ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Two ideas:

1. Add tooltips to status effects in the sidebar and character sheet. You'll probably know what beneficial status effects do, since they're the result of your own talents or potions. But you might not know about malign ones (burning hex, curse of vulnerability, etc.). A tooltip could explain what the curse is doing to you.

2. Tooltips could provide feedback to the player about how effective their abilities are. For example, the tooltip for physical resistance could say "You have a xxx chance of resisting physical effects", where xxx is something like "good", "average", "poor". It would be calculated based on a generic fighter at the zone level (or perhaps just based on the zone level alone).

Done 1 (and that was not fun!)

About 2 it's not that easy, I'll think about it

Diablo 2 handles #2 by telling the player how likely they are to either dodge or hit the last enemy they've seen. This would be pretty useful as right now that's something of a guessing game.

The problem with adding it in just like that, is that you usually see far more than 1 npc at a time in rogue-likes, T4 especially. I don't see that as a feasible way of doing it.

However, #2 I think is a rather hard one to properly display. It's done well in things like angband and T2 where a display like that is designed around, but T4 is completely different. I don't have any ideas right now about how to go about it, but I may later.