acid vs magical armor

[PowerDiver]

I've been experimenting with acid attacks not affecting plusses on enchanted armor. Instead, they reduce the base AC. So a cloak (1, +5) first corrodes to (0, +5) and then suffers no further damage. Scrolls of restore item return the item to full base AC.

I thought it would be a great change, but it has left me underwhelmed. It feels right for heavy armor, but the one and done nature of standard cloaks just seems off.

Also, enchant armor scrolls seem too plentiful in this framework.

One consequence I hadn't thought of before the experiment was that crowns and ethereal cloaks with a base AC of 0 cannot be corroded, so they never provide the 1/2 damage modifier against acid attacks. Standard cloaks only protect once before needing to be restored. That is an interesting change, but I don't know whether it is good or bad.

Any ideas on how to improve this approach?

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Don't do it.

The approach right now is clean, simple, and uniform. There are no odd little 'gotchas.' Why go to a non-simple, non-uniform (in effect) method, that DOES have gotchas? Fine, maybe it's more 'realistic'...but realism is a bastard stepchild to playability.

[Derakon]

My general take on this is that at least some aspect of the "magical enchantment" on armor is just improving the quality of the armor. Standard chainmail is functional but not without flaws -- the occasional weak link, missing reinforcement, etc. A skilled craftsman would output +2 armor, and a master +5, without even needing any magic to help out. Or something along those lines.

[PowerDiver]

Don't do it.

That's the default. Let me be hopeful for a little while that someone can figure out how to make it work.

There has been discussion in the past about how acid should be orthogonal to magic. This approach was inspired by trying to figure out how to change scrolls of restore item, which were much too powerful when they were added.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

You can't make it work basing it on the base AC of the item, without introducing the massive variation from item type to item type, when you have everything from ethereal slippers to plate mail being covered by this paradigm.

[Derakon]

What you could do is introduce a third quality of armor, namely how corroded it is. This could range from, say, 5 (not corroded at all) to 0 (maximally corroded), and you'd multiply the output AC (base plus magic) of the item by that value, then divide by 5. Corrosion remains relevant regardless of the base AC of the item, because it acts as a negative multiplier on the magical armor bonus.

I suppose some items would be inherently more or less resistant to corrosion, for that matter. Cloth and leather armor could have only 3 levels of corrosion, plate armor could have 8. Or something along those lines.

[Magnate]

Why does the damaging of armour have to be connected with the halving of acid damage? In the current code, armour with IGNORE_ACID is not damaged yet still provides protection. I could imagine the same logic applying to armour with 0 base AC but positive +ac.

I don't know if that helps implement/improve your idea or not.

[EpicMan]

You could say an item with base AC 0 that absorbs 50% of an acid attack just gets destroyed. So that [1, +5] cloak is damaged by acid once, becoming [0, +5]. Then it gets damaged again, and is destroyed like an inventory item getting destroyed.

[d_m]

Any ideas on how to improve this approach?

If you imagine broken armor being worse than no armor, I could imagine the base AC going negative. At that point it becomes somewhat isomorphic to the current behavior which you're trying to avoid.

What are your goals? If your goal is to keep the "magic" alive on items then reducing base AC instead would work (and maybe something like ?repair-item would fix that). If you have other goals I'm not sure what to do.

[PowerDiver]

What are your goals? If your goal is to keep the "magic" alive on items then reducing base AC instead would work (and maybe something like ?repair-item would fix that). If you have other goals I'm not sure what to do.

One goal is to be able to repair a magically enchanted +25 item that receives acid damage. Another goal was to come up with an alternative use for ?restore_item.

It's just an experiment based on a lark. I try a bunch, throw most away. The coding just took a couple minutes, so why not try it? This one is different because it doesn't feel like either a failure or a success.

The halving of acid damage confuses things. Moreso since I could never internalize the idea behind it. The same cloak that keeps acid from reaching your skin also keeps frost from reaching your skin, and the IGNORE_ACID stuff is yet another layer I don't comprehend. Should a circlet, even an IGNORE_ACID magically enchanted circlet, protect your scalp if acid gets splashed on your head? I dunno.

Everyone should feel free to tell me I should just follow Tiburon Silverflame's advice to dump the idea. Derakon's suggestion of proportional corrosion at least solves the one-and-done problem, but then one has to figure out what to do both functionally and for display with a 0.6 AC cloak.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

If all we want to do is say that some really highly enchanted item can't be magically damaged...simply say that anything +12 or over is "too highly enchanted to be damaged by magic." In D&D, an item's magical enhancement bonus (weapon or armor) increases its hardness and hit points...that is, makes it harder to break. We can use that logic: after a while, it becomes "acid immune."

I don't care about the restore item effect. It feels like a solution in search of a problem.

I do agree that the notions of "the item took damage" and "the acid damage is reduced by half" are NOT connected. I could see that cloaks, body armor, and shields ALWAYS reduce acid damage by half (given that their base AC > 0)...but an issue here is, well, can a 500 point acid breath ONLY hit boots or head or hands? That feels contrived...but it's also the odd state we have now. Every 'armor' slot is treated the same...when they're really not.

[buzzkill]

You could say an item with base AC 0 that absorbs 50% of an acid attack just gets destroyed. So that [1, +5] cloak is damaged by acid once, becoming [0, +5]. Then it gets damaged again, and is destroyed like an inventory item getting destroyed.

AC > 0
AC is reduced by a value n with the chance of higher n when AC is higher.

If you're serious about it, then do this. If acid can damage an item, then acid can destroy it. If that's a reality that you're not willing to face, then can the concept. So (if your careless or maybe just very unlucky) you'll lose a nice cloak, or boots of speed every once in a while. It's good thing IMO.

edit... and what TJS said below.

I don't care about the restore item effect. It feels like a solution in search of a problem.

This too.

[Magnate]

If you're serious about it, then do this. If acid can damage an item, then acid can destroy it. If that's a reality that you're not willing to face, then can the concept. So (if your careless or maybe just very unlucky) you'll lose a nice cloak, or boots of speed every once in a while. It's good thing IMO.

+1. I quite like this idea.

[TJS]

How's about this behaviour when an item gets hit by acid:

AC > 0
AC is reduced by a value n with the chance of higher n when AC is higher.

AC <= 0
Chance of item being destroyed with the chance being higher the more negative the AC is. If the item survives the damage then it is merely damaged (and AC becomes more negative making it more likely another attack would destroy it).

[Tiburon Silverflame]

If acid can destroy an item, then there is motivation to go with, say, steel-shod boots of speed rather than ethereal slippers of speed. And that's not a bad thing.