What's the point of Amulets of Adornment?

[Pondlife]

What's the point of amulets of adornment? They seem to be total junk that are of no possible use to anyone. Do they have some use, or would they be better off being removed entirely?

[Sky]

They seem to be total junk .

It adornes you

[Pondlife]

I could understand it giving a charisma boost, but that stat doesn't exist any more.

I know there are a few items of dubious benefit, but this one seems to be out-and-out useless.

[spara]

Before runeID, they served a purpose since you did not right away find them useless. Now they are an echo from the past.

Maybe there should be a rune of adornment that could only be identified with a spell.

[Will]

It could be renamed "Amulet of Nostalgia and Times Past"

[AnonymousHero]

It could be renamed "Amulet of Nostalgia and Times Past"

... and promptly removed.

[Sky]

OP obviously has no fashion sense.

[Carnivean]

OP obviously has no fashion sense.

More items of Adornment should be in the game. Boots of Adornment, cloaks of Adornments and headwear of Adornment seem obvious.

What better way to show scorn to Morgoth than to wander into his lair as if to a party?

[Grotug]

Hahaha. What about shiny rings that do nothing?

[Pondlife]

I guess we could have a well-dressed challenge mode then: kill morgoth in style wearing only ornamental amulets, rings and armour :-)

[Pete Mack]

Well you could make a rune that does nothing and only shows up on Adornment and occasional junky randarts. Then it would serve it's original purpose of being hard to ID.

Before runeID, they served a purpose since you did not right away find them useless. Now they are an echo from the past.

Maybe there should be a rune of adornment that could only be identified with a spell.

[AnonymousHero]

Then it would serve it's original purpose of being hard to ID.

I'm just curious: Do any of the old-timers know if that was actually its intended purpose?

(Seems a bit silly to me, even before rune-ID.)

[Pondlife]

I remember there was a ring of adornment in rogue, so it may have been inherited from that.

Identify was more valuable in rogue than it is in angband, so it was more likely that you'd end up wasting a ring slot to the useless ring or at least wasted an inventory slot carrying it around until you could identify it. I think it may have increased food consumption, and that was a bigger issue in rogue as well.

[Mondkalb]

I'm just curious: Do any of the old-timers know if that was actually its intended purpose?

(Seems a bit silly to me, even before rune-ID.)

There were several nore useless rings and amulets in earlier versions, even cursed ones. Since the cursed are gone, it is about time to get rid of adornment too.

[luneya]

There were several nore useless rings and amulets in earlier versions, even cursed ones. Since the cursed are gone, it is about time to get rid of adornment too.

Except that curses are about to make a comeback.

With standard identification, having some useless rings and amulets made good sense even without curses. These things appear at early levels, when magical id is still scarce. Some of the other item that appear at such low levels don't auto-id on equip, so it's a challenge for the player to decide whether to use magical id or to start testing possibilities the hard way (by taking elemental attacks, walking into pits, wielding until the hunger timer updates, and so forth). In normal play, the usual choice was to id, but in ironman where both id and inventory space are extremely scarce resources, the strategic decision becomes harder.

Under rune-based id, use-id is somewhat easier than before, but magical id is rarer. It thus becomes even more interesting to have null-effect runes to complicate identification strategy. But this requires that amulets of adornment be inscribed with an initially-unknown null-effect rune as opposed to being trivially identifiable by the absence of runes. Furthermore, if we want to have a dummy ring in addition to the amulet, I'd recommend that it comes with a distinct null-effect rune rather than sharing the amulet's. It makes the gameplay more interesting, and thematically, there ought to be an infinite supply of null runes in a rune-based magical universe--every conceivable rune-like pattern that isn't an actual rune is a null.