Unequip cursed gear ... eventually

[simesy]

I regularly get to the point where I just need to equip something, or I really want to save enchants and defer committing to something. It's not that uncommon to have a game with no DMs early and strategically you are holding a bunch of indeterminate scrolls of which at least 3 types would be very regrettable to waste.

Equipping something cursed is really depressing. I think cursed gear should become uncursed after a period of time. Make it 1500 turns, or how about if you kill 20 monsters? Maybe even proc'ing 20 times in some cases (getting harder to implement, so just spit-balling).

This would see players experiment with gear earlier, when they can be confident they'll have enough time to test it and remove it, and of course wearing the gear means you are prevented from testing other gear so it would not be an easy decision.

There might be other ways to achieve this effect, my only real concern is getting cornered into equipping cursed gear that basically ends an otherwise interesting game.

It would also add a really interesting story mechanic (about that time I survived a cursed flail of plenty).

I'm taking a punt that this is not a hard thing to implement since there are already similar mechanisms for this behaviour. I can't code C+ much but I worked out how to compile so i'm happy to test.

[tmewett]

This could be worth trying - but I don't want waiting for 1000+ turns to be optimal or be the intuitive thing for a beginner to do.

[nstoddard]

What about adding a "cursed" status effect (with long duration) that gets applied when you unequip a cursed item? I'm not sure what the actual effect(s) should be, though. Maybe unequipping a cursed weapon would temporarily reduce damage or accuracy, unequipping cursed armor would decrease your armor rating, and unequipping a cursed ring would reduce the effects of any other rings for a while? That might be hard to implement, though, with 3 separate versions of the status effect. Maybe the status effect would always do all 3 of them, e.g. by temporarily subtracting 1 or 2 from the enchantment level of all equipped items?

[MattWeiner]

One less disruptive change here would be to guarantee a somewhat early Detect Magic. Rapid Brogue guarantees a detect magic by level 2 (which would be the equivalent of level 8 or something in CE).

[brturn]

Created a PR for this (#530).

Equipping cursed items adds time to the "Cursed" debuf. Cursed items cannot be removed until the curse ends.