Making the game harder, take four: curses

[Magnate]

So, I emailed takkaria and said what would be good to prioritise and he said curses, so here we go. For those new to Oook, we've been discussing curses in the dev team for a long long time - two or three years. I'm starting this thread from the premise that pretty much everybody hates sticky curses: they're a classic example of a mechanic that adds tedium (obsessive IDing before wielding, or scumming for remove curse) without fun. They also penalise ID-by-use, which has been a development goal for years.

So if they're finally going away for good, what replaces them? Well, first - do we need to replace them at all? IMO yes, because if all items are all good that makes the game both easier and duller. So we need some things which make some items have drawbacks. So far the dev team's archive of ideas (probably pinched from variants) has these:

"cannot drop" - a less game-breaking version of the sticky curse: you can unwield it, but it stays in your pack until uncursed. Potentially a good thing on swap items you don't want to drop by accident, but too many will make your inventory very hard to manage ....

"pval-flipping" - this could be implemented in a couple of ways. Either the curse randomly flips a positive pval negative for a random length of time (and then after a random rest does it again to another pval) ... or using S's "hidden curse" system it lies dormant for a long time after IDing and then suddenly flips one of the pvals permanently. The former would irritate me (I hate items being unreliable), but the latter is likely to lead to more items being junk.

"anchorage" - a teleport-nullifier field. So @ cannot teleport self, and cannot be teleported by monsters - a mixed blessing but on balance a problem. Could also prevent monsters teleporting and being teleported, making it generally even worse but with a nice edge case for use against Sauron,

"hide the monster health bar" - which I would extend to a whole class of "detection gimping" curses. So when you wield the item, you suddenly get less information somehow: the monster health bar disappears, or monster recall throws up junk, or your ESP has brownouts, or the 'l'ook command stops telling you very much. As with the whole detection debate, the danger is that any of these encourage note-taking.

"aggravate" - this needs to be granular, so will become a pval-related flag. One simple thing would be to make one point of aggravate equal minus one point of stealth, but I need to do some thinking about the stealth algorithm (#1113) first.

"nullify" - the description on trac says "Stops the item doing anything until it's uncursed", which could mean a variety of things - cannot attack, or simply acts as a 0d0 weapon (0AC armour, etc.) - so you can wear it, but none of its properties are active. This would be an interesting curse to have on extremely powerful items, especially for ironmen.

And let's not forget the "bad" flags we already have implemented:

"impair regen" - slow down either hp or mana regen.

"drain xp" - very slow xp drain, pretty much irrelevant for high-level characters. (I wonder, does this provide an exploit for stat restoration?)

"fear" - making you unable to melee, and gimping casting and shooting. IMO this is a bit too powerful at the moment - it needs to be a bit less awful for people to bother with it (though having said that, lots of people seem to use rings of escaping quite happily).

"random teleportation" - IMO this also is a bit much. All that's needed is to increase the gap between teleports and people might actually consider using such items if their other flags were worth it.

"vulnerabilities" - increasing the damage you take from a particular element.

So, that's the exposition, now what do I need? Your views - making the game harder by adding bad stuff is unlikely to be popular, so tell me how to avoid pissing you off. Which of these could you absolutely not tolerate, and under what circumstances? What other curses or drawbacks would you want to see on items to make decisions about whether to use them more interesting? What about removing curses - a single cheap scroll to remove all the bad flags from an item sounds very wrong (look what happened to restore_item), so should remove curse exist at all? Apart from nullify and cannot_drop, which other bad things would you want to be made removable?

In my next post I'll put forward some proposals for how these various curses would be (i) identified and (ii) removed (if at all), but in the meantime I need your input.

[d_m]

So, here are some things I believe about cursing:

1. I think the "aha, gotcha" model of cursing isn't very interesting. Almost no matter what, I think it causes people to carry tons of ID scrolls, and not wield unknown items, etc. It's a hold-over from 1E AD&D.

2. That said, cursed items (particularly weapons) are interesting and fun, and we have lots of great examples in the literature (Mormegil, Stormbringer, Dyrnwyn, Andvari's ring, etc). So we should try to support having cursed items.

3. A cursed item that has no use, or whose use can never balance out its drawback, is just junk, and the only game mechanic to it is determining that it is junk and ignoring (squelching) it.

