I was thinking it might be cool if players could be vampires, wearvolves or get cursed causing other changes (pirates of the carribean). Throw a few npc vampires/wearwolves into the game. hopefully a pc gets bit and it goes from there. Obviously vampires cant go out in sunlight so you would need a big cloak or maybe a spell can protect you for sometime. Wearwolves are only wearvolves 3 nights out of the month. So maybe 1 day a week, 4 hour day cycle. You could also become a skeleton if you are resurected frequently. You would want to plan ahead if you are a wearwolf as you would be targeted by guards. People could specialize in hunting vampires/wearwolves. This would require many other game elements to be changed in order to work probably. Probably a mmorpg which doesnt focus on stat building. Do you think this could be interesting? do you think there should be cures?

It would have to really be tweeked but its certainly an interesting idea.

Though one of the unspoken rules of MMOG's is that its generally bad joo-joo to limit a players playing ability. If someone, who didnt want to be a vampire, was turned into one and they could only go out at night.../shrug

If it's just an affliction, then players will feel bummed out when it happens. Make it a character trait that might actually be desirable. For instance, in the Ogre Battle games, some unit types couldn't be trained; you had to have things happen to them. Every so often, a dead unit with high magical powers would spontaneously rise from the grave and continue to fight, but as a zombie. If they were targetted with a fire spell, their flesh would burn off and they'd become a skeleton. That's how you get skeletons. They aren't uber-units, but they have a definite role in the army, and can be very useful.

Other times, and character with just the right stats might return as an angel after dying. If you have a golem, you can have it get hit with a variety of spells to turn it into different types of golem. All useful, all desirable. Your golem is never "ruined" in this way.

So it should be with PC curses. Some players might actually cover themselves with barbecue sauce and wander the foggy moor under a full moon, hoping to contract lycanthropy. Encourage this. Vampires might not always transform their victims (it would be impractical to have a new mouth to fead every time you eat), so you could petition the vampire underground for transformation, maybe do some quests for them first. Then you get the special bite, and the super-powers, and the awesome accent.

Make sure that characters can still function in the world, and this sort of thing will be quite welcome, I think.

What your proposing would be cool, and it has been done before in the Elder Scrolls series, both Daggerfall and Morrowind. The thing that annoyed me the most is that i couldn't complete any of the main quests as either a vampire or a werewolf, they were treated like their own sub-quests. Anyway, to become a vampire/werewolf you needed to be hit by one obviously, it had i think a .6% chance of infection, and it took 3 days to take hold, during which time you could see a healer (in morrowind you could use a cure disease potion/spell as well).

Really, being a vampire in an MMO, even with disadvantages would certainly allure a number of people, heck it could be its own class. Morrowinds vampire traits were increased physical abilities all around, but they couldn't regenerate health without sucking down a few quarts of blood, they also (obviously) couldn't go into any Holy/Sun lit area's. Other negative effects may be that your stats are capped and can't improve (dispite the vampire bonus) and be dispised by good/specific NPC's for being a vampire/werewolf. The only way to change back from vampire/werewolf in Morrowind was to see one of the Daedra and to do them a favor (finding the shrine and/or summoner was the hard part), afterward you would be cured of vampirism/lycanthropy and could never become a Vampire/werewolf ever again.

thanks for your replies

the hardest part is making it so you dont want to get infected but still once you are infected you can have just as much fun as before.