Curses feature branch

[debo]

It feels like vanilla might have room for pretty extreme bonus/malus combos, because it is generally sort of predictable. If you gave me a weapon that did 2x damage but gave me 50% HP, I might actually use it Not so in poscheng, though. Same thing with a TY-curse-y kind of thing. Bonus points if it summons cyberdemons...

[bio_hazard]

I think it would be possible to have first sticky cursed items appear not at random, but in ways that would give some clue that they *might* be cursed. For example, say you're at DL 8 find an unlocked, untrapped chest with an equip-able item in it. Suspicious! Or steel helm right next to your entry stairs when you've only found leather caps up to that point.

[wobbly]

Sticky curses I mostly find uninteresting unless it's something like the one ring or it's got something like xp drain/aggravation & you want to stop the player from continuously swapping it in & out. For aggravation it'd have to be toned down enough for someone to use it rather then just stash it for the final fight.
Mixed "blessings" I find a fair bit more interesting.

That said I don't care that much, one of the players who would just wield it & put up with it till I can get it removed. Mostly waiting for something testable to be up & running before commenting further.

[fizzix]

Assuming curses are usually some sort of malus on an item, we should have monsters that bestow curses (which really just means renaming disenchant to curse). We could make these more severe but temporary and remove resist disenchant altogether.

Personally, I haven't found sticky curses to be interesting in any way. But there is one case where I think it could be useful and that's with a soft-sticky that comes with minor quests. The idea is hard to implement though.

The idea is that you have an item which is clearly sub-par, but if you fulfill some quest, it becomes really good. If you remove the item (after wielding it, but before fulfilling the quest) it disintegrates. This is what I meanby soft-sticky. Now the game is whether or not you can survive long enough to fulfill the quest with a slightly weaker character, or a dangerous vulnerability, and get a reward.

In my opinion, the only way curses become interesting is if they are temporary hurdles to overcome. And the only way to prevent players from doing really boring curse-testing techniques, is to make the hurdle voluntary.

The reason curses were ripped out is because they led to some really terrible gameplay. Stuff like, take off all your armor before reading a scroll kind of crappiness. Having junk weapons and armor isn't really interesting either, you learn the rune once and then you just ignore that forever. We should all remember that our goal isn't to make the player annoyed with playing.

Just for an example of a curse/quest option. Something like a shield of fire vulnerability found on dlevel 35 could have a quest to kill an Ancient White Dragon. A weapon that drops max hp by 50 (or 50% whichever is lower) could have a quest to gain 3 levels.

[Nick]

Released!

OK, there are now builds for Windows and OS X, and the source is here.

It's been very lightly playtested, and doesn't seem to crash. It is still unfinished, in particular

• Descriptions of curses are pretty shoddy and
• I do want to add traps that curse stuff,

but I thought it was better to get it out and get more eyes on it than mine.

Please test it thoroughly, ask questions where stuff isn't obvious, and say what works and what doesn't.

[wobbly]

Parse error in \lib\customize\sound.prf line 448 column 1: MST_BR_ELEC: undefined directive

I'm assuming I can just ignore that?

[Nick]

Parse error in \lib\customize\sound.prf line 448 column 1: MST_BR_ELEC: undefined directive

I'm assuming I can just ignore that?

If the game continues, sure.

Is it a clean new version, and what operating system?

[TJS]

I'm probably way too late on this, but I've recently thought that the whole idea of having curses on items is the wrong way to do it. Either they are sticky in which case they are incredibly annoying and break id by use or they aren't in which case they are pointless.

Curses should be on your character and not on equipment and be cast on you by monsters or through traps.

[wobbly]

Yep. Windows 7 Nividia. Had a crash to desktop on saving. Tried opening the save, crash to desktop.

[Nomad]

Also on Windows 7, I've twice had a sort of pseudo-crash on exiting the game: the program seems to close quite happily with no visible issues, but then a moment later Windows pops up the "angband.exe has stopped working" message box. I've had it happen once after a character death and once just doing a standard save and exit during an ongoing game, but can't reliably reproduce it with either the same or different save files.

[Nick]

Yep. Windows 7 Nividia. Had a crash to desktop on saving. Tried opening the save, crash to desktop.

OK, seems like I failed to test randarts at all

Looks like there's something horribly broken with them. There'll be a fix when I have a fix...

[PowerWyrm]

I'm probably way too late on this, but I've recently thought that the whole idea of having curses on items is the wrong way to do it. Either they are sticky in which case they are incredibly annoying and break id by use or they aren't in which case they are pointless.

Curses should be on your character and not on equipment and be cast on you by monsters or through traps.

Monsters already "curse" the character, but only for raw damage. There should be D&D-like curses, which are simply the reverse of the "bless" status... so your character suffers AC and to-hit penalties for a short duration.

[Nick]

Fix to randarts is up, Windows build and OS X build. Savefiles from the crashing version should now work fine.

[Nick]

I'm probably way too late on this, but I've recently thought that the whole idea of having curses on items is the wrong way to do it. Either they are sticky in which case they are incredibly annoying and break id by use or they aren't in which case they are pointless.

As implemented, they create interesting player choices in two main ways:

1. Is this item worth using, even if it's cursed?
2. If yes, and the first attempt at removing the curse fails, is it worth trying again at the risk of destroying the item?

There's also the discovery aspect of finding new curses. Note that there is still a single basic sticky curse (currently one of 25), which I think is rare enough and simple enough to deal with that it doesn't break ID by use.

Anyone have any comments on the branch so far?

[krazyhades]

f.r. Topi Ylinen's ancient foul curse of Morgoth