4. The interesting point (both mechanically and narratively) is when characters choose to use items which they know to be cursed.

5. Therefore, the kind of curses I want to see are ones which can be serious and deadly, but which are put on powerful items that tempt the player to use them. I'm fine with the details of the curse being opaque (e.g. unpredictable, or only occasionally manifesting) but the player should always know that the item is cursed and be allowed to stop using/drop the item if they want to.

6. In other words, the more powerful the curse, the more powerful the item. This goes completely against how curses work in Angband now (where Mormegil has terrible penalties and is completely useless). I think mixed-blessing items are fine but should aim to be a net-positive. Cursed items may not be a net positive for every player or character, but should be powerful enough that they could be in some cases (or at least that they could tempt some players).

7. The One Ring being sticky might be OK only because it is so overwhelmingly powerful, and it fits narratively. But it fits my other criteria, in that people use it despite it being permanently cursed.

8. It might be fun to have items which begin cursed, but which are useful after they are uncursed (e.g. Calris). But I think the mechanic of needing to find a scroll (or be a priest) to do this is uninteresting.

9. If curses are things to be broken, I'd almost imagine them like quests (e.g. kill 9 vampires to break the curse, or kill a unique, or something), or things like kill X monsters with this weapon, or gain Y experience points, or bring it to dungeon level Z, or whatnot. Just something to make the experience of breaking a curse have narrative power.

10. In these cases, I'd want things like flipping a negative pval to positive, or a negative to-hit to positive to happen when the curse is broken, not via reading a ton of other scrolls.

11. Which is to say that I would take out ?remove-curse and the corresponding spell.

Seen from these criteria, some of the previous suggestions work and some don't. I will write a specific proposal later, but I just wanted to get this out there. Takkaria and I talked about this, and I think we're in basic agreement about a lot of it. But I'm interested in criticisms. It's certainly a departure, and it is easy to argue that it's too radical for V.

[Derakon]

My take on this is that outright bad items will never be used, but mixed-blessing ones will. My characters use rings of Reckless Attacks and of the Dog all the time, because the benefit (gaining more combat damage) is more-or-less worth the penalty (significantly reduced AC and stealth). Curses are certainly one way to make more mixed-blessing items, but I'd also recommend going through the list of egos, artifacts, and rings and amulets and simply adding more penalties to items that have bonuses. I made some suggestions of ways we could do this in this thread.

As for the curses mentioned, here's my thoughts:

* Cannot Drop: will only be relevant until the player finds a ?Remove Curse, which makes it seem a bit boring. However, this would be good as an alternate for Permanently Cursed -- once you pick up the One Ring / Morgoth's Crown, it's stuck in your inventory for the rest of the game (but you can wield/remove it at will).

* Pval-flipping: like you, I want items to be reliable. I'd hate to make a major inventory decision based on some new gear I found, only to have that new gear turn out to be lying to me. Then again, pvals are rarely what enable new gear (it's usually free action / telepathy / important resists, which this presumably wouldn't touch). I think I'd prefer merging this with "Nullify", and have the item simply randomly do nothing for a turn or blow.

* Anchorage: no problems here. Standard mixed-blessing. How certain are you that you won't need to flee this fight?

* Hide Info: other things you could do here: reduce the character's sight radius, reduce radius of detection spells / telepathy, make detection spells / telepathy show monsters in greyscale (and be unable to 'l'ook at them). This would have to be an effect that persists for a bit after you take the item off, I think, to prevent rapid-swapping. You could of course detect before putting it on, but I don't have a problem with that.

* Nullify: my main question here is, what happens if an item with +CON nullifies? Your max HP go down for a turn, then it un-nullifies and suddenly you're not at perfect health any more. This has more to do with the weird results from gaining CON than anything else though.

* Drain XP: I'd change this into "get less XP from kills". And yeah, the current drain-XP mechanics could theoretically let you sit around until you lost a level and then regain it, but the effect is so slow that it's not remotely practical.

* =Escaping is useful for casters, since their bread-and-butter spells remain reliable and they get a speed boost. It's useless for anyone who wants to melee. If you really want a speed item that has similar effects, I'd call it a Ring of Agony or something, +4 speed, +50% spell failure rate, -20 to-hit. I don't really think "permanently afraid of melee" is that interesting a mechanic in comparison.

