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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DrunkonDuty" data-source="post: 5543461" data-attributes="member: 54364">Sorry for the delay in my reply, been a busy little Easter Bunny. SP: Thanks for the clarifications, I think I have a more solid idea of what you're talking about. We were definitely talking tangentially at points. A brief bio to help you understand where I'm coming from. I'm a low-magic sort of GM. Stingy on the items and a big fan of gritty and sword and sorcery style stuff. I insist on internal consistency in the games I play. I like action/fate/hero/drama points. I hate "Gotcha" situations.What I was doing in my above post was basically listing different ways in which cursed items have been/can be used. Listing. Not suggesting one is better than another; merely saying that there are options available. What I did not say but should have is that the options I listed will work for some gaming styles and not others. The whole YMMV thing. As to what others have said: I liked the cursed swords Thirdwizard and Lostsoul presented. Both of them tie the positives closely to the negatives. And there are reasons for why the item is as it is. These are great cursed items with lovely fluff. Whereas with what (it seems) you're suggesting is that there is a pool of fate points that bounce back and forth from player to GM as events are manipulated but without there being any in-game reason why the events (ie: the uses of the fate point) are connected. Extreme example to illustrate: Event 1: player uses a fate point and the Slayer sword kills the BBE Orc. Event 2: the GM uses the fate point and next week and a thousand miles away the Drow Cleric makes a saving throw against the wielder of Slayer's friend, the wizard.  This is totally Meta-game. And that's cool. It's one of the ways of running it. The suspense of "when is it going to come back and bite me on the arse?" does definitely add to the drama of the game. But it does in a different way from that of, say, Whitesteel, Bane of Khelzatis that Thirdwizard wrote up further up-thread. Whitesteel's disads are totally In-game. Meta-game vs. In-game. (More bio: I personally much prefer In-game connections, it's part of that internal consistency thing I need.) They have different feels from one another BUT both fulfil the requirerments of a cost-benefit trade-off made by the player. Please correct me if I'm wrong but is this the real meat of what you want? That the player gets to make a choice that has both positives and negatives? I'll define this cost-benefit trade-off as this having three questions that need answering:Does the item have benefits?Does the item have costs?Is the player free to choose whether nor not to use the benefits of the item and there-by incur the costs? (yeah I know it's pretty obvious. Sometimes it helps to state the obvious.) If the answer to all three is "Yes" then all good. One will get one's pound of drama from the situation. A "No" to any of them will kill the drama that the GM is trying to achieve with the cursed item. A couple of examples. A crap cursed magic item of the Gotcha variety:Player: I, er, put on the belt.GM: It's a Girdle of Sex Change! Now your a chick! Hah! A chick! Get it? You're a chick!  A good cursed magic item that lets the player choose and builds drama:Player: I have the Cursed Berserking Sword. We are beset by foes and I must use it or we shall be slaughtered. But if I do I run the risk of killing my own friends! What shall I do? (OK, not exactly "To be or not to be?" but it's what I've got right now.)GM and other Players: Nice. And yes, I did deliberately pick a magic item that's been around for years. Just to show that a cost-benefit option has been available if one wants to play it that way. True this can happen. But if the players decide the benefits of the magic ring are worth the costs of buying lots of anti-undead cream then that is a player choice. A player choice about the item. Is this not what you're after? I grant you it doesn't have a lot of drama about it. What drama it does have happens in the magic stuff supermarket between adventures. Kinda a yawn. But I don't have magic item super markets in my games so it works quite fine for me. Anyway that's enough from me on this. I really should do some work today. cheers.</blockquote>

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