Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!

I would like to see fighters use weapons at levels lower than the mages. Since they're fighters and all they'd be better with weapons sooner right?

Hmm, that's a good point. I think more likely is that I'll add weapons that are more useful for Mages, such that they generally won't want to use Fighter weapons, and then the issue becomes moot.

Originally I designed the equipment system to be very simple, as such the level requirement is the only way to keep a character from equipping something. A better way to do things would probably involve having more character stats, a Strength attribute for example. Strength could increase more slowly for Mages than for Fighters, and there could be some items that increase Strength for you, or other ways to increase Strength, but there's no Strength or anything in Game! (yet), so that's not an option (yet).

The other option is to have some items be class specific in general, so that only one class can equip/use them, but I'd have to build in support for that too.

Of course, the other advantage of adding more items (for Mages) is that then there's more items! Everyone loves more items.

You could incorporate random attribute increases on weapon/armor drops.

i.e. A long sword drops, (I'm a nubblet at c++ so I'll try to make the least confusing pseudo-code I can)(I only know c++ because I had a looooooong drive to go on, and it was the only book in the car. Thank god it was a beginners book) call a random function (1-100) to get a number, if that number is 1-80, do nothing and just give the original weapon, 80-95 = enchanted (different text color possibility?) & gives minor stat increases that scale with the level of item dropped (+2 str on a lvl 1 item = woot, +2 str on a lvl 30 item = wtf).

If it rolls 95-100, the item comes out Glowing (these are just random names I'm thinking up) that gives overly beneficial stats (where enchanted would give +2 str, Glowing would give +10 or +15). By my math, it's a 2% chance anything would drop glowing, and there could be another function for randomly generating which stats get X much bonus from the additional stats.

I'm really drunk right now, it took me like 15 minutes to proof read this for typos. I hope it makes as much sense to you as it does me.

Items with extra (semi-random) attributes is certainly possible, the main problem is that it'd require a pretty major change to the backend item system. There'd also have to be a number of changes to the interface as well, but those are fairly small in comparison.

So yes, I agree it'd be cool, but also a lot of work. Then again, that's usually how things work out...

enchanted stick ftw!