Bladerunes/Weaponrunes in Angband?

[Shockbolt]

Would the addition of spells/scrolls that add special enchantments to a weapon be a cool thing to add to Angband? As with the other posts I've made today, I don't know if this feature has been suggested before in the past.

The basic idea would be to enchant a weapon either by scroll/spell or by any other magical item (Ring of Bladerunes: 1/day enchants a blade weapon with extra fire damage for 1 attack), giving that weapon a temporary magical effect that plays out when player successfully attack and hit a npc/opponent.
The Bladerune/Weaponrune would then vanish from the weapon after a successful attack/hit against a npc.

A few examples:

-Bladerune of extra damage - yields extra hits to the attack
-Bladerune of extra attack - adds an extra attack/hit dice to the attack
-Bladerune of fire - does fire damage
-Bladerune of Darkness - blinds target

[Derakon]

Temporary brands have been suggested, but nobody's gotten the time to figure out how to best implement them. They would presumably replace the existing branding spells, which alternate between useless and broken.

[artes]

If you want to implement those temporary brands, I suggest that you let them work for more time, e.g. until the player leaves the floor, or at least so that they last during a long battle.

If they only last for one blow with the weapon, I as a player would find them useless, i.e. the time and work it takes to find the scroll, throw away things from the backpack to make room for it, and place it on the weapon, is too great compared to the effect, unless the effect is very powerful.

[Shockbolt]

unless the effect is very powerful.

Something like that was what I had in mind. In my head, any additional effect placed into a weapon would give you an advantage. And yeah, having some effects that last for a certain amount of rounds could possibly also be done.

[fph]

Temporary brands have been suggested, but nobody's gotten the time to figure out how to best implement them.

There's already ?monsterConfusion in the codebase, which is basically an effect of the kind Shockbolt is suggesting. Adding more of these effects could lead to savefile incompatibilities (need more flags), but I imagine it should be easy to change the effect of ?monConf into something useful, just for testing.

[Magnate]

There's already ?monsterConfusion in the codebase, which is basically an effect of the kind Shockbolt is suggesting. Adding more of these effects could lead to savefile incompatibilities (need more flags), but I imagine it should be easy to change the effect of ?monConf into something useful, just for testing.

Monster confusion is a hack with special-case code - which is why there aren't more effects like it. I do have ideas about introducing timed object flags, which I have briefly discussed with takkaria. It's not trivial, but I might get an opportunity to try it out one day.

Affixes, by the way, make the priest weapon branding spell useful at last. I changed it so that it will add a single branding affix to an existing item (providing that item is not an artifact, has no brands already and does not have a theme, i.e. HA/Defender/etc.). So it's now useful to add a single brand to a decent weapon which lacks one. The ammo branding spell is still overpowered though. My thinking is that it should use up some of the ammo in the branding (i.e. 20 original arrows become 10 branded arrows), but I haven't tried this yet.

As for the original topic, I have long aspired to a sort of forging/crafting system for Angband. It might be something I'll work on when I'm done with affixes, but I think I want to tackle combat next.

[Antoine]

Affixes, by the way, make the priest weapon branding spell useful at last.

One of the best applications of affixes I think. It wouldn't need to be just elemental brands, all kinds of affixes could be added using spells/items.

If you find ammo-branding spells too effective, you might like to consider increasing the breakage rate of branded ammo, even to 100%? ("The arrow burns up in flight!") Might be more themey than destroying them at branding-time.

A.