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?
What's the point of Amulets of Adornment?
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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.Playing roguelikes on and off since 1984.
rogue, hack, moria, nethack, angband & zangband.Comment
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Hahaha. What about shiny rings that do nothing?Beginner's Guide to Angband 4.2.3 Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9c9e2wMngM
Detailed account of my Ironman win here.
"My guess is that Grip and Fang have many more kills than Gothmog and Lungorthin." --FizzixComment
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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.
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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.Playing roguelikes on and off since 1984.
rogue, hack, moria, nethack, angband & zangband.Comment
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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.Comment
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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.Comment
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