Re: Call for mixed blessing-style jewellery and consumables

Andrew Sidwell wrote:

> Anyway, I would like to remove entirely-bad stuff from the object list
> and instead have some mixed-blessing items that might plausibly be used.
>   This especially applies when it comes to rings and amulets.

A weapon whose bonus depends on how hungry you are.  The closer you are 
to starvation, the bigger the bonuses it gets.  Maybe it also gives you 
a (very small) amount of nutrition whenever you kill something with it. 

Make resist-cold and resist-fire mutually exclusive.  If you have more 
sources of resist-cold, you resist cold -- but not fire.  And vice versa. 
Possibly do likewise for other "opposed element" resistances.  This would 
probably require toning down some resistable attacks by say, 30%, for 
game balance reasons.

Detect Magic could cause blindness if someone else activates an artifact 
in your FOV.

You could have poisons that cancel each other out/act as antidotes for 
each other. 

Rings of aggravate monster could also have beneficial effects like 
strength. 

Rings of slow digestion could also make you vulnerable to confusion 
(at least, *I* get dizzy and lightheaded when I've been not eating 
enough...), reduce your strength or constitution while being worn, 
or reduce the rate at which you heal or recover mana. 

Potions of speed could have a small chance of reducing your constitution. 

Healing potions and speed potions should inflict hunger when used. 
This should be severe enough that you can't use 3 of them back-to-back
without stopping to eat. 

Boots of speed could have a "break-in" period where you occasionally 
misstep or fall down while you get used to them.  Maybe the first thousand

turns you wear them?  But don't count time on this clock unless there's 
an active, hostile monster with at least half the player's HP around, 
otherwise you'll get people just sitting there in a locked room for a 
thousand turns. 

Scrolls of enchant weapon could become a lot more fun but riskier, if 
they were a lot more trouble to use.  For example, if after reading 
them, you had to actually wield the weapon you were enchanting for 
at least a thousand hit dice of monsters vanquished (no switching 
weapons, no unwielding, no digging, no using wands/anything else 
in your hands, etc) before the enchantment took effect.  For bonus 
coolness, the enchantment could vary depending on what you actually 
did with the weapon during that time.  If you fought mostly orcs, 
you'd be likely to get a sword of orc slaying, for example - 
instead of having the same "plus-one" effect from every scroll that 
works. Natch, you'd need to make them rarer and increase the odds of 
them actually working. 

Scrolls of confuse monster (where your hands glow until you touch 
something, etc) could backfire and confuse *you* if too much time 
p***** before you touch something. 

You could have a negatively enchanted weapon (say -3) that is such 
because it makes all your mistakes in weapon-handling obvious. Use 
it for long enough in combat, and you get an intrinsic +1 or +2 with 
that type of weapon, because it also forces you to learn from your 
mistakes. 

A rod of light or frost bolts or something that drains mana every 
time it is invoked.  Useful to people who don't have the spell, but 
for wizards who do, not worth carrying. 

                                Bear