* Random teleportation would be better (read: more interesting) as random blinking, IMO. Possibly even more likely to get you into trouble.

* Vulnerabilities are tricky to balance, given how critical resisting elements is in the game. How much extra damage can you allow? Vulnerability can't just cancel resistance, or you end up taking the full 1600 damage from a firebreath -- way too much, so the vulnerability gear doesn't get used. Maybe if it just multiplied all damage from that element by 1.5 after resistances kick in?

[Magnate]

Yeah I was thinking 1.33 actually (from vulnerability). Although at the moment it does simply cancel out one level of resistance ...

I deliberately didn't suggest reduced sight range, because I think that will lead to instadeaths from unseen monsters. But maybe once the LOS/FOV debate gets resolved this could be implemented safely.

As usual I agree with you on almost everything. I am going to implement a hidden, delayed pval-flipping curse just to bug you though ;-)

I agree completely with d_m, except for the bit about curses needing to be on really powerful items. I think there ought to be some "minor" curses as well - both drain_xp and impair_regen fit into this category, IMO.

[d_m]

I like the idea of making XP drain about getting XP at a reduce rate (66% or 50% or something). That seems like a solid drawback and means that finding a great XP draining artifact early will actually have an impact (slower advancement).

Having a powerful weapon that prevents ESP seems good. I'm less excited about hiding other info but maybe it would work well.

Making aggravation more nuanced would help (so that aggravation(1) would be different than aggravation(10)), as would making it only affect certain kinds of monsters (e.g. ghosts, or dragons). Stealth penalties are also good.

I would rather stay away from vulnerability I think, but I'm not sure I have a great reason for why.

[AnonymousHero]

I'll just comment on a couple of the curses...

"anchorage" - a teleport-nullifier field. So @ cannot teleport self, and cannot be teleported by monsters - a mixed blessing but on balance a problem. Could also prevent monsters teleporting and being teleported, making it generally even worse but with a nice edge case for use against Sauron,

ToME 2.x has this in the form of a Light Source ("Anchor of Space-time") and it is extremely powerful for the player. Now, the monster composition isn't exactly the same and in ToME the item isn't cursed, so you can freely unwield. I does take a turn to do so, so you are at risk of death.

"aggravate" - this needs to be granular, so will become a pval-related flag. One simple thing would be to make one point of aggravate equal minus one point of stealth, but I need to do some thinking about the stealth algorithm (#1113) first.

Just make it halve(!) stealth (if positive) and double it if negative. If I've understood the current stealth handling, that should be pretty effective.

[camlost]

I'll just note that hidden curses aren't all that popular among the Sangband crowd, or at least the vociferous minority.

I think S might take some direction from V or FA regarding curses at some point.


What about "stat malus". I.e. normal items with a reduced stat or stats? With multiple pvals, this shouldn't be too difficult to accommodate.

[Magnate]

What about "stat malus". I.e. normal items with a reduced stat or stats? With multiple pvals, this shouldn't be too difficult to accommodate.

No indeed, and Derakon suggested several for the standart set, most of which will probably happen.

I think the devteam needs to do some thinking about how the curses will be created: there's not much point in having them as their own ego templates, since they need to be offset by something good. My suggestion is that every ego item has a chance of being cursed with one or more random bad things. This would result in some junk (e.g. a slay troll weapon is not much use anyway, and with a malus it would be binned immediately), but it's quite an easy route to initial implementation. I'll see what the others think.

I'm assuming it's only worth putting curses on ego items and artifacts. I suppose a Blade of Chaos (6d5) (+10,+15) might still get used if it had a minor xp drain, but most other things wouldn't. This chimes with Eddie's post in another thread that DSMs are effectively ego items (he compares red v. white DSM with ring of rfire vs. ring of rcold). I think we need some way of distinguishing that kind of base item from the rest.

