Dungeon Master Forum

Is there a way of making a monster susceptible to a user created spell?

In the monster stats, the "damage by magic" section only contains fireball/lightning/des ew/poison cloud/poison blob.
I want a monster that can only be killed by a certain user made spell.
I'd point to Chaos' death by fusing, but i'm guessing that is part of the main code and not for editing (since Chaos seems to have the same stat window as all the others).
Any help would be much appreciated.

In what way? How to go about doing that depends on what effects you want. I'd say that at some point you'd want that spell to trigger a uniquely named relay, which would activate any specific effects you want.

You will likely also want to create something like a unique spell cloud and spell object to use as part of the triggering mechanism for the spell, depending on exactly how you want it activated and what you want it to do. You'll likely also need constant weight triggers operated by the creature you want to be affected by this spell, and a 2nd trigger that the constant weight trigger activates, which, in turn, is activated by your unique spell cloud and that trigger would then activate the spells effects. All this should limit the spell to 1 specific monster type, since the trigger that activates the spells effects won't be active unless the right creature is standing on that tile. The effect could be causing damage, instant death, or any number of other effects. You could even slow the monster down, by swapping it out for an identical looking monster with lower speed or attack stats, with a time delayed relay that reverses the effects.

exactly SU, monsters can run, walk, twirl, blow kisses, what ever. more than one condition can be met now, this opens the flood gates for possibilities.

Thanks for the advice guys...
I know i can use the damage health by spell action, but i have to give it a value.
I will set the monster spell damage to 0% for the standard ones, and set up triggers/actions for the new spell, but can i make the health decrement dependent on the strength of the spell?

I think it is a -1 value for strength Saumun to use spell power with casting, not sure if it works though, might error. I tried it a while back, had no luck with that, going to have to manually set that spell power up I think.

Thanks CS... I'll give it a try.

I'd recommend you start with a test of concept, making sure you can get the spell to do what you want, without setting up the power levels, that way if your idea doesn't work you won't have wasted time setting something up for nothing, and you can move onto trying something else more quickly. If it does work, you can always add in the power levels later, when you know your idea will work.

That is what i'm going to do.
I haven't reached this part yet. I wanted to get an idea of what to do before potentially spending ages on something that turns out not to be possible.

I set up a small room to try it, and i can get it to work via specific cloud over trigger = health damage.
The only problem is that i can't seem to make it strength dependent, so Lo and Mon spells do the same damage.

As CS suggested... a -1 value does indeed cause it to error.

you'll have to set it up manually, I have not set it up myself, the stats are around somewhere, something I need to do to. I have the same problem with replacing spells. some reason -1 doesn't work. the engine is quirky, some things can only be accepted once, say like relays, which there is a fix for that, but say you want to put a %VALUEref:xxxxxx% on a scroll, you can only do one, the next line value won't change, just the first value. RTC has a few quirky things like that. look up spellpower Saumun. what you find let me know.

When i say i got it to work... It was with a damage tile on the floor, activated by the cloud.
When i try to do it through an "action", i can't get it to work. It will do almost anything else i try. Just can't seem to damage the monster.
Am i doing something wrong? I was using DAMAGE_BYPARTY_FRONT_(various... eg SHARP, BLUNT, MAGIC).
I've never tried killing a monster through actions before.

EDIT: Actually it does work if i'm stood in front of the monster. Ranged attack doesn't work (with both PARTY_FRONT and PARTY_ALL).

if the attack is close, and view is 0, spells can work like swords except minus the bitmaps and sound. on those who are on a 2x2 or 4x4 setting, it may miss them. in RTC, the view attack and the attack are hooked together, a bug??? who knows, but it did change the method I am using. play with it some more Saumun, I need those answers as much as you do.

Is there some way to get the power level of a spell just cast? I tried experimenting with that a while back and couldn't find anything. If so, you would need to set up 6 relays, all using a uniquely named relay cloned from a regular relay and activated by the spell, each set with a logical comparison to the spell's power level so only the relay that matches the spell's power level ever actually activates. You would then also need six different damagers, each with the damage level set to match up with a the corresponding power level of the spell.

I was thinking along those very lines. Setting six different triggers/relays/damagers, but cannot find any way to separate a Lo from a Mon strength spell.

There is a thread alluding to monster resistance to user spells, but alas, no cigar.
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... all#p60498

you need to set that in the relays I think, using the greater than or less than or equal to stuff.
i have other ideas to simulate this, but i'll check it out before blurting anything out.

How can you retrieve the spell's power level though? I've tried playing around with this idea and it works in theory, but there has to be some way to get the power level of the spell to be able to do the comparison, and when working with a relay, I haven't figured out how yet. If you have figured that out, please share!

Saumun wrote:I was thinking along those very lines. Setting six different triggers/relays/damagers, but cannot find any way to separate a Lo from a Mon strength spell.

There is a thread alluding to monster resistance to user spells, but alas, no cigar.
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... all#p60498

The way things are right now, editing monster resistances would pretty much require being able to go into the source code and extend the monster object to add in extra resistances, then replace all the hard coded monsters with new ones from the expanded monsters so they all have the new resistances. I think RTC was done in C++ so it would require access to the source code, which so far, GG hasn't looked willing to do that, and knowledge of C++, which I do happen to have, but again, the source code is something I don't have. The other would be enabling scripting support in RTC, with the ability to write scripts that expand upon the monster's stats and behavior routines, but that would again require modifications to the base RTC code. New RTC code seems highly unlikely after 6 years since the last update and about 4 or 5 years since GG last showed up here.

Hmm, well, it would have to be done with relays and triggers and such to simulate such stats, which may be possible, it would take someone willing to play around with that and see what happens.

really SU, you ought to let go, you're there! it comes with action

but must start with lights, camera before action if the movie's to look right

I've nailed it (at least i've nailed what i wanted to do, but not through messing with spell strengths).
Turned out to be so simple. Two triggers per tile will do it, along with a single action.

I made an iceball spell cloned from a fireball, and then cloned a screamer to be resistant to everything except fireballs.
Then i made a trigger operated by a monster with constant weight. This activates a second trigger (inactive unless a monster is on the tile) which activates the 'explode spell' action when a fireball is over it. The fireball never hits the screamer, but it appears to.
I threw 20 mon fireballs at it and it didn't die. I threw one iceball and hey presto!
Since i made it resistant to everything else in the monster stats, it can only be killed by the iceball.

This combined with SU's fluxcage solution means i can finish the last level of my dungeon.

Sooooo very happy!

Thank you guys for your input....