed, you don't know the active effect of the curse.
2. The curse gives the item a passive bonus, similar to an artifact, a cursed item as an additional effect beyond it's base type. The bonus is limited to effects that are not "good"(no rN and no Holy weapon)
3. The curse will "trigger" at random but fairly infrequent intervals, the cursed item will become bound at that point until the curse's effect is over. The triggered curse effect is temporary, and is more likely to occur at higher tension.
4. The curse's effects will be set, but won't be known until it's effects happen the first time.
5. Remove curse scrolls will renamed to "suppress curse" and instead give the -Curse status for a duration, this will cancel both the positive and negative effects of the curse, It will prevent the curse from triggering, and (temporarily) halt the progression of any curse effects in progress.

I've got a bunch of curse effects to start with (I culled from not only, and curses have a severity and commonality rating (So the cursing action can request a more severe or less severe curse) and a duration, the intention is to have all the negative effects be tweakable in frequency and duration.

Overall the design is to give the player the possibility of unusual power gain, with a risky and potentially hazardous temporary effect, all of the 'curse' effects are intended to be minimally harmful most of the time, but potentially VERY harmful or even deadly should the curse trigger at the wrong time or in the wrong situation. (Similar in idea but not in execution to god wrath)

This is a little counter to the ideas in the dev wiki mentioned, as instead of having an immediate negative that you work off, you get a long term positive with serious, but periodic drawbacks that you need to work around. I haven't designed in any way to permanently remove curses, but perhaps there needs to be a (rare-ish) way to permanently remove curses.

Of course this may not be the way that it's decided to go with curses, but at very least it'll be something to work from at worst as a counterexample

[Bim]

I do really like the idea in essence, but I have a few comments:

all of the 'curse' effects are intended to be minimally harmful most of the time, but potentially VERY harmful or even deadly should the curse trigger at the wrong time or in the wrong situation. (Similar in idea but not in execution to god wrath)

- I don't think they should ever be deadly or too dangerous. I wouldn't want to use an item that could potentially cause a random 'unfair' death (or put me in an incredibly bad situation). Giving me rN- or rN-- would be ok, same with draining a stat or two or causing blurry vision, but something that could severely damage me would just seem not worth the risk. This is unless cursed items were all made amazing - which would seem very strange.

3. The curse will "trigger" at random but fairly infrequent intervals, the cursed item will become bound at that point until the curse's effect is over. The triggered curse effect is temporary, and is more likely to occur at higher tension.

Please don't link it to tension. It's already been commented on that tension doesn't work particularly well, and it just feels too gimmicky. It occurring randomly is fine, although I'd much prefer constant passive effects with suppress curse scrolls being a way to negate the passive effect and allow removal of the gear. I think I'd want to use cursed items even less if they were related to tension, and the point of this seems to be to make them more worth while/interesting.

[SirDinkus]

So What if any cursed items in your inventory have a small but random chance to equip themselves to you and stick, displacing whatever was in that slot? Or maybe that once an item is identified as cursed it can't be dropped until you remove the curse? Or both? This would really make for some inopportune situations and carrying unidentified magical equipment a dangerous business. It would make curses relevant again because of the risk that one of those cursed rings in your inventory will force itself on your finger mid combat. And Ash could stay relatively the same God, and his abilities would now have a much greater use.

[SirDinkus]

And to clarify, other than auto equipping themselves and refusing to be dropped, I don't think there needs to be a "cursed effect" or any added debuffs other than what the item might already have on it. Also, an unidentified cursed item can still be dropped until it reveals itself by auto equipping or you reveal it manually. I'm not for completely redefining what a cursed item is. Instead just add something that will make you want to use those scrolls of identify before you risk putting on an unknown magical item, and scrolls of remove curse will become much more valuable as it will suddenly be the prime way of getting known cursed items out of your inventory.

[Siegurt]

I do really like the idea in essence, but I have a few comments:

all of the 'curse' effects are intended to be minimally harmful most of the time, but potentially VERY harmful or even deadly should the curse trigger at the wrong time or in the wrong situation. (Similar in idea but not in execution to god wrath)

- I don't think they should ever be deadly or too dangerous. I wouldn't want to use an item that could potentially cause a random 'unfair' death (or put me in an incredibly bad situation). Giving me rN- or rN-- would be ok, same with draining a stat or two or causing blurry vision, but something that could severely damage me would just seem not worth the risk. This is unless cursed items were all made amazing - which would seem very strange.

