Re: Call for mixed blessing-style jewellery and consumables

Andrew Sidwell <takkaria@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in news:fv5flg$q6l$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Armor and weapons could be consumable.  They could degenerate with
>> use - how quickly would depend on how many/hard hits they take or
>> give, on the item's quality,
> 
> I think this is less of a mixed-blessing idea and more a fundamental 
> rework of how weapons or armour work.  To make it an interesting game 
> mechanic, you would need some significant percentage of combat gear be 
> subject to wear and tear, and I think that's out of scope for V.

  It also is a very dangerous thing to implement.

  I believe Kamband is the variant I played that tried this?  (It was
the same variant that made objects have a random material type, which
led to some funny short item descriptions.)  Weapons simply wore down
too fast.

  Indeed, from my experience in various games that try this idea,
either equipment wears down so fast as to be annoying to dangerous,
or it wears down so slow as to be ignorable.

  Angband has two further issues.

  The first is the variable amounts of creatures.  What may be a good
wear rate for fighting trolls may not be a good rate for fighting dog
packs.  What works well for separate small packs of orcs may be too
quick to deal with an orc unique's retinue.  Similar issues occur if
you go for other measures of damage, such as messing up a sword
faster on a stone/metal golem than on bats.  What you end up facing
in a single level can be so variable.

  The second issue is that people would fight against artifacts
wearing.  They may even fight against egos, or want reduced rates
on such objects.  Which ultimately just encourages people to use
only those objects, rather than encouraging people to more readily
switch to new weapons when their old ones begin to wear down.