Damage types...

[nikki.]

Okay, had an idea last night, but dunno how workable it is... Basically, I would like to know if there is a way to record what kind of damage a PC does to a bad guy..

 

Example - party x always uses a particular spell against the bad guys, who for arguments sake are bandits. Now, after a while the bandits realise that they keep being pummelled by the same spell, and make armour to counter it. So if it was Ice Lances, for example, the bandits make armour that would give a resistance to cold damage, and so on.

 

In order to do this, I'd need to record how often the party uses a particular attack type (probably in a series of SDFs), and adjust monster stats accordingly. And I can't see a way of doing this...

 

Any ideas? And if I'm right and there isn't a way, any workarounds that you might think of would help

 

Thanks.

[John S]

I can't think of a way. I can think of a shoddy approximation of wht you want, though.

 

I know that you can keep track of the damage-per-round dealt to a monster by checking its health constantly. What you could do is give the monsters status effects like Resistance, Shielding, and Magic Resistance* until there was a sudden significant decrease in damage-per-turn.

 

*I don't know if these are actually the effects you're looking for, but they sound like a good place to start... Unless someone more knowledgeable comes along.

 

Obviously, this isn't what you wanted. It's also a lot of more complicated math. If you really wanted to, you could do this; but I wouldn't recommend it.

[Lazarus.]

The only way I can think of would be to take away all the default spells and replace them with custom ones. After that it would be fairly easy to keep track of adding an SDF counter in the spell's code. Any other damage would be assumed to be done with melee.

 

I'm not sure what you could do from there to actually give resistances to the monsters. You could have entire sets of monsters (Regular Bandit, Fire-res bandit, Ice-res etc.) and replace them appropriately. Or you could give them element resistance armor (isn't one of those calls broken? That'd be critical here, but I don't have the appendices on this comp.) Also you could give hardiness for melee res, or Resistance stat for general element resistance (which wouldn't be specific to one element, so is probably a bad idea.)

 

The more I think about it the less practical it seems. Custom spells seems the only good way, maybe somebody else will think of something.

[Dintiradan]

The best idea I can come up with right now that allows for using the default spells is checking the PCs' energy at the end of every turn, and writing some code to guess what spells they cast. Very ugly, and haste and extra AP could screw things up, not to mention priest/mage multiclassers.

 

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Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.

- Rick Cook

[Lilith]

Quote:

Originally written by Dintiradan:
Very ugly, and haste and extra AP could screw things up, not to mention priest/mage multiclassers.

Not to mention Magical Efficiency.

The spell-energy-checking idea occurred to me, but I don't think it's workable.

[nikki.]

Fudge.

 

Thanks anyway guys.

[Kelandon]

Terrain scripts can run between every character's step, which would fix the extra AP problem. Of course, if you used a terrain script to do this (and then something in the scenario's START_STATE to supplement it), you wouldn't be able to do anything about the outdoors.

 

I'm not sure if that helps at all, though.