None of the curses (currently) do outright damage, the idea being they change your situation sufficiently that you need to either alter your tactics or possibly run away from combats you might otherwise beat easily for a brief time. The (current) effects are all temporary (no permanent stat draining or mutations) but the idea is to give you something that does tempt you to use it by giving you a more-powerful-than-normal sort of item, which does have the *potential* to put you at serious risk, but (hopefullly) the amount of risk added will seem worth it most of the time, and can be reduced considerably by carrying a suppress curse scroll (So someone using cursed equipment would want to have suppress curse scrolls the way everyone else wants to carry around curing potions)

3. The curse will "trigger" at random but fairly infrequent intervals, the cursed item will become bound at that point until the curse's effect is over. The triggered curse effect is temporary, and is more likely to occur at higher tension.

Please don't link it to tension. It's already been commented on that tension doesn't work particularly well, and it just feels too gimmicky. It occurring randomly is fine, although I'd much prefer constant passive effects with suppress curse scrolls being a way to negate the passive effect and allow removal of the gear. I think I'd want to use cursed items even less if they were related to tension, and the point of this seems to be to make them more worth while/interesting.

Well, perhaps tension isn't the best measure of when the curse will "activate" As-designed-and-not-yet-implemented, my proposed curses will activate very very randomly (Different types of curses have different and adjustable 'frequencies'), with a very slightly higher chance of activating at high tension. Taking tension out of the equation wouldn't really change the experience of things much. I might not use true "tension" but instead use some other measure to try to judge whether it'd be a more-inopportune time to activate the curse.

And to clarify, other than auto equipping themselves and refusing to be dropped, I don't think there needs to be a "cursed effect" or any added debuffs other than what the item might already have on it. Also, an unidentified cursed item can still be dropped until it reveals itself by auto equipping or you reveal it manually. I'm not for completely redefining what a cursed item is. Instead just add something that will make you want to use those scrolls of identify before you risk putting on an unknown magical item, and scrolls of remove curse will become much more valuable as it will suddenly be the prime way of getting known cursed items out of your inventory.

Well that's certainly a different way to go than the one I've proposed and am working on. Personally I think that makes curses no more interesting than they are now, and discourages picking things up in the first place. It doesn't change when I'm "safe" to check them out by equipping them (When I have a remove curse or ID scroll) It just means that anything that I want to check out I have to walk all the way back to when I get such a scroll instead of carrying it with me until I do get the requisite scroll (So encourages backtracking and stash-creation, which I personally find boring.)

Actually if I read your proposal correctly ID'ing an item doesn't make it safer, it makes it worse because if I ID it, and it's cursed, I can't drop it now that I know about the curse and must then read a remove curse scroll to drop it. In which case you'd never ID equippable items before putting them on, because you have to use a remove curse scroll to get rid of it whether it's worn or not. Besides IMO inventory management is already tedious enough without locking some portion of your inventory down with cursed items.

[SirDinkus]

Those are valid points. I guess you could just go all the way back to pick them up if you didn't want to risk it...hmmmm... well you could make cursed items automatically identified as "cursed" once you pick them up. Not before while they're on the ground. Once picked up, you wouldn't know what they do before you identify it, only that it is cursed and now it's stuck in your inventory. And they would still have a chance to auto equip themselves at bad times, and still stick when they do. That way, Ash's ability to see cursed items would still be handy. That way you could avoid ever picking them up in the first place. Scrolls of identify would still be useful for non_Ash players so you can find out if that cursed item you picked up is good or bad.

As for discouraging players to pick up magical items, I think it's fine. If you want to go further in the game without risking picking up any magical items until you can do it 100% safely, that is a risk unto itself by missing out on the protection they might offer you. I think it creates a moment of weighing risk for reward. Instead of players snatching up every glowing and runed item they see, they'll stand over it and ponder if they really want to pick it up. And since scrolls of remove curse are pretty plentiful, it wouldn't be super dangerous if it is cursed. They might carry the cursed item in their inventory unmolested until they find a scroll of remove curse, or it might stick to them the next turn. I like the idea of being scared to pick up powerful items but doing it anyway because that's what it takes to survive.

[SirDinkus]

And you know, you could have Ash give a piety bonus whenever a cursed item decides to equip to you. That way, players who choose him as a god will curse everything good in their inventory, and hope they try and stick. It could be kind of a cursed equipment russian roulette. You could have five different cursed rings that periodically decide swap each other out. Risky, yet you get lots of piety for it. That would be pretty cool.

