I agree that the whole potion mechanic in roguelikes has always been flawed, so why not tweak it a little bit? Let the game keep track of what which terminal does but don't strictly differentiate between good and bad ones. Let them all have a positive effect of some kind but keep the negative effects for Mean and Very Mean terminals. That way, whether you use a terminal or not could become a tactical decision. You might end up in a situation were the minor positive effect of terminal outweighs it's negative effects.
And, if you want to be very mean, you can add terminals with randomized negative effects that change every time you use them. The game would still tell you which positive effect you get, but you never know exactly what price you would have to pay for it.
Agreed with this.
I play alot of roguelikes myself, but I'm actually not all that fond of the 4 "main" ones, Hack, Crawl, Angband, and.... the 4th that I can never seem to remember the name of. They all do the "you dont know what ANYTHING does" mechanic, and.... ehhhh. Always found it to be flawed as heck. A bit too much luck involved, one way or another, in a genre where one mistake ends your game entirely, and while luck is always a thing in a roguelike, I think it's best used in generating "situations", AKA arranging the level and current situations with nearby enemies and traps and the AI's decisions, rather than handing you an item and saying "test this. It may or may not end your game RIGHT NOW. Oh, and then there's still 40 other items to test on this run". The situational stuff has the extreme randomness, but the player can use their own wit and logic to try to escape from the situation that the RNG has placed them in using the tools that they currently have. The item testing though, in many cases, is like just flipping a coin.... which is just not a good gameplay mechanic, really. Sure, there are methods that can help with testing items in these games and lower your chances of instant death, but the chance is still there, and it's not a thing that you can use logic and other tools to successfully avoid. And often in those games the "methods" for testing items are extremely screwy.
In THIS game it'll be a little different, because of the unique mechanic of having more than just ONE character to work with, which changes things around quite a bit, but at the same time a flawed mechanic is still a flawed mechanic. Implementing dangerous and deadly potions is fine and all, but I think it's all in HOW you implement them.
One of my favorite methods of implementing this comes from a game called Baroque, which is one of my all-time favorite games, period. In that game, you didn't do this constant identification of every single item ever. Instead, when an item dropped for you to pick up, there was a random chance of it being an "unidentified" item (they were unidentified probably about 10 to 15% of the time). It would still tell you what TYPE of item it was.... weapon, armor, bone (that game's version of potions... no, I dont know why bones were used here) or whatever, but it wouldnt tell you which specific item within that group it was. And the thing about it was that it wasnt based on already-found things. If you'd already found the dangerous Explosion Bone a few times earlier in the game, that did not for a second mean that you would not at some point find the unidentified version of it. And in this game, many items could indeed be very dangerous to the player if used wrong.... BUT, the player had multiple possible uses for every item. You could "throw" any item in the game, so you had a very important extra choice on what you could do with unknown things, as you could test unidentified items or item stacks on enemies instead. But even doing THAT could be dangerous. Sure, if you test something on a monster and it's an Explosion thing, it'll do massive damage to the monster. But it could also be the one that grants invincibility for 30 seconds, at which point you could be in big trouble if you'd just given that to a powerful monster. But you could decide this based on the situation, all the normal, identification-not-needed items you had at the time, and what monsters were around. There was a little more to it than just this, but overall it was a bloody brilliant system, and the ability for items to ALWAYS be useable on the player OR the enemy was important. The player always had that all-important tactical choice, even when the item's effect was totally unknown. Which I think is important as heck in a game of this type, and it's a choice that often isnt there in the main 4 roguelikes, and even when it is, it's not done quite right.
