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I've finally had some time to play the newest nightly versions. I'll make a larger post about general gameplay and such, but I figured I had some stuff to say about curses (and traps) so I'll say them in their appropriate threads.
I feel that there's a lot of skeleton work for something interesting to be done with curses, but it's not there yet.
I see two real purposes for curses. 1) A way to limit powerful items. 2) A way to force the player to use a suboptimal item in order to obtain a greater reward. They don't quite do either of those right now, here's why.
For power limitations, curses don't really succeed because they're randomly attached to items. So you almost never get a cursed item that is going to be better than what you already have. It could happen but it's exceedingly rare. An improvement would be to preferentially curse powerful items, or OoD items. If you find boots of speed on dlevel 35 (which my character did) those boots should probably have a curse on them.
For 2, we currently have one hoop, using a remove curse scroll and hoping that the RNG lets the item survive. This isn't so great. A far better way to remove curses would be to have the curses gain xp along with the player. At some level the curse is removed. Because XP is on such an insanely non-linear scale, this will be a bit difficult to get right, but I think that's where we should be headed.
So in my conception the basic idea is, you find some great item on dlevel 20, but it has a drawback. If you managed to use it for a little while, then the drawback goes away. I find this a lot more appealing than the remove curse approach. Remove curse probably should just be used to allow a player to unequip a sticky cursed item. Right now the drawbacks tend to completely ruin an item from usability.
We also need to really cut back on curses that make items completely unusable. AGGRAVATE is an example of a curse that is a bad idea, since so much of angband play involves choosing where to go and what to avoid, having an aggravation penalty really is impossible to use except for OP scumming characters and late game powerhouses.
There are two options, the first is a stealth reduction (although in my experience this doesn't work all that great, but as a first cut replacing them with -5 and -10 stealth penalties is ok.) The second is occasional aggravation. Once every 500 or so turns, the item makes a loud bang, waking up monsters. Exactly how often to do this is a good question, but that would be far better than current aggravation. You actually already have this curse (siren) but it would be far better to replace all aggravation with it.
Finally one side note. Steelskin says that conducting electricity gives you a negative electricity modifier. This is poor physics. Better conduction should make you more resistent to electricity, this is especially true if it's the skin that's conducting. It prevents any electricity from passing through the body, and funnels it all around the outside to the ground. (This is why lightning rods work).
I feel that there's a lot of skeleton work for something interesting to be done with curses, but it's not there yet.
I see two real purposes for curses. 1) A way to limit powerful items. 2) A way to force the player to use a suboptimal item in order to obtain a greater reward. They don't quite do either of those right now, here's why.
For power limitations, curses don't really succeed because they're randomly attached to items. So you almost never get a cursed item that is going to be better than what you already have. It could happen but it's exceedingly rare. An improvement would be to preferentially curse powerful items, or OoD items. If you find boots of speed on dlevel 35 (which my character did) those boots should probably have a curse on them.
For 2, we currently have one hoop, using a remove curse scroll and hoping that the RNG lets the item survive. This isn't so great. A far better way to remove curses would be to have the curses gain xp along with the player. At some level the curse is removed. Because XP is on such an insanely non-linear scale, this will be a bit difficult to get right, but I think that's where we should be headed.
So in my conception the basic idea is, you find some great item on dlevel 20, but it has a drawback. If you managed to use it for a little while, then the drawback goes away. I find this a lot more appealing than the remove curse approach. Remove curse probably should just be used to allow a player to unequip a sticky cursed item. Right now the drawbacks tend to completely ruin an item from usability.
We also need to really cut back on curses that make items completely unusable. AGGRAVATE is an example of a curse that is a bad idea, since so much of angband play involves choosing where to go and what to avoid, having an aggravation penalty really is impossible to use except for OP scumming characters and late game powerhouses.
There are two options, the first is a stealth reduction (although in my experience this doesn't work all that great, but as a first cut replacing them with -5 and -10 stealth penalties is ok.) The second is occasional aggravation. Once every 500 or so turns, the item makes a loud bang, waking up monsters. Exactly how often to do this is a good question, but that would be far better than current aggravation. You actually already have this curse (siren) but it would be far better to replace all aggravation with it.
Finally one side note. Steelskin says that conducting electricity gives you a negative electricity modifier. This is poor physics. Better conduction should make you more resistent to electricity, this is especially true if it's the skin that's conducting. It prevents any electricity from passing through the body, and funnels it all around the outside to the ground. (This is why lightning rods work).
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