Resistances cumulative?

[Hariolor]

Vanilla already has percentage resistances, with the following rules:

1. Every resist value is 66% or 100%;
2. Multiple resists are multiplicative (two lots of 66% gives you 89%) but
3. Permanent resists don't stack.

The FA system merely relaxes 1 and 3.

The difficulty is that a "+" is a rather opaque way of indicating the degree of resistance. Why not display the net %resist next to the Rtype?

[Nick]

The difficulty is that a "+" is a rather opaque way of indicating the degree of resistance. Why not display the net %resist next to the Rtype?

      abcdefghijkl@            abcdefghijkl@
 Acid:*.....+.++... 100% Confu:..+..........  45%
 Elec:..+...+.++...  89% Sound:........+....  56%
 Fire:...*+.+.++..- 100% Shard:...+.........  40%
 Cold:......+.++...  77% Nexus:..--.......+.  -1%
 Pois:....+.+......  67% Nethr:+..+.........  76%
 Lite:.........+...  35% Chaos:.......++....  70%
 Dark:........+...+  64% Disen:..++.........  78%

Like this?

[Hariolor]

      abcdefghijkl@            abcdefghijkl@
 Acid:*.....+.++... 100% Confu:..+..........  45%
 Elec:..+...+.++...  89% Sound:........+....  56%
 Fire:...*+.+.++..- 100% Shard:...+.........  40%
 Cold:......+.++...  77% Nexus:..--.......+.  -1%
 Pois:....+.+......  67% Nethr:+..+.........  76%
 Lite:.........+...  35% Chaos:.......++....  70%
 Dark:........+...+  64% Disen:..++.........  78%

Like this?

Exactly, now someone put that in V please?

It'd be nice if the bonuses from temporary resistance showed up there too, for that matter...

[takkaria]

This is an interesting point. Canonically only the basic 4 elements + poison allow double resist. Personally I'd favour moving to a more logical system where every element has a double resist possible (even if some of them are not available via any items). Or even an O-type system of percentage resistances (where you can stack several sources up to a cap). Not sure if Takk is up for any of this though.

Changing how resistances work is a major gameplay change and I'd much rather start with a problem definition and work out solutions to it. What exactly is/are the problem/s with resistances as they stand?

[fizzix]

Changing how resistances work is a major gameplay change and I'd much rather start with a problem definition and work out solutions to it. What exactly is/are the problem/s with resistances as they stand?

Well offhand, I think some of the points are minor and don't effect gameplay, but are rather UI suggestions.

1. Make resistance less opaque. Add % resistance to elemental, and add the percentage range to higher level resistance. If this can't fit on the standard character screen, add it to a new screen.

2. Having multiple pieces of armor that resist something specific do not increase resistance. This should be made clear. implementing 1 pretty much solves it, but if 1 is too hard, you can include just this in several easier ways.

3. Effects of time-based + permanent should be made opaque as well by modifying the descriptions of the resist potions and resist spells.

Some other suggestions do involve a change in gameplay, namely.

4. The fact that multiple resisting armors don't increase resistance doesn't make much sense. Going to a percentage based resistance for each item would change that, but is a huge bear to implement and fundamentally alters gameplay. Luckily, there's a lot of playtesting in the variants to help with this.

5. Higher resists do not have double resists possibilities.

[Marble Dice]

Some naming changes might clarify things if the names were actually used consistently. Refer to the base five as "resistance," the temporary base five as "opposition," and the high resists as "protection," for example. Make permanent rBlind and rFear abilities with names like "True Sight" and "Bravery," and timed rConf something like "Clarity."

On top of that, an object flag knowledge menu might help a bit. If you wanted to get really fancy you could hyperlink the flag names from object or ego descriptions to the appropriate entries in the flag knowledge menu. Describe all the relevant mechanics in the description for each permanent object flag, and update the effect descriptions to clarify the relationship between opposition and resistance, and people could probably figure this stuff out on their own.

[Pete Mack]

Steamband calls it "resist bewilderment".

[PowerDiver]

Changing how resistances work is a major gameplay change and I'd much rather start with a problem definition and work out solutions to it. What exactly is/are the problem/s with resistances as they stand?

They are strange. And bizarre. And seemingly inconsistent. There's no way for a beginner to guess what's going on without reading spoilers and then asking for clarification.

Inspection of an item with rConf should make the formula for damage resistance apparent. That probably means changing the formula to something more intuitive. E.g. "randomly reduces confusion damage by (15 + 1d35)%".

If you cast a temp resist while having a permanent resist, the one-line message should be sufficiently clear that a beginner who hasn't read any manual or spoilers should understand the double resistance mechanic. "You feel resistant to fire" does not cut it. "In conjunction with your armor, fire damage is now reduced by a factor of 9"? Ugh. I'm obviously just pointing out the problem, not providing a solution.

