ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The talent Item Appraisal gives the character the ability to extimate a rough value of a not identified object in his inventory.

The value could be expressed by a rough money value, a money value range, or just a brief tag / description:
- bad: cursed items (when they will be implemented)
- normal: plain standard object
- good: enhanced objects with 1 extra power
- exceptional: unique artifacts, and enhanced objects with 2 or more extra powers

The appraisal is not immediate, it requires some time (expressed as turns passed since the object is in your inventory) to take place. This time (and the precision of the guessed value, if expressed in monetary terms) depends on the current talent power.

The talent would be hidden, meaning you can not spend talent points on it: it has a constant value of 1, and is given at birth to all characters. Its power increases with the character stats.

To balance things, I would make its power depend on the sum of Magic and Cunning stats: this excludes strength based classes from taking advantage of the skill (they can carry a lot of stuff compared to the other classes), and makes it really useful only for mage and rogue like characters, that are supposed to be smarter and better able respectively to sense magic flowing through an item, or judge its real value. Plus, this would add one more point of depth and differentiation between fighters and mage / rogue classes.

Why in the world would an archmage-type ever use this skill in the first place? Identify is available at CL 4 (since not taking Sense is... suicidal). But a rogue talent tree (based on CUN) might look like

Affinity for Gold
Item Appraisal (passive)
Haggling (passive) -- Get better prices at stores (max of double sell price and 0.75 asking price)
Golden Fortune (passive) -- Monster drops have a %% higher probability of being large heaps of gold coins rather than normal ones.
Gold Lust (activated) -- You realize that not only are the enemies trying to kill you, they want to loot your gold! As you gain more gold, your attack power increases (while active) to a maximum of 40% more damage, except 60% for dwarves

Taxorgian wrote:Why in the world would an archmage-type ever use this skill in the first place? Identify is available at CL 4

Well, not all magic based classes have access to the id spell.

Anyways, I like the idea of such a "money-making" talent tree for rogues. After all, that's what they are supposed to do. It could include steal skills as well.

I like it. It's basically pseudo-id.

Also it costs the character nothing.

However scrolls of identify will id your whole inventory if you have a high magic so really this would benefit rogues the most.

pseudo-ID could be good. i might also suggest implementing ID by use, perhaps instead. it has been such a positive addition to many recent rogue-likes that it almost seems odd playing without it.

Yes but ToME is not ressource-bound like some other RLs, you can always afford an ID scroll, so why take the risk of using an unknown weapon/armour/.. that could be very well less good than yours and risk facing death at the hands of an angry troll ?

true enough
the shift from inventory management to tactics and skill development as the primary focus of te4 has rendered a lot of standard rogue-like practices obsolete...and the role of ID in general is greatly diminished in tome4...
but pseudo/id-by-use could still be useful additions - ID is expensive enough for the first 15 or so CLs that you can't ID most of what you come across. and it only stands to reason that you would know to mark a hat that gave you +3 to dexterity as the one that made you feel surprisingly more limber (and indeed, the player can easily, if tediously, try on equipment and make such notes themselves). so i'd meekly advocate pseudo and/or ID-by-use for cohesiveness, making the equipment process feel a little more 'natural' (while not making the gameplay significantly easier)...