ToME WikiRavenRed: Just a quick and annoying idea. Curses on items should do more to weapons and magic items than just preventing you from removing them. This could be implemented in a couple of ways.
Edit: Heh... forgot to make myself clear. These are acquired curses from the monster attack spell of the same name. i.e. "It points at you, incanting terribly." The curses I'm talking about are not there from creation, they are a result of enemy activity.
- Curses are like disenchantment attacks that have a chance of permanently decreasing the to Hit and to Damage values of weapons, the plusses to resistance of Resist Artifacts or Pvals (since there are now multiple Pvals for individual items, this is not necessarily as devestating as it seems at first).
Curses have a chance of destroying non-artifact items.
Your Ring of Speed turns grey and dull... This is, fairly obviously, a permenant effect. "Indestructible" items should be immune, making this quite a powerful ego-type.
A cursed item has its Pval / to Hit / to AC / Resistance flipped for the duration of the curse. This can be remedied by a remove curse spell, but will be extremely frustrating (if not potentially fatal) in the meantime. Get thee to a temple, quick-smart!
The corollary to all of these is that Artifacts should have a generous bonus to resisting this effect, and the more powerful ones should have the "Indestructible" flag. Ego-types should also have a less-generous resistance to this effect. To compensate for this, the damage for curse spells should be reduced some. The side-effects will be significantly nastier than the initial damage hit in any case...
2c worth and counting...
BobbyJim: Your idea on flipping is already in use. IE: a cursed ring of speed would slow you down.
BobbyJim: One more thing: this idea would be better off in the idea section for items.
Zonk: Quick idea which came into my mind...perhaps a REALLY nasty item could show up as giving bonuses(both in the inventory and in the 'C'character screen)while actually being cursed? Assming it was only identified and not *identified* of course.
LordEstraven: How about...
- Stat-reducing curses. Affected items will reduce a stat every once in a while. The reduction may be temporary for lightly cursed equipment, curable for nastier stuff, and permanent (i.e. need potion of stat gain to reverse) for nasty artifacts. Should probably be implemented as a list of stats to reduce, with a stat being randomly selected each time reduction occurs.
- Damaging curses. An annoying pacifist wizard, for instance, might leave a cursed sword lying around that burns your hand every time you try to stab something with it. Or a suit of cursed armor might really be "deathly cold", and hit you with mild cold damage.
- Curses that affect fates, increasing the frequency of being fated to meet massively OOD monsters, or boosting your chance of getting a death fate (regardless of luck). I'm definitely thinking of Gurthang here.
- Backstabbing items, as in Hengband. Each time you attack something, there's a chance you also attack yourself. Sentient, bloodthirsty daggers come to mind.
- Curses that make gaining levels slower, increasing the experience required to gain levels significantly.
- Curses that prevents healing. The light version would just make you unable to regerate HP over time, and the heavy one would prevent any healing. Nastier grades would prevent drained stats from being restored, and maybe even keep injuries from being healed.
JohnGilmore:Wow. Those are NASTY! I like them alot. These later ones sound more like a "found items and special artifacts" thing that a "dang monster hit me with a curse" type things. Though some of them would work for, say, sauron.
Hey! Even better! Require a beastmaster-type or lost-temple-type random quest to remove the curse! Yeah, now we're talking a truely fearsome curse, and totally worth it for your +13 ring of speed, don't you think?
LordEstraven: Eh, I don't really like the idea of forcing the player to take a quest to cure it. (Obvious subtext: heavily cursed items are not going to give up their evil attitude so easily.)
BTW, RavenRed, sorry about going OT. 
PatashuPatashu: A curse that reduces your light radius to 1, or even 0!
LordEstraven: Falls under curses that affect pval, I think.