Dungeon Master Forum

what is the use of monster lightning(monster spell hit -flashes)?

It seems to always flash in the colour of the spell it was hit with.
(lightning bolt hits a monster, it will flash yellow,
poison bolt hits a monster, it will flash green ).


While it is a really cool feature, it would actually make more sense
to have the lightning bolt only flash the monster when it
would wound it;(*and then again not really)
is there something like monsterwounding in dsb??

I mean , I know when I do hit a monster with
a lightning bolt spell and when not, there is no need to
extra flash the monster.(or am I missing something here:
how did this get into dsb in the first place , what^s the intention
Do not get me wrong, I kind of like it !!!
*it would look super awesome if
there was discharge lightning surrounding the monster
when the lightning crackles into it.
or a frame that depicts a monster being hit could be placed instead of
the flashes? So do not remove it

I thought about the following;:

if monster did not get a wound(whatever that may be), do not flash it at all when a spell hits it. Only when there is some effect on the monster.
Deth kights should not flash green when they are immune to poison etc..
so no flash: either the resistance is too high or the spell too weak.

if monster did get a wound from a lighting bolt spell,
only flash the corresponding body part that is wounded.
so for worms ,head, left arm, right arm, body..
(would that be doable? anyone else who would like that??)
(basically the way it is now is fine with me, if it would only
flash while doing damage or an effect)

for a poison bolt it should maybe flash each time monster
gets poison damage, not only at first spell contact.
So you actually "see" when a monster is poisoned.
make the green flash longer(2 seconds) or with a higher frequency
(1.5 flashes per second) when poison amount is high.

mmh. a red flash for melee hits ?
in the black and white movie SAMURAI FICTION there is a red flash
each time someone is being hit(most times deadly).
So the dungeon view could flash red when the party is being hit,
just an idea...probably too irritating!

zoooom wrote:what is the use of monster lightning(monster spell hit -flashes)?

Extra visual feedback, and just generally looking cool.

In original DM, the poison bolt had no actual impact graphic or anything, so I wanted to do something to indicate that the monster had actually been hit by it.

For the lightning, it's more to try to give some idea of what the lightning is really doing. I think that lightning was generally dismissed as useless due to its cloud being half as powerful as a fireball's. What lightning does that fireballs don't is impact damage (like a thrown object)-- it will also work on monsters that resist magic and fire well, like knights. So, to show it was doing direct damage to one monster, as well as exploding, I flashed that monster yellow.

zoooom wrote:if monster did get a wound from a lighting bolt spell,
only flash the corresponding body part that is wounded.

Right now, there's no keeping track of this kind of stuff. It would likely require significant alterations to the Lua code that handles damaging monsters.
Also, to only flash a certain body part, you'd need a sort of "mask" overlay that corresponded to the different body parts of the monster-- that part would need to be hacked into the core engine. It's something I'd not be unwilling to do, provided someone else already made the actual mask bitmaps and did most of the rest of the coding.

zoooom wrote:for a poison bolt it should maybe flash each time monster gets poison damage

Monsters don't get poisoned.
This one might actually be easier to implement, probably a poison exvar and a looped message or the like would be all that was needed...

zoooom wrote:So the dungeon view could flash red when the party is being hit,

This is already doable. Create a party condition called C_PARTYDAMAGED or something, set it with a timer of 1 tick, and give it an overlay graphic of a red bitmap with a mostly transparent alpha channel. Then you can just hack that into the appropriate damage functions.