RPG Design: Cursed Items
Back in the 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons days, the magic items list in the Dungeon Master's Guide included a ton of really horrible, nasty items that resembled their powerful, beneficial counterparts to every normal test, until they were actually used in earnest. In fact, the description even included the "head fake" description - a sword would perform perfectly until used in a life-or-death battle, at which point its sinister curse was discovered, which usually meant an opposite effect from the one intended.

A magical sword might give penalties in battle. A spear would actually loop around when thrust to stab its own wielder in the back. A Bag of Holding would actually devour and destroy its contents. To make sure player characters didn't just throw said cursed item away the moment its true colors were shown, the game rules stipulated that no amount of effort could remove or get rid of the item short of a spell. Which was pretty much the only reason for the cleric's "remove curse" spell back then. Once you had it, you were stuck with it until you got medical (well, clerical) help. Oops.

Most of these cursed items were designed, I believe, as a penalty for greedy players who had memorized the magic item lists of the earlier version of the game. This added to some element of risk to the equation - which makes the game more fun when the risk pays off. But, like the risk of death, it's only fun if the risk is avoided. Or when the annoying player in the group who calls dibs on almost every magic item suddenly falls prey to Boots of Dancing or a -2 cursed longsword.

But for the most part, cursed items sucked. Early attempts to recreate D&D for the computer sometimes included cursed items, but the fact that most games ignore this aspect of old-school role playing games is probably telling. But the concept isn't completely without merit. There are two ways that I can think of that make cursed items an interesting and even enjoyable part of the RPG experience.

Taking the Good With the Bad
If you are trying to make 'cursed' items that don't just suck, one approach is to combine the curse with something desirable.

While not technically cursed, the ring of vampiric regeneration (if I recall correctly) was a very powerful item in older editions of Dungeons & Dragons that allowed the wearer to heal damage by wounding others. For every two points of damage the wearer inflicted, they recovered a point of their own health. The practical result was that most players (and their characters) became far more bloodthirsty once they acquired this ring. Other players were already ridiculously bloodthirsty to begin with, so this had no impact on their behavior.

In Wizardry 8, several useful (and in some cases, freakin' powerful) magical items were cursed. The powerful sword Bloodlust comes to mind - available early in the game, it is very powerful and useful through most of the game. But - Just like D&D, you needed a spell to remove the item, and a character equipped with the weapon could not switch weapons - and the sword was useless against opponents at range. But for many players, that was worth it. I didn't use it for long - but it is one of the items in the game that I remember the best.

In EverQuest, several of the more powerful melee weapons for their level range were saddled with a small damage effect that would wound every other creature within a small radius. This sounds like a great bonus, until you recall that one of the principle combat strategies in EverQuest was to perform crowd control by temporarily stunning or mesmerizing ("mez") opponents. Any damage effect, no matter how weak, would wake them up and allow them to rejoin the combat, usually killing the enchanters that mezzed them in the first place. Another risk was that the damage effect might hit a creature outside the current room (the radius ignored walls and floors), and it would come and join the combat, usually bringing along a few friends.

This is a far more interesting to cursed items. It also has the virtue of being very appropriate for a computer RPG. It becomes no longer a simple mechanical issue of getting a curse removed, but a conscious decision of weighing the curse against the benefits. This is the kind of decision-making that is at the heart of good gameplay.

Story Items
The Girdle of Masculinity to Femininity was every juvenile male D&D player's worst nightmare. Rather than granting the strength of a giant that most items of its kind provided, this one would instead change the gender of the wearer. Once. As a thirteen-year-old boy playing the super-macho, super-cool idealized version of himself, this was a fate worse than death. For adult players, more in touch and confident of their sexual identities, it becomes more of an amusing plot twist, and might even potentially serve a useful purpose. Maybe.

In fantasy and supernatural stories, a curses are great, if often hackneyed, plot devices. I just watched Drag Me To Hell over the weekend - a pretty excellent Sam Raimi horror / comedy that can probably best be described as The Evil Dead's kid sister. The storyline revolves around - you guessed it - a curse. Or specifically, trying to break a gypsy curse centered on a stolen button.

I haven't seen this kind of storyline so much in computer RPGs. The Elder Scrolls games have had vampire / werewolf sub-quests related to being cursed with becoming one of these creatures. But that is not centered on an item.

The key here, for a game, is to encourage the player to willingly accept a curse that comes along with an item. If the acquisition of the item is central to the storyline and continued progression, the player may not have much of a choice. If it is an optional aspect to the game, the player will need to be convinced that it is (a) a worthwhile option that will be fun to explore, and (b) that the curse is recoverable should it cease to be "fun" at some point down the line.

Using the ol' gender-change belt as an example, if the characters in the game really did make a fuss about your character switching teams, rather than simply switching visuals and forgetting about it, it could be a lot of fun. The reaction from parents, friends, and one's romantic partner could be a lot of fun to play through. A significant NPC exclaiming early on that "We've got to find a way to break this curse!" would signal to the player a promise of a resolution to the state. Better still if the item is either a cool solution to a quest, or yields really potent abilities (mixing the bad with the good, as above) to help make it worthwhile and provide some dramatic motivation.

Unfortunately, the reason we probably haven't seen much of this in games is that it obviously involves a good deal of additional scripting and design to accomodate a story-based curse. But it is a cool possibility that I'd like to see explored more often in the future.

Keeping Items Interesting
Items in RPGs - especially CRPGs - tend to be treated as little more than a collection of statistic bonuses for a character - sometimes with a cool visual. Mechanically, that really is all they are. But in a fantasy-based RPG, throwing a few curses around is one way to help give items and equipment some interesting character that goes beyond their stats.

It just has to be done right.

(Vaguely) related stupidity:
* RPG Design: Magic Entitlement
* RPG Design: Items and Economy
* Trash or Treasure?

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:17 AM (Permalink)