[savageorange]

Re: items that refuse to be dropped:
I have seen this in MANY games, including ToME2, and it's just incredibly annoying. Whenever it happened, I was like 'FUCK THIS GAME, whoever developed that deserves to be punched in the face.'

Even in strongly inventory-focused games (which DCSS is not), and games where all items are predetermined rather than being randomly generated, it just gives a Xom-ish "I'm being an outrageous jackass because I happen to feel like it" vibe.

It's alright to have a item which takes up a lot of space/weight and you're keeping it because it's just that good. It's not okay to have an item which eats up inventory space + weight purely because it happens to be cursed. That's the difference between intentionally making a major tradeoff (for example, using a cursed item that both boosts stats enormously, and inflicts 'degenerating body' while it's equipped), and simply having a 'status effect' cruelly inflicted on you by your simple choice to check out an item.

(I'm fairly neutral on the current situation of possibly equipping cursed gear, as to me that indicates far more commitment/preparation than simply picking something up or IDing it. Certainly you want to ID things such as rings of hunger and terrible artifacts, but you'd never do anything but throw them away afterwards.)

TL;DR: Making the player agonize over whether to equip this or that, with significant upsides and downsides, is good game design and fits well with Crawl design philosophy. Making them deal with 'status effects' of useless weight/inventory slot expenditure because they happened to be interested in finding out more about an item, is more like spontaneously turning some items into oklobs.

[SirDinkus]

Well heaven forbid a cursed item be inconvenient to a player. It's almost like "cursed" could be construed as something "negative" that's meant to be detrimental to the player. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the original purpose of cursed items was to make it difficult to be rid of, and to make a player hesitant to equip an unknown magical item. With the way this game had developed, cursed items have lost that scare factor and hence this entire thread and many others. The threat of something being cursed just doesn't mean much anymore. It's too easy. So my suggestion was to turn the focus of the cursed status from being equipped, which makes it very convenient for the player and hence the no risk level of the current curse system, to being cursed upon picking up.

You're complaining about cursed items that can't be dropped as being annoying. Duh. It's supposed to be. Say you've got a decent magical sword. You'll still pick up every magical sword you see and try them out without much fear because removing curses is easy and being cursed in its current state is pretty mild. Making cursed items not drop and possibly auto-equip makes you question if you really need that new sword. If you really need to know what it is. If you should even touch it. It brings back the hesitation that has been long gone from the curse formula.

Oh, and complaining about the difficulty or "fuck you" factor of a game like this is ridiculous. It's not the developers of TOMEs fault you chose to pick up that item and now you can't drop it. It's your fault. You chose to do it. I'm new to this Roguelike but it seems like any suggestion that makes the game more challenging isn't wanted. So by your logic SavageOrange, we should get rid of curses all together because it makes it harder on the player. Because curses are annoying.

[savageorange]

It's not mere annoyance. Current curses are a mild annoyance, that's fine, oklobs are a bigger annoyance, that's fine too, they are both avoidable. However, DCSS is very good at not suddenly going "oh and btw you are totally screwed now, haha" -- it tries hard to make your character's death YOUR fault. With some races, not having a spare slot to carry chunks IS a death sentence. I don't really accept the proposition that 'picking up an item' is or should be a significant act -- I consider it less significant than say, whether I choose to go to A or B location in one particular turn of a battle.

I do agree that this would make the equipment optimization sub-game more interesting (and incentivize Ashenzari worship), I'm just not convinced that it would be a good kind of interesting, as opposed to a train-wreck kind of interesting.

But I admit I could be simply favoring what I'm already familiar with. If someone implements this, I'm certainly willing to test it and report my actual experience with it.

[SirDinkus]

So explain to me how a player is getting unjustifiably screwed by picking up an item? You can tell what type of item it is by just looking at it while its on the ground. You don't need to have it in your inventory to see that. You're taking a calculated and completely voluntary risk by putting it in your inventory. The game isn't forcing anything on you or being cruel.

It sounds like you're upset that you wouldn't be able to carry a magical item around and identify it at your leisure. As it stands, you can just pick up everything you can carry and once you find a few scrolls BAM! You know what everything is at no risk. And personally, it makes more sense to be hesitant to pick up that glowing plate mail that weighs a ton if you might not be able to put it down.

I really don't see how changing to cursed items being undroppable is in any way unfair to the player.

[SirDinkus]

And you know what? I didn't see that last sentence at the bottom SavageOrange. So I apologize for getting snippy. I'm glad you're willing to give it a shot if (by some divine miracle) they do decide to try it out.