[will_asher]

Here's a few item drawbacks from DAJ as suggestions:
- DANGER- weapon has a chance to attack yourself
- PEACE- reduced number of blows by 1 and inhibits heroism and rage. As an upside to the drawback (which might be too weird for V), it also inhibits aggravation.
- STOPREGEN- stops natural hit point regeneration (edit: I guess that's almost the same as impair regen which was already mentioned)
- ANNOY- (really unlilkely for V but I'll throw it out there) does something annoying every once in a awhile. (annoying things include short-duration maladies like stunning, blindness, or hallucenation, trap creation, summoning a minor pest (picks from certain monsters), etc.)

As for the others already suggested:
- cannot drop: seems like just another form of a sticky curse, doesn't sound very interesting or fun.
- pval flipping: I share others' objections about making other items unreliable. not cool.
- anchoring: I'm unsure, but it sounds like a probable deal-breaker as the advice always says to have escapes ready at all times.
- hide the monster health bar: I like the idea of curses which nerf detection and this is a form of that which I wouldn't have thought of.
- nullify: sounds cool to me.
- aggravate: having it use a pval doesn't sound bad, but I don't think making a 1 of aggravation = -1 stealth would be very effective. Something like pval 1= half stealth, pval 2= 1/4 stealth, pval3= 1/8 stealth, etc. might be better -and whenever one of these makes it round down to 0, then the next point of pval would make it actually aggravate (eg if stealth is 7, pval 3 would put it to 0, and pval 4 would make it aggravate).

[other]

I think the devteam needs to do some thinking about how the curses will be created: there's not much point in having them as their own ego templates, since they need to be offset by something good. My suggestion is that every ego item has a chance of being cursed with one or more random bad things. This would result in some junk (e.g. a slay troll weapon is not much use anyway, and with a malus it would be binned immediately), but it's quite an easy route to initial implementation. I'll see what the others think.

I'm assuming it's only worth putting curses on ego items and artifacts. I suppose a Blade of Chaos (6d5) (+10,+15) might still get used if it had a minor xp drain, but most other things wouldn't. This chimes with Eddie's post in another thread that DSMs are effectively ego items (he compares red v. white DSM with ring of rfire vs. ring of rcold). I think we need some way of distinguishing that kind of base item from the rest.

For distinguishing base items, how easy/useful would it be to implement a GOOD item flag that would go on the top end items? This could make a base item eligable for curses, trigger a rating increase in the level feeling code, add some control to squelching, and allow certain "normal" items to come from GOOD/GREAT drops. If you want to extend such a system, adding the GOOD flag to some ego templates, plus a GREAT flag and code such that GOOD base item + GOOD ego (a Scythe of Slicing of Extra Attacks) = a GREAT item. I suspect that any item which has a reasonable place in the final fight should get the GOOD tag; the only base item I would automaticly flag as GREAT would be PDSM.

On the subject of Curses & double-edged items, I have fond memories of ZAngband mutations & item flags. I know NO_TELEPORT has already been mentioned; in Z, I believe this had the advantage that it prevented all forms of player teleportation, including Gravity, Nexus, and monster spells such as SUMMON_PLAYER and TELEPORT_LEVEL. Another thing to look at stealing is NO_MAGIC, which prevented the player from casting spells & using scrolls, but gave a huge boost to saving throws, mitigated many forms of damage, and, importantly, was the only way to reduce the damage from Mana Storms and Mana bolts. It got used by warriors more than mages, of course, but I think having some items more useful to certain classes & play styles is a good thing (notably, it showed up on Gorlim, which already had combat bonuses and a penalty to INT/WIS, but was heavily cursed).

I suspect that there are also some possibilities in timed effects -- every normal speed turn, if you had one of these, the game would roll 1 in X (ranging from 100 to 10000), and if it hit, something would happen. I believe the current TELEPORT flag works something like this, and most of the monster spells would have some possibilities with the right activation frequency. Once you have rBlind, a helm which blinds you 1 time in 1000 would just be a rare "you resist" message, but I probably wouldn't use something that cast SUMMON_HI_DRAGONS unless it was Bladeturner (and it might make sense for Bladeturner to do just that ...)

Another possible bad item effect would be "of Fumbling" -- It takes 300 energy to put on or take off, adds 50 energy to the cost of swapping anything else, and perhaps causes you to stumble (lose 100 energy) 1 in 2000 normal speed turns.

[Hariolor]

I like a lot of these thoughts.

