Dungeon Master Forum

I was thinking that perhaps some thought should be put into immunites and resistances.

I don't know how far it goes in DM or RTC but poison and fire seem to have varriable effects on certain monsters.

IS there an all out immunity for specific spells rather than it's direct nature?

For example Poison.. you could have something that has a resisitance to it.. but what if it doesn't breath? cloud shouldn't affect it.. but poison ball could.

A mummy is one of those things.. and skeletons.. should poison have any effect on them since they are dead? Skeletons certainly don't need to breathe..

This I think adds to the complexity of the game in a nice way.. makes you build more strategy.. I don't think it went far enough in DM.

what does anyone else think about this?

Mummies are immune to poison clouds, as are skeletons - I don't know how, so I don't know if there was anything else coded into DM that made other subtle variations like this.

(It is why a mummy is used on the end of the worm level - try firing a poison cloud, which might let you rush on passed the worms befroe they appear...nothing!)

They weren't immune to poison bolts however...which is odd unless the bolts are like poison slimes - they inflict damage and then cause a poisoning effect, where as you need to breate in the cloud.

I agree, an ability to code immunities and weaknesses of monsters would be good.

Just to give you a starting point and let you know what currently happens in RTC - each monster has 4 defence values against different attack types (blunt, sharp, fire and magic); currently poison isn't included in that list, but as you say probably should be; anything else...?

George

And what about invisible monsters like ghosts and faders? It should be immune against blunt and sharp attack and against fire and magic as well - only "weaken non-material beings" and "Disrupt" action could harm them.

Yes - that's all covered by those 4 values; they just happen to be maximum for all of them (i.e. you can't harm them using any ordinary attack) for ghosts etc.

The DesEw spell (and Vorpal blade etc) are handled as exceptions in the code...

Strange though about the breathing point. Animated Armours couldn't breathe - yet they were very susceptible to Poison Clouds in DM. I wonder why this was the case, yet mummies and skeletons weren't affected?

lessee here..
fire
blunt
sharp
poison
lightning is an 'energy' attack metal things and water things would be weak to it.. no?
breatheable and non breathable to the poison
what about thrown vs in hand attacks? you have a better react time for a thrown obj.. you can see it comming. shorter creatures and thin creatures should be able to dodge better unless the object is too big.
this list would grow if new spells came to be though..
think elements.. what about a resistance to time spells? they are too quick to be stopped but perhaps can be slowed down?
Fire Ice wind water electicity poison time life death and so on... jus leave a few open spots I guess..

cheers

Light, sound, fear, water (as in drowning), acid?

Or how about des-ew/vorpal actually do inflict 'anti-magic' damage, but all normal creatres are immume - this means that you can code for magical creations, with low or high (but not totally) reisitantance to this so that they take damage from these spells. Animated Armours could be very featsome with high blunt/sharp resitance so a combination of anti-magic and weapons needs to be used, etc.

Maybe it would be better to use a rune immunity rather than a spell or fire immunity:
there is a resistance for each rune, so the resistance
to a given spell (or an equivalent effect) is the higher resistance to one of the runes used for that spell. Or the mean of the resistance, I don't know which is best.

Whatever damage slots become available, could there be a few slots free?

It would be nice to design in a one off dungeon, for example, salt bombs. They do like 1-2 points of blunt damage from impact, and maybe 1000 points of damage in a normally unused slot. You make all monsters immune in the dungeon to this unused slot damage, except for the giant slugs, that otherwsie have very high sharp, blunt and fire damage...

Just a thought, you could have holy water bombs against undead that don't effect anyone else, or even make a sword do some hidden damage in an unused slot too , and have a powerful big bad only able to be damaged by this sword...and so on

In reverse, you could have a creature that maybe does a damage type (spectral knights maybe) that the party cannot build up an immunity to, no matter the armour, levels and attributes because it's doing damage in an unused slot
Buuuut, get the magical armour, which also raises immunity to this unused damage slot..voila...

This is now all possible in V0.35