TFork idea: antimagic monsters

[Therem Harth]

Between class assignments, I've taken to working on TFork again...

It's gotten clear to me that nothing less than 100% trap detection will work vs. ToME traps, so I've decided against the whole thing with making Searching, Perception, and Disarming actually work. Instead I'm giving Archers, Rogues, and Monks access to Antimagic.

But this gave me another idea. If players can use Antimagic, why not monsters?

I figure I could give certain monsters a trait (call it ANTI_MAGIC) that causes spell and device fail rates to increase the closer you get. The higher the monster's level, the farther the AM field would extend. However, monsters with AM fields would be unable to cast spells.

I figure, if I do this, I ought to leave monsters' breath attacks (if applicable) and artifact activations (duh) unaffected.

Also, the monster's AM field would have to affect other monsters, which would probably be kind of tricky. But, given time, I think this is doable.

What do people here think of the idea? Is it good, or just too nasty on the player?

[konijn_]

Between class assignments, I've taken to working on TFork again...

It's gotten clear to me that nothing less than 100% trap detection will work vs. ToME traps, so I've decided against the whole thing with making Searching, Perception, and Disarming actually work. Instead I'm giving Archers, Rogues, and Monks access to Antimagic.

But this gave me another idea. If players can use Antimagic, why not monsters?

I figure I could give certain monsters a trait (call it ANTI_MAGIC) that causes spell and device fail rates to increase the closer you get. The higher the monster's level, the farther the AM field would extend. However, monsters with AM fields would be unable to cast spells.

I figure, if I do this, I ought to leave monsters' breath attacks (if applicable) and artifact activations (duh) unaffected.

Also, the monster's AM field would have to affect other monsters, which would probably be kind of tricky. But, given time, I think this is doable.

What do people here think of the idea? Is it good, or just too nasty on the player?

In the right dosage, this sounds awesome !

T.

[EpicMan]

I like this. It makes for interesting challenges and if the effect increases with closeness is kind of like breeders - it starts as a minor issue, but if not dealt with quickly will become fatal.

It also doesn't hurt warriors more than anyone else, and may be less dangerous to them (since it doesn't directly affect their attack power).

[Therem Harth]

Okay, this is going to be harder than I thought. As is, the antimagic code seems to be kind of hackish and applicable only to the player character. I honestly don't know where to start.

If anyone can provide some hints, please do... But honestly, this is going to take quite a while. Especially given all the other stuff on my schedule right now.

[Pete Mack]

You don't actually need to use auras; simply compute (minimum) distance between player and monster, for all anti-magic monsters in LOS. It's about 3 lines of code. You can grab it from the monster disturbance (stealth) code, among other places.

Edit: I missed th point about monster-to-monster interactions. That's a bit more complicated, as you say.

Still, so long as you only care about monster that are attempting to cast spells, it's not very hard to enumerate distances over all monsters with anti-magic. (Sure, it's quadratic, but only for a small number of monsters.)