Perhaps not to cursed corpses and pieces of raw meat, but yes to rotten food, and more than a 1/100 chance.

Isn't rotten the same as cursed?

Sounds really frustrating for new players, and would teach bad lessons. Right now it's a clear lesson that kobolds are unsafe to eat, spiders poison, etc. By giving a chance of a bad effect you're risking teaching the wrong things.

Plus in general it would be annoying, I think :P

I agree with Grey... as a hardened veteran I'd like that feature, but I think it would make the learning curve for new players more frustrating and we don't need that.

Oh right... yeah, I didn't think of that. Rotten food makes more sense. Plus, rotten food gets labeled as such (whereas cursed food does not automatically) so the player would be forewarned that the food is potentially unsafe.

Cursed food is rotten food. When food rots, its BUC status gets changed (first to uncursed if it was blessed, then to cursed). When you identify the BUC status of a food item, the "rotten" indicator disappears.

This makes a lot of sense and I think it would be a good addition--particularly if the chance isn't too high. a 1% chance is probably too low, but a 5% chance wouldn't penalize people much, and would add an interesting mechanic. Also, as Laukku notes, rotten is simply non-ID'd cursed food.

I also don't think it is /that/ punishing at all. Even if it was 100% of corpses...well, what do you expect from rotten or cursed corpses?! Nothing good, I hope! (granted, one cannot know this most of the time)

How will you know it's cursed without detect item status? This is a cruelly punishing effect in the early game, in my opinion. It would make everyone scared to eat corpses at all.

Well, you won't [in the case of a corpse that is dropped as cursed; if it has rotted to cursed in inventory, you will know]. Again, I don't think it's that punishing. For one thing, you've got a guaranteed food store in the early game that most r/c's can typically afford at least one ration from, which should tide you over until you can find some more gold (plus, you start with food). Even if you eat a lot of corpses, cursed corpses aren't that common. (I would definitely peg it at less than 50%). Now, if you have a 5% chance for it to give you poisoning (which, let me add, is something that is pretty easy to recover from most of the time. if you're eating a corpse, you're usually in a least temporary, relative safety), you're at, at most, a 2.5% chance of getting poisoning. That's really not high and won't dissuade anyone from eating corpses, but it does add a bit of risk to eating corpses. Plus, poison resistance isn't that hard to come by.

Mmm, true. Well then, you'd generally get warned if a food was potentially dangerous whether its B/U/C status was known or not. I agree, 1% is probably too low. Perhaps 1% for (slightly rotten) and 5% for fully (rotten) would do the trick.

Nor do I think it's terribly punishing. The chances are low, you're generally forewarned which foods might be slightly risky to begin with, and (let's face it) poisoning in ADOM is usually not terribly dangerous. Even if you don't have the resistance, it's almost always survivable, and the resistance is easy to get (spiders are common). My characters always eat every spider they can and are generally virtually immune to poison before within the first few experience levels.

Who is this "everyone" you speak of? Personally, the feature wouldn't hinder me in the slightest. Poisoning is seldom more than a nuisance whether you have resistance or not, and if you eat a few spiders along the way you needn't worry about food poisoning at all. Plus the odds are low, and you're forewarned if you have detect item status, drop it on an altar, or observe that it's rotten. "Cruelly punishing" is a bit of an overstatement. It's more flavorful than truly hazardous.

There are a couple of reasons I never got into Nethack, but the way food works in that game is one of the biggest. I think, having played Nethack, Thomas made a very conscious decision early in ADOM development to make food generally safer to eat in his own game, and especially not to include a random food poisoning mechanic. This change, I think, would have the potential of severely shifting the way the early game and food is handled in ADOM, for a benefit I can't discern for the life of me. In what ways is this supposed to be interesting? If you've got Detect Item Status, you're good to go, and if you don't, you just can't eat corpses anymore, making you even more dependant on bought food and even less capable of saving yourself from starvation by killing monsters to eat.

I think there are many ADOM players who've played Nethack, and continue to play ADOM over it, and I think food is one of the chief reasons why. ADOM 1.2.0 is not the time to potentially ruin it.

EDIT: If it's not going to affect play, why introduce the feature at all?

