ToME WikiFubarReturns: The basic notion here is that the quality of workmanship in an item, especially a weapon, is important -- and should be rapidly obvious to anyone who knows even a little bit about items.
Currently, pseudo-ID detects the general strength of an item, and works based on your skill with the general category of items (weapons and armor, or magic items). But the fact that a sword is magical shouldn't be obvious to a warrior just because she knows about swords! Rather, what should be obvious is that a sword is particularly well-crafted or ill-made.
Quality scores
Every item has a quality score, which ranges from -5 to +5. This indicates how well-made the item is: not its enchantment, but rather the skill with which it is crafted, the quality of the materials, and its general ability to perform its function: the balance of a sword, the fit of a piece of armor, and whether they will stand up to the abuses of combat.
Basically, a low-quality item is shoddily assembled, made of inferior materials, or just plain beat-up. A high-quality item is made by a master craftsman, of excellent materials, and well-maintained. Items can become worse in quality as you use them, especially if you have low skill; moreover, effects that harm items do so by degrading their quality score.
Detecting quality
Anyone with even the slightest amount of relevant skill (1 point) can identify an item that is truly falling apart (quality -4 or worse). Such items will be pseudo-identified as "{bad}", and a description of the damage will be visible on the "I"dentify screen: "This sword has been badly abused; the blade is dull and the hilt about to fall off." "This wooden shield has a knot-hole right through it and a deep gouge across the surface."
With greater skill (5 points in Combat or Magic-Device) you can discern whether an item is generally well- or ill-constructed: items +2 or better and -2 or worse will be detected as "{good}" or "{poor}", while items in between will be detected as "{average}".
It requires much greater skill (15 points) to identify the best-crafted items: with this level, items +4 or greater will be detected as "{well-made}".
Finally, at 30 points of skill you can outright detect quality scores when picking up an item.
Effects of quality
The biggest effect of quality is that it serves as "hit points" for items: if an item is damaged, it loses quality, and if it goes below -5, it is broken: it gets the ego type "Broken" and heavy minuses to all use. Broken armor cannot be worn (it falls off, or is too dented to fit) and broken weapons do very little damage. Broken magical devices tend not to exist, as the act of breaking them usually causes a mana explosion.
(Normally, artifacts can only be reduced in quality by morgul damage.)
The quality of weapons affects both to-hit and damage. A poor-quality sword is both unbalanced and dull. A high-quality one, on the other hand, is well-balanced and very sharp. Moreover, low-quality (below 0) weapons are quite likely to become worse if they are used; they have a 1% chance of losing a quality point each time they're used. High-quality weapons may also lose quality, but only when expressly damaged or abused.
The quality of armor affects armor class, but it affects balance much more. Wearing any item of -2 or worse armor reduces your effective Dexterity by 1. Wearing body armor that is low-quality reduces your speed by 1. Armor of high quality has reduced weight effects and offers better protection.
Low-quality arrows have an increased chance to break when fired: the chance is doubled for every quality point below 0. High-quality arrows have a similarly decreased chance; the chance is halved for every point above 0.
The quality of charged magic items affects the reliability of their function: a damaged or badly-made wand or staff is more likely to have critical failures causing minor (or not-so-minor) magical backfires.
Repair
It is possible to improve the quality of an item by taking it to a craftsman of the appropriate type. This may be quite expensive, though: repairing an item of quality below -3 back up to 0 will cost as much as a new item. In some cases, repairing an item will require additional materials; you can't repair mithril armor if you have no mithril to hand.
Only unusually powerful craftsmen, under special circumstances, can repair a broken artifact (think Narsil here).
Total destruction
Even a well-built item can be totally destroyed, beyond repair, by certain acts.
Chatter
Derakon: While this is fine from a realism perspective, I'm not certain that the design as described above passes from a gameplay perspective. Here's my big complaints:
- Having to return to town all the time to repair your gear is a pain. This isn't Diablo; dungeon dives tend to be long more often than not.
- This could royally screw over ironman games, where players have enough problems recognizing and keeping good gear as it is.
- You imply that warriors should not necessarily be able to recognize magical items; just the quality of items. Identifying loot is a major pain already, even for classes that get ID spells; there's absolutely no reason to make it worse.
This effectively means that (assuming an even or gaussian distribution) at least half of all gear is substandard. Since craftmanship doesn't affect or correlate with magical quality, this means that any gear you're considering using must first be repaired to whatever quality level you're willing to accept. This imposes a gold tax on any new gear. Granted gold is plentiful in the late game, but this could be a major drain in the early- and mid-game.
- I don't like the implication of requiring special materials; we have too much junk already. Just jack up the price so the craftsman can import what he needs.