On pval flipping - I share the concerns about unreliable weapons. However, I might not mind weapons with hidden pval that is always random (rather than flipping right when you'd want it most). Essentially, turn the to-hit and to-dam into a die roll that's called each time the weapon is used. Set the average value to the target bonus/malus of the item (which is what shows on the info), but any given attack might be higher or lower than that value....

maybe a bit complex for very little reward, but possibly better than flipping as described in the OP.

[Netbrian]

I agree with those that say hidden curses that come out of nowhere don't sound like much fun at all.

However, curses that affect teleportations, shorten durations, tweak elemental damage, etc are more interesting. In general, I support the principle that using cursed items should be an informed decision.

What do people think of a curse that would cause OoD monsters to be generated more often?

[camlost]

I think the devteam needs to do some thinking about how the curses will be created: there's not much point in having them as their own ego templates, since they need to be offset by something good. My suggestion is that every ego item has a chance of being cursed with one or more random bad things. This would result in some junk (e.g. a slay troll weapon is not much use anyway, and with a malus it would be binned immediately), but it's quite an easy route to initial implementation. I'll see what the others think.

I'm assuming it's only worth putting curses on ego items and artifacts. I suppose a Blade of Chaos (6d5) (+10,+15) might still get used if it had a minor xp drain, but most other things wouldn't. This chimes with Eddie's post in another thread that DSMs are effectively ego items (he compares red v. white DSM with ring of rfire vs. ring of rcold). I think we need some way of distinguishing that kind of base item from the rest.

I agree, but I'd say put this stuff in a info file (curses.txt).

[takkaria]

What do people think of a curse that would cause OoD monsters to be generated more often?

A curse of danger? I like it.

[takkaria]

"pval-flipping" - this could be implemented in a couple of ways. Either the curse randomly flips a positive pval negative for a random length of time (and then after a random rest does it again to another pval) ... or using S's "hidden curse" system it lies dormant for a long time after IDing and then suddenly flips one of the pvals permanently. The former would irritate me (I hate items being unreliable), but the latter is likely to lead to more items being junk.

When I first filed the feature request for pval-flipping curses, I had in mind a curse that flipped the pvals of an item until it was uncursed. Dormant curses sound like a terrible idea, though...

"anchorage" - a teleport-nullifier field. So @ cannot teleport self, and cannot be teleported by monsters - a mixed blessing but on balance a problem. Could also prevent monsters teleporting and being teleported, making it generally even worse but with a nice edge case for use against Sauron

Maybe the anchorage effect should persist for a couple of turns after taking it off. Maybe not.

"hide the monster health bar" - which I would extend to a whole class of "detection gimping" curses. So when you wield the item, you suddenly get less information somehow: the monster health bar disappears, or monster recall throws up junk, or your ESP has brownouts, or the 'l'ook command stops telling you very much. As with the whole detection debate, the danger is that any of these encourage note-taking.

I think there's a careful line to be drawn here. maybe stuff that isn't vulnerable to note-taking is what should be blocked with these kinds of effects. hiding the health bar, restricting fov, that kind of stuff. i'd hate anything that touched monster recall or whose main effect seems entirely to affect UI (e.g. turning off 'l'ook would mean you'd have to turn off the monster list too, and you're starting to go down a pretty tangled path there).

"aggravate" - this needs to be granular, so will become a pval-related flag. One simple thing would be to make one point of aggravate equal minus one point of stealth, but I need to do some thinking about the stealth algorithm (#1113) first.

why not just add negative stealth items, in that case?

"random teleportation" - IMO this also is a bit much. All that's needed is to increase the gap between teleports and people might actually consider using such items if their other flags were worth it.

I like random teleport items, I'm not sure they need changing. i wear them whenever i'm going into a risky battle on the basis that if I get teleported away in the middle, it might lead to my character surviving longer....

Though the idea of replacing it with a short-range blink probably makes it more of a problem. But then, is it a bit too bad?

What about removing curses - a single cheap scroll to remove all the bad flags from an item sounds very wrong (look what happened to restore_item), so should remove curse exist at all? Apart from nullify and cannot_drop, which other bad things would you want to be made removable?

if we have remove curse, then it should only work on pval-flipping, cannot_drop, or nullify. it would be good to have a more interesting way to break curses though, so if anyone has any ideas...