Well, it's possible that the reason cursed (rotting) food gives less satiation is that the character is choosing not to eat the rotten parts, making it so he ends up eating less. Here's how it could work out: make it a low chance, and if the chance is hit, do a further roll depending on Pe. If food poisoning happens, make the sickness last less than other kinds of sickness. Make certain races (troll, ratling, orc) resistant to food poisoning, making it very unlikely or impossible for them to be affected by it. Perhaps make To/luck/fate affect the rolls too.

On the other hand, maybe it is indeed too punishing. In that case, there are two possible solutions (if it is to be implemented). One of them is to make food poisoning only affect cursed raw meat (perhaps also fish meat) and not corpses. The other is to make food poisoning simply cause vomiting and not sickness. I'm partial to this last option.

Edit: Silfir's argument is very compelling, which makes me even more partial to the last option if it is implemented (make it only cause vomiting). And of course making it a small chance and further affected by Pe/To/race and perhaps luck.

I think the parallel to Nethack is a bit overblown. From what I know, food poisoning in Nethack is very easily a death sentence--poisoning in ADoM is no such thing. As Black Mantis notes, this wouldn't have that much affect on gameplay, and is really more a flavor suggestion than anything (which, I think, is a perfectly fine reason to introduce a feature).

These objections have already been covered in detail.

1) There are multiple ways you would be able to identify potentially hazardous foods. Detect Item Status is only one of them. Dropping items on altars is another. The (slightly rotten) and (rotten) tags are a third.

2) The chance of getting poisoned would be low. This means that even cursed and rotten food would be generally safe.

3) Getting poisoned isn't that big of a deal in ADOM anyway. It's usually survivable by even low level characters, the First Aid skill renders it little more than a nuisance, and the (very easily obtainable) poison resistance intrinsic renders it virtually irrelevant.

EDIT: The risk would also be eliminated by cooking the food, so there's another avenue to perfect safety.

I don't see how the change would in any way severely shift the way food is handled in the early game, and claiming that it would make it so "you just can't eat corpses anymore" is absurd. If you're that worried about how it's going to impact play, it could be made so that getting and surviving food poisoning also grants poison resistance... through I personally think that's overkill, as it's seeking to address a problem that really isn't a problem to begin with.

Because it's attention to those little details that makes ADOM good in the first place. Why introduce scrolls of cure blindness?

Slightly rotten is uncursed food, don't you know?

More specifically, it's uncursed food that was previously blessed. Yes, I know. So maybe the 1% chance would only apply to uncooked corpses that had started to deteriorate in such a fashion but not to the ones that started out uncursed. Maybe it would apply to all uncursed uncooked corpses in general. Or maybe the food poisoning risk would only apply to fully rotten/cursed food. Really, I'm not fussy -- it wouldn't be game-breaking no matter which way it was done.

Wow, I didn't know that after years and years of playing ADOM. Which means that either I'm dumb, or the food rotting system is not really very intuitive to understand.

Since I don't like believing that I'm dumb, I prefer believing that the food rotting system is not really very intuitive to understand. One more reason for not implementing a high-impact mechanic like this on top of it.

It's pretty intuitive actually [sometimes when it goes from blessed -> cursed (slightly rotten) does not appear beside it, though], but more importantly, this isn't a high-impact mechanic, as stated numerous times! It really is just...flavor.

Food goes, over time, blessed -> uncursed -> cursed -> vanishes. If you have sufficient Food Preservation and don't know the BUC status, you'll receive a message about it entering the next stage of rotting and it gets tagged either (slightly rotten) if it's now uncursed, or (rotten) if it became cursed.

Yup, I didn't know it either... It always bothered me the thought of my PCs eating rotten food. I suggested to penalize eating rotten food considering that you knew 100% of the time that a certain corpse was rotten. If you can't tell if the food is rotten or not before eating it, I agree the mechanic is not interesting.

However, if the rotten status were to be always displayed (admittedly every normal person can tell if food is rotten or not) then you won't eat a rotten corpse unless (a) you are desperate or (b) you want a positive effect of that corpse. This is the mechanic I had in mind and I think it is interesting.