[Magnate]

Some naming changes might clarify things if the names were actually used consistently. Refer to the base five as "resistance," the temporary base five as "opposition," and the high resists as "protection," for example. Make permanent rBlind and rFear abilities with names like "True Sight" and "Bravery," and timed rConf something like "Clarity."

On top of that, an object flag knowledge menu might help a bit. If you wanted to get really fancy you could hyperlink the flag names from object or ego descriptions to the appropriate entries in the flag knowledge menu. Describe all the relevant mechanics in the description for each permanent object flag, and update the effect descriptions to clarify the relationship between opposition and resistance, and people could probably figure this stuff out on their own.

Personally I consider unresistable elements to be a problem. I'd much rather see ultra-rare resists to force/gravity/time/mana as random powers on ego items or randarts than not have them at all.

At the very least, unresistable elements ought to be listed along with all the other elements on the character display.

But as far as Takk's main challenge is concerned, I don't think the current system is broken. It's not easy to understand, but it's not particularly broken.

[Derakon]

I wonder if we can come up with sensical combinations of existing resists and abilities that would grant resistance to the "special" elements? For example, featherfall plus resist nexus could provide resistance to gravity; resist cold plus resist confusion plus resist sound could provide resistance to water; resist sound plus an AC over 100 could provide resist force; all resistances grants resist mana...

The overall goal would be to make the exotic elements resistable through combinations of other factors that you wouldn't necessarily obtain automatically in your normal kit.

[d_m]

I wonder if we can come up with sensical combinations of existing resists and abilities that would grant resistance to the "special" elements? For example, featherfall plus resist nexus could provide resistance to gravity; resist cold plus resist confusion plus resist sound could provide resistance to water; resist sound plus an AC over 100 could provide resist force; all resistances grants resist mana...

The overall goal would be to make the exotic elements resistable through combinations of other factors that you wouldn't necessarily obtain automatically in your normal kit.

This is an interesting idea, but the naive implementation would kind of be a disaster. If those attacks become resistable, certain creatures who are currently pretty dangerous even to high level characters (including Morgoth) become a lot less dangerous. At that point you can rescale their attacks to be just as dangerous as they are now (maintaining the challenge for well-equipped characters) but this will make them way harder to others. Or you can split the difference. None of those options sounds that great to me.

I guess I would prefer to make them actual resistances that you'd need new items (or new resists on existing items) to get. Presumably these would not be common, and I would hope it would be impossible (in most cases) to fill all resistance holes.

[Colbey]

Some naming changes might clarify things if the names were actually used consistently. Refer to the base five as "resistance," the temporary base five as "opposition," and the high resists as "protection," for example. Make permanent rBlind and rFear abilities with names like "True Sight" and "Bravery," and timed rConf something like "Clarity."

Mostly agreed. I think the situations where you resist a status but it doesn't come with a damage resistance can safely be called "immunity", though. And I don't think it would be horrible to continue calling high resists "resistance". (Newbies aren't doing the exact HP math; they just want to know that nether damage isn't so horrible anymore.) I think renaming the temporary resists would be quite helpful, though.

[Derakon]

Have we given any thought to standardizing high-resist damage reduction? Why is it random anyway?

d_m: my main thought is that it should be possible to rig your gear so that you can resist some exotic element, but you would have to make tradeoffs. The examples I gave are too easy to achieve, though, so they didn't really make this clear. For example, maybe you could resist time attacks by having at least eight "sustain stat" flags. You'd probably only do that if you really hated time attacks, since getting the necessary flags would mean losing out on other important abilities.

[Hariolor]

This is an interesting idea, but the naive implementation would kind of be a disaster. If those attacks become resistable, certain creatures who are currently pretty dangerous even to high level characters (including Morgoth) become a lot less dangerous. At that point you can rescale their attacks to be just as dangerous as they are now (maintaining the challenge for well-equipped characters) but this will make them way harder to others. Or you can split the difference. None of those options sounds that great to me.

I guess I would prefer to make them actual resistances that you'd need new items (or new resists on existing items) to get. Presumably these would not be common, and I would hope it would be impossible (in most cases) to fill all resistance holes.

This sounds like a great way to tweak some of the artifacts that are still pretty lackluster. Magnate did a great job making artifacts more interesting, but IMO adding special resists so some otherwise less-used artifacts would be nice.

I also suspect that when curses finally get reworked, there could be some very compelling tradeoffs created if resistance to special elements was available.

[Pete Mack]

Personally I consider unresistable elements to be a problem. I'd much rather see ultra-rare resists to force/gravity/time/mana as random powers on ego items or randarts than not have them at all.

That feels wrong. There's even a riddle about it in The Hobbit(!)

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

As for not resisting force or inertia, it's not just a good idea, it's the law!