[savageorange]

Personally, I prefer to ID items immediately. But in the early game (where currently curses have the most serious, and dangerous, effect), there usually isn't enough resources to ID things immediately, so lugging it around often is the only option. It's pretty normal to pick up an armour that you want to check out, and some turns later after you are in a already cleared area, take the time to ID it and/or put it on. Unless you intend to change that situation, I think that needs to remain doable without pain. If you require the situation to already be safe before a player thinks about investigating items, then you are creating travel grind. We should try hard to avoid that (and of course, any code that adds any kind of grind is unlikely to get into mainline crawl, so that's another reason to avoid it.)

There is also a question of what the effect of rCurse should be if curses effect inventory management even on non-equipped items. Currently they only uncurse equipped items. IMO they would need to uncurse either all items in inventory, or a semi-fixed number of cursed items in inventory (with prioritization on equipped items). For Ash, of course, the current effect is fine (IIRC prompts you for what exactly to uncurse, 1 or more times)

[crate]

If you're trying to change curses the first thing you should try to come up with is something that makes them actually fun. Having items randomly stick to my hands or stick to my inventory is about as far from fun as I can think of as far as curses go. Would you actually enjoy having that be a part of crawl?

[Bim]

If you're trying to change curses the first thing you should try to come up with is something that makes them actually fun. Having items randomly stick to my hands or stick to my inventory is about as far from fun as I can think of as far as curses go. Would you actually enjoy having that be a part of crawl?

Yes, yes a thousand times yes. Although I get what Sir Dinkus is trying to say/convey, it seems incredibly un-fun to the point of just a constant annoyance. Yes it makes curses worse, but for all the wrong reasons. Cursed items should (as is Siegurts plan) become more more of a difficult choice rather than just completely difficult.

By the way Siegurt, all your changes sound great. As long as they're not dealing direct damage or paralysing you or doing anything too horrible then I think it's a great idea, I just think that anything above a certain level of 'evil' would put people off taking the chance. Also, I'm glad you're looking at other things than straight tension, I just had a vision in my mind of it being sort of 'meet a giant - everything is cursed' (similar to demonic guardian style tension) which I think would just turn out (like major damage) to be too much of an annoyance to be worth while and a bit gimmicky.

[savageorange]

To get into more brainstormy territory, I like the idea that cursed items have a chance to activate, every X turns. But not to force-equip or anything like that -- what I'm thinking of is more like having a mini-Xom in your backpack, so while you carry cursed items you could be subject to sudden tactical/strategic changes. The effects shouldn't be wholly bad, rather they should all include aspects of all three of (bad, good, surprising). A very simple one could be suddenly losing a point of rF and gaining one of rC; or vice versa; or gaining an AC boost which goes away when tension rises; or suddenly berserking (only in high-tension situations, because it could easily be completely bad otherwise). To me this seems like it has potential to be fun, and has the flavour of 'your inventory is mocking you'.

I think this is similar to siegurt's idea, but I haven't thought out its relation to rCurse etc.

It's possible that we just don't need rCurse (or Curse foo, either?). If the curse implementation doesn't directly effect your ability to manage your inventory at all, then this might work. There could be other ways to get gear cursed (esp. if you are an Ash worshipper, I really see no problem with a (food cost only) invocation to do so. We should definitely avoid any incentivization to farm mummies.). You could have the concept of spiritually tainted ground, that over time(exposure) has an increasing chance to curse an item in your inventory (but not items dropped on the ground, as that seems like it would be a candidate for creating grind). Seems like it would fit well with Crypt, Tomb, and Hells (and possibly could also be applied to the general area of an active ghost's death. The death that they had before you met them in this game, that is.)

[Bim]

Having non-currently used stuff in your backpack being annoying seems like it'd just become tedious. For instance, if you were constantly having to drop equipment because it gave you rF- when you wanted rF+ (or whatever) I think most people wanting a non-Xom like experience would just forgo cursed equipment all together. This is unless all cursed items were made really, really good to be worth the hassle - which seems like an odd design decision.

Edit: I think the idea of cursed ground sounds really good though! It'd certainly make Crypt a bit more interesting!

[SirDinkus]

Well I guess I'm baffled as to how keep any sort of challenge present in (any) game by making absolutely everything "fun". Dying (for every other gamer besides a Dugeon Crawl player) isn't fun. Taking damage isn't fun. Missing attacks are annoying. Meat spoiling isn't fun. Hunger isn't fun because it gets in the way of winning! On and on and on...

