Mixed-blessing items

[TJS]

I find mushrooms a bit boring at the moment and most of them seem to do you more harm than good. It would be nice if you got a bit more excitement from finding a mushroom. Also I'd like to see some mushrooms that are worth eating since there is a chance that something good would happen. I'd like to feel I'm gambling when I eat a mushroom with a chance of a really good outcome as well as a bad one.

Mushroom of change ability: Increases one of your stats randomly by one and reduces another by one. Small chance that the stat reduction doesn't happen (say 25%) to make eating them worthwhile.

Negative mushrooms have a small chance of giving you a resistance to the effect. For example a mushroom of poison could give you a 20% chance of gaining poison resistance, but only if you actually get poisoned (so if you have a resist poison ring on then there would be no chance of gaining the resistance). At the moment there is absolutely no reason that you'd eat a mushroom of poison and I can't imagine anyone actually eating a mushroom without identifying it first either. So these mushrooms are wasted at the moment in my opinion.

Mushroom of chance:
25% chance increase up to three attributes by one
30% chance increase one attribute
25% chance lose memories
20% chance reduce up to three attributes by one

Also curses are a bit underused at the moment I think. Like the mushrooms not being eaten before you know what it is noone really wields an item before itentifying it first. You could have cursed items that have hidden positive effects which you can use once you remove the curse.

Perhaps identifying an item only finds out if it is cursed, but not the other attributes of the item (such as bonuses/penalties to say speed). To find these out you need to wield the item.

So you could have this item which appears as this when you identify it:

Broad Sword {cursed}

But when you wield it you get this:

Broad Sword of Speed (+2 speed) (-1 Wisdom) (-4,-5) {cursed}

And when you remove the curse you get this:

Broad Sword of Speed (+2 speed) (+1 Wisdom) (+4,+5)

Perhaps by carrying around the item for longer you get a feeling above the {cursed} description that becomes say {cursed with possible hidden powers}

[Narvius]

Bad mushrooms have one tricky use - if you have some unidentified stuff and want to test if it gives you resistance against the given bad effect, you can swallow a mushroom - if you are poisoned/blinded/paralyzed/stat-reduced/dead/whatever, then it doesn't provide resistance, if not - it does.

[TJS]

Bad mushrooms have one tricky use - if you have some unidentified stuff and want to test if it gives you resistance against the given bad effect, you can swallow a mushroom - if you are poisoned/blinded/paralyzed/stat-reduced/dead/whatever, then it doesn't provide resistance, if not - it does.

Do you know I never would have thought of that. Mind you, aren't there potions that do this sort of thing as well (such as a potion of poison) which aren't as harsh as the mushroom version? So I guess you'd probably use those instead.

Also regarding those potions of poison and the like, another use for them could be that they have a chance of affecting monsters if you throw the potion at them (say 50%). Maybe they could affect uniques as well as ordinary monsters, so it would be worth keeping a few Potions of Slowness handy early on for when say Wormtongue appears.

I like the idea of seemingly useless items actually having some use in certain situations.

[Narvius]

As far as I know throwing potions *does* inflict the given ailment to the target...?
If not, that's definately a good idea.
But not against uniques... maybe OOD-Enemies you can take on with the right stuff.

[Edit]
Seemingly potions don't. Or maybe I just had bad luck (I threw three !Confusion on a novice warrior, nothing happened).

[zaimoni]

As far as I know throwing potions *does* inflict the given ailment to the target...?
If not, that's definately a good idea.
But not against uniques... maybe OOD-Enemies you can take on with the right stuff.

[Edit]
Seemingly potions don't. Or maybe I just had bad luck (I threw three !Confusion on a novice warrior, nothing happened).

That would be Nethack, not Angband.

A couple of kinds of inedible mushrooms are good for minor [sic] damage when thrown.

[Jude]

I'm for more randomization. Perhaps a few strains of mushrooms that change from game to game, along with the standard ones. Some potentially good or bad depending on the mix of effects.

Items of all types that have random abilities drawn from a larger pool of effects, perhaps sorted out between different item types in the beginning of the game. For example, a bonus that appears on shoes in one game might appear on shields in another, etc. Increased variety and gives a reason to be interested in every item until the late game where all types are found.

I kind of like this for potions or mushrooms - anything you can only use once. What could happen is, there's a list of pros and cons that a mushroom can get generated with, say an equal number of each...then if every mushroom is generated uniquely, there's always going to be a bunch of OK ones, a bunch of terrible ones, but there is also a chance of some really good ones appearing - something that gives a temporary speed boost, HP boost, and a bunch of resistances, at the cost of draining a few SP and speeding metabolism or something like that.

It would result in a LOT of junk though...but it would be interesting to find random, unique one-shot items that would be worth saving up for a big fight, since you will only ever get one of them.

[Nystul]

I think that Too Much Junk has actually nothing to do with cursed items or even the old completely useless items like skeletons. If every item in the game was an artifact, and greater demons drop 10-20 items, nearly every artifact would be Junk. Actually then things would be even worse, because you'd have to determine the properties of thousands of artifacts while realizing that they are all going to be junk. I think it is purely a matter of Too Much Items. I do think some more mixed blessing items would be a very cool thing, but I'm not sure that removing cursed flavors in favor of mediocre but potentially useful items serves any purpose.

[Jude]

That would be Nethack, not Angband.

Zangband too, and if the potions are shattered on the floor or in inventory by a sound/disintegrate attack, they explode for the same effect. I like this a lot.

As for mushrooms, they should either be made interesting like th guy was posting, or removed completely for being redundant.

Maybe they could grow slowly over time if left there?

[ekolis]

Growing mushrooms? Heh, reminds me of the herbs in ADOM that grew and died according to a certain well-known algorithm...

[takkaria]

Growing mushrooms? Heh, reminds me of the herbs in ADOM that grew and died according to a certain well-known algorithm...

I was going to implement that for breeders once.