Ring of Weakness

[aldarron]

"The ring immediately begins to drain energy from the wearer, making him weaker at a rate of 10%/turn until a maximum of 50% is attained.
This weakness is reflected in both attack and defense capabilities" - Monsters and Treasure.

Did we discuss this already somewhere? Anyway, possibly this is something that Arneson came up with as it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in relation to the published rules. It sounds like a strenght reduction kind of thing, but today, in thinking about some posts on DF regarding energy/level drain attacks, it occured to me that this entry might be taken to refer to experience points!

I don't know if "energy levels" is what was meant of not but losing up to half your experience points would certainly impact your attack and defense capabilities. Thoughts?

[waysoftheearth]

In the early game the number of experience points necessary to advance to each new level is approximately double what was required to achieve the previous level. Therefore, losing 50% of one's experience points is more-or-less equivalent to losing 1 experience level.

If I wanted to use such a cursed item I would probably simplify it to exactly that, and call it something a bit fancier than a mere "ring of weakness".

On the other-hand, if I actually wanted a strength draining curse, it could be along the lines of the item described, applying -1 strength per day until strength is reduced to 3, or simply strength 3 immediately.

[Finarvyn]

We always interpreted it to be Strength. If a character had 18 strength, the ring would reduce it to 9.

I can see where one could interpret it as "life levels" so that a 6th level character would have to function as 3rd level, but I agree that using XP is a problem since the numbers roughly double each time and a 50% drop in XP is only a slight level drop.

[aldarron]

hmm - good points; so prolly not so useful as an experience point drain.