Thursday 12 March 2009

Gameplay Idea#5: Curses

Kharne currently has cursed items, which as well as being 'sticky' in the traditional sense also have negative modifiers on them, e.g.:


Nick McConnell has posted an interesting expansion of this idea on rec.games.roguelike.angband that expands the idea of "cursed" items to also bestow a wide range of negative effects upon the unfortunate player. This is appealing to me and I think I might implement something like this in Kharne eventually.

Of course, there would have to be another source of positive effects to balance these out.

2 comments:

Jotaf said...

You know, cursed items wouldn't be so bad if there was a chance of turning them around. A player would certainly not mind a -2 invasion curse for a while if it meant it could turn it into a +2 invasion bonus later on!

Dave said...

That's an excellent idea. How about "Scrolls of Blessing" that *reverse* the cursed effects? So that, to take the example above, the ring now grants a bonus instead.

That's incredibly easy to implement, incidentally. Its just a matter of flipping a single flag on the object ("TItem.Cursed").

I don't have the code in front of me, but I think that, as a rule, there is a 10% chance for an generated magical item to be cursed. What sort of frequency should "Scrolls of Blessing" occur at?