Breaking Items

[Hi]

Magic items are more interesting to me when they break in interesting ways. 
I think it would be fun if glitches started showing up in a magic wand as they heated up from too much use.

Things like always firing a little to the left of where you aim,
automatically going off when you take a step to the north,
or you being unable to change the targeting reticule from where the previous wand aimed.

I think this would add to a game is by making you come up with creative ways of working around the limitations of your tools.

[Pueo]

Seems like a good idea.  Although I wouldn't want my perfectly fine Wand of Fire to start going off randomly.  Maybe "Cursed" wands do that instead of sticking to you?  Also, I would want some glitches to be good (or at least not "bad").  Maybe something along the lines of "If a creature comes within 10 steps of you, your Wand of Fire discharges at them."  That would give you an automatic defense system, but stop you from having allies.

[Alex E]

It would definitely be interesting to pick up a Broken Wand of Fire, use it in battle, only to catch yourself on fire. Or maybe a Broken Wand of Teleportation randomly beaming you around the dungeon at the most inconvenient time. But they don't have to be all bad. The "glitches" could help you, as said by Peuo. But if there weren't any benefits to them, the player probably wouldn't use Broken items unless they were desperate. Which could be a good thing.

[requerent]

Might be more interesting to rationalize it as 'intelligent' items. The more frequently you use an item in a particular way, the more restrictive it is to being used in that way (possibly at the upside of being slightly more powerful).


For example, if you consistently use a Wand of Fire to target enemies at a distance of 3 and rarely use it under other circumstances, the wand eventually closes its max/min range around the most frequent distance (and direction).


I'd recommend something like that to make it more strategic/tactical. Having random effects only limits player involvement in how the RNG effects them.

[Pueo]

For example, if you consistently use a Wand of Fire to target enemies at a distance of 3 and rarely use it under other circumstances, the wand eventually closes its max/min range around the most frequent distance (and direction).

That also sounds really good.  I've recently been looking into limiting how much of an effect the RNG has on tactics and strategy, and that sounds like it would fit pretty well.

[Snargleplax]

"My wand of polymorph was in a terrible huff on Wednesday and would only turn things into pink ostriches, no matter how I begged and pleaded."

[Pueo]

"My wand of polymorph was in a terrible huff on Wednesday and would only turn things into pink ostriches, no matter how I begged and pleaded."

Nice.
 

[Hi]

Seems like a good idea.  Although I wouldn't want my perfectly fine Wand of Fire to start going off randomly.  Maybe "Cursed" wands do that instead of sticking to you?  Also, I would want some glitches to be good (or at least not "bad").  Maybe something along the lines of "If a creature comes within 10 steps of you, your Wand of Fire discharges at them."  That would give you an automatic defense system, but stop you from having allies.

That could work very well.  I wasn't really thinking of dividing them into good and bad as much as each glitch is a glimpse into how wands work.  So you could have your wand of domination that often fires before you finish aiming it (saving you a turn), your wand of sun-strike that takes a couple tries to get started ever since it got wet, your wand of lightening that pulls to the right when it heats up.

So just like my laptop has trouble charging but i still use it because it's not worth it to buy a new one, the player would trade off extra "bother" for more in game power and the wouldn't blame me because it's a perfectly reasonable way for a wand to break down. 

[Ancient]

A discussion on related topic was held on rgrd eight years ago. Have a look.

[Psiweapon]

A discussion on related topic was held on rgrd eight years ago. Have a look.

Interesting.

You nasty, nasty necromancer!