[Hajo]

In old RPGs I remember there have been items with (mostly) bad effects, that were "cursed". That is, once you equip them you cannot take them off anymore until the curse is broken.

It was obviously meant to be another "reward vs. danger" decision upon using unknown items. Spend gold/time to identify it, or use it as it is, hoping it will be good.

What do you think about the idea of cursed items?

[Terry]

As long as they're not unfair (i.e. you've got a reasonable chance to identify them and it's not ridiculously hard to remove them) I don't think they'll cause too many problems. I don't see them contributing a lot to the gameplay though.

One exception is if they're funny - Baldur's Gate had a cursed belt which changed your gender, for example!
_________________
http://www.distractionware.com

[Mattias Gustavsson]

I agree, it is important that they are not a source of frustration for the player, but have minor or insignificant effects.
_________________
www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[Hajo]

In those games it was easy to avoid them. Basically the rule was to be safe, identify items before using them.

But there was a temptation to use items before identifying, id scrolls were scarse and expensive (if buyable at all).

I feel uncertain if this feature is worth to be included. I mean if there is nothing on the pro side, better not bother about it at all?

[DeveloperX]

I wouldn't bother with them unless the gameplay was bound to their existence somehow.
_________________
Principal Software Architect
Rambling Indie Games, LLC

See my professional portfolio

[RampantCoyote]

The idea in the old-school "pen-and-paper" games was to curb player greed, and to add some risk to attempting to bypass costly identification magic.

I can't say it worked too well - one bad experience with a Cloak of Poisonousness in my campaign resulted in players REFUSING to experiment. Ever.

A better way to handle cursed items, IMO, is to put curses on items that are otherwise significantly superior to what the player would regularly receive at his level. That way the player must decide whether or not he wants to take the bad with the good.
_________________
Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[Rainer Deyke]

Cursed items are an idea from pen-and-paper rpgs that hasn't really translated well into computer games. In a pen-and-paper rpg, the challenge level of the game can be adjusted by the DM to adjust for the cursed item, so the item is really just an opportunity for an adventure to remove the item. In a computer game, cursed items are just random punishment, which is never a good idea.

Items that the player knows are cursed, but uses anyway (because the advantages of the item outweigh the disadvantages, or because the player has no choice) are a different matter, and could work in a computer game.

[RedSlash]

The permanently cursed until you find a solution is pretty annoying. I prefer that the curse is either easily removed, time limited, or part of the plot.

[RampantCoyote]

Yeah, the nasty, perma-curses kinda took your character out of the game until it was resolved. That's filed in the "Not Much Fun" category.
_________________
Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[Hajo]

Thanks for the advice :)

I think I'll put cursed item at the end of my list, if I include such at all.

[Nodtveidt]

I think the best example of a cursed item in an RPG to date has got to be the Cursed Shield from FF6. You could base your own cursed items on the effects it causes and the end result. The gender-bender belt is funny though. :)
_________________
If you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows. - wallace

[ManaTroph]

yeah i remember the cursed items from the wizardry games and they were annoying at best. I am designing a game similar to this style but i decided to leave out cursed items as it only contributes an undesired element to the game.

[Captain Vimes]

[RampantCoyote]

Actually, just from this last weekend (massive D&D), I managed to reverse the trend. After the bard accidentally "experimented" with a masterwork harp nobody had yet identified as magical (with huge success), suddenly EVERYONE was emboldened again to experiment with some of the magical stuff they'd discovered.

Funny how a small taste of success can make people forget their fears... and maybe now I can stick some cursed items in the loot pile again... but maybe not a cloak of poisonousness or a scarab of death...

Lesson Learned (and applied to CRPG design):

Decisions are fun and interesting only when risk & reward appear to be in relative balance. If the risk (insta-death) outweighs the potential reward (which is NOT the value of the item - it's only saving 100 gp and not having to wait until you have time to get the item identified), the choice becomes trivial - and effectively a non-choice. Ditto if the reward clearly outweighs the risk (there are no cursed items, so there's no sense in NOT using an unidentified item).

So you can either balance the risk / reward factors (at least the perception of them) to make it a choice, or get rid of the choice altogether.

When I was working on Hackenslash, I took the latter option. I realized there was no reason at all NOT to search a chest for traps every time you came across one, so I decided to just make it automatic. 'Course, that was a crappy little experimental project, so it could have been a terrible decision, and I wouldn't know.
_________________
Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[Hajo]

Slalom skiing between design decisions ;)

"Cursed" basically is just a flag in the item data which means not to execute the "take off/unwield" code, so it's not that much work to support it.

Can cursed items be stolen?

I mean, in some games thiefs or rather master thiefs are able to steal even equipped items from unwary characters. So if you have a cursed cloak and a thief tries to steal that, what happens?

Could be a curious idea to have "scrolls of curse item" and curse the things as anti-theft measurement :P

Angband had "scrolls of curse item" AFAIK, and it was another of the balance questions, to identify the scroll first or to try it out. Unidentified scrolls stacked there, so you knew you have 5 of the same sort, and you could try them out, knowing if you figure out the effect the other 4 will do the same. Some effects self-identied items, I assume "curse item" could be one of those, since it's obvious to the player what happened once tried.