Why do people insist curses be "fun"? It should be avoided because it's the opposite of fun. If curses were "fun" everyone would want to get cursed items. It's like every topic about anything posing an added challenge is shot down for something less hard on players. I kind of thought Roguelikes made an identity for themselves by running opposite of current gaming trends. Instead, it sounds like the people on here are nudging new game design choices toward being easier for the player to handle. To "soften the blow" if you will like all current generation AAA titles already do.

[SirDinkus]

I love how everyone on here hates the fact that curses cause inventory problems. That's the whole dang point! You guys are all like "We want curses that don't affect our inventory or our ability to safely lug around everything we want until the moment is absolutely safe for us identify things. We want curses that we have absolute control over! Or it's not fun!"

[Siegurt]

I love how everyone on here hates the fact that curses cause inventory problems. That's the whole dang point! You guys are all like "We want curses that don't affect our inventory or our ability to safely lug around everything we want until the moment is absolutely safe for us identify things. We want curses that we have absolute control over! Or it's not fun!"

Clearly you don't understand what the objective here is, I suspect you just haven't played enough. No-one's suggesting that curses should be completely within the players control.

What you've suggested is a choice for the player where *either option* is less fun than not implementing this suggestion. You can either A. Pick up items you might want to use, and hope you don't get them locked into your inventory, ultimately leaving you with an onerously small carrying capacity, this choice leaves you spending disproportionately longer micromanaging your inventory as your free space gets smaller and smaller, or B. You can choose to *not* pick up anything that might potentially be useful for fear it would be cursed, which leaves you under-equipped, but at least with all your inventory slots, then you have to run back and forth as you get scrolls allowing you to safely test equipment, in order to check out the things which you might want to use.

So you get to choose between A. Micromanagement, or B. Boring back and forth travel to pick up things you left behind. Both of these options reduce the time you actually get to *play* the game, which is counter to the intention. No-one wants to play the "micromanage my inventory" game, that's just not a fun game.

Curses should increase the challenge *without* making the game less fun an interesting.

Another way to look at it is that the curse should punish the *character* but not the *player*

[SirDinkus]

And just so I don't sound like a total Nancy Naysayer, I love the idea of cursed items activating and doing random things while in your inventory. I would say that is a perfect way to solve this problem. Even making cursed items unequippable and droppable. You'd probably need to make Scrolls of Remove Curse incredibly rare though to keep the curse effect actually a threat though. Or remove the scrolls altogether. But I definitely don't think cursed items should have any "good" random effects unless it is a perk of worshiping Ash.

[SirDinkus]

In response to Siegurt, I haven't played as much as many of you true. But I have noticed that Scrolls of Remove Curse are everywhere. Very very rarely do you get more than a few floors down without picking a few up. So I don't agree with your belief that you'd be filling up your inventory with cursed items and not having a way to remove them. You could use up all your scrolls by picking up every item you come across and have exceptionally bad luck, but that is you're choice and it's something my approach purposely would dissuade a player from doing. I see that the main issue with becoming cursed on pick up is that you guys want the ability to carry around a bunch of mysterious items until you can investigate them safely. I think that tactic is why curses lack the punch they do now and I was looking for a way to stop players from doing it. I guess its not what is wanted.

[Siegurt]

Well, I can see that you're attempting to make remove curse scrolls be used up more quickly, because it's your perception that they're too common for how much they're needed.

The *reason* they are so common in the first place is part of the history that you're missing, It's actually to *encourage* players to pick up and try out new equipment. If remove curse scrolls were as rare as say, cure mutation potions, it would discourage players from trying new equipment and reduce the experimentation that new players currently have the freedom to do. Because without an early out for curses, a new player gets locked into a horrible weapon or something really quickly and then just gets frustrated and gives up. One thing that isn't desirable is to harshly punish experimentation, particularly at the early levels. That reduces the flexibility of the game and results in "one and only one optimal strategy" which in turn reduces the game's replayability (Which is critical to a game like crawl, where you don't play through the game only once, but many, many times before you acquire the skills needed to win.)

Now the downside to this, is of course that the common-ness of the scroll does make it relatively trivial to uncurse things later on. Compounded by the fact that if your *good* equipment is cursed, you have almost no drawbacks, since you'd pretty much be using that for the rest of the game anyway.

While your suggestion does somewhat alleviate the common-scroll-problem, it doesn't solve the larger "I don't care if my stuff is cursed because it's already awesome" problem, nor does it allow for experimentation at the early stages of the game.