acid vs magical armor

[myshkin]

Ethereal Slippers do have IGNORE_ACID, as do Golden and Jewel Encrusted (but not Iron) Crowns, Ethereal Cloaks, and Alchemist's Gloves. So we'd only really be worrying about Iron Crowns as a destroyable 0-AC base item.

[PowerDiver]

You guys are really harsh. Not that that's a bad thing.

Back in 3.0, you might only see one decent boots of speed a game, if you were lucky. The pendulum may swing back. I'm not sure we should design based on the assumption the player has so many speed boots he gets to pick and choose.

I thought of one more option, more in line with the status quo. I was bothered by the idea of negative AC. I embrace negative numbers in more situations than most, but having a ravaged cloak increase the monsters' hit chances seems too much.

What if we allow negative base AC, but only up to the magical bonus? Then the idea is that the magic is holding together the item that would otherwise have disintegrated. So you could have boots [-5, +5] for a total of AC 0, and one more acid attack would destroy them. This is maybe too lenient, in which case acid attacks could be changed to reduce AC by 2 or 3 or a variable amount depending upon damage.

[buzzkill]

Back in 3.0, you might only see one decent boots of speed a game, if you were lucky. The pendulum may swing back. I'm not sure we should design based on the assumption the player has so many speed boots he gets to pick and choose.

If boots were to become so rare again, then the the player could always take extra precautions to preserve them if he felt it was worthwhile to do so, or he could just move on without them. Who said you need boots of speed to have fun anyhow.

Beside that, BoS is the fringe example, very fragile and incredibly useful, that is holding back what would otherwise be a very easy decision regarding armour and acid damage.

[Roch]

Slightly off-topic, but how about acid damage persisting for multiple turns at a progressively reduced rate? For example, the baby black dragon breathes acid and @ takes normal damage the 1st turn, mitigated by any resistance @ has. The acid doesn't just disappear, but runs off/dissipates/is consumed to some extent in its corrosive reaction with @'s armor/body. So the next turn results in some reduced percentage of acid damage. And the next turn even less. Until you escape the vitriol by say the fourth turn after the initial insult.

I suppose this scheme would be applicable to other elemental attacks -- you continue to burn/freeze after the first hit. Lightning might be exempted I suppose.

I suppose the gameplay effect would be a hit point drain similar to wounding or poison.

[PowerDiver]

Beside that, BoS is the fringe example, very fragile and incredibly useful, that is holding back what would otherwise be a very easy decision regarding armour and acid damage.

Any boots with base AC 1 could be destroyed simply by stepping into LOS of a few acid hounds, if I understand the idea about armor destruction correctly. You couldn't count on boots of FA or stability or anything like that lasting a trip.

Currently, when you get boots or gloves of free action, you can toss your old ring of free action and move onto other rings. When such wieldables are so fragile, that changes. Considering the importance of free action, this seems like a really big deal.

I've read plenty of stories where artifact equivalents are rendered temporarily unusable by destructive attacks. E.g., polearms where the haft is destroyed, but the blade is taken home to be attached to something else. If you want boots to dissolve so quickly, would you accept a system where full elemental damage means "unwieldable but not destroyed"? I'm imagining a system where you immediately drop the wielded item when it becomes unusable, but would be able to pick it up and repair and use it again later.

[buzzkill]

Any boots with base AC 1 could be destroyed simply by stepping into LOS of a few acid hounds, if I understand the idea about armor destruction correctly. You couldn't count on boots of FA or stability or anything like that lasting a trip.

Currently, when you get boots or gloves of free action, you can toss your old ring of free action and move onto other rings. When such wieldables are so fragile, that changes. Considering the importance of free action, this seems like a really big deal.

Could be destroyed, is you do something stupid (or maybe just unlucky).

That simply means doing without, or getting accustomed to having redundant resists handy, or simply opting for more durable items in preference to what might otherwise be chosen.

2 points.
Lack of FA isn't the player killer it used to be.
Rings of speed aren't susceptible to acid.

I'm not saying it the change will be great and everyone will like it. I'm just saying it's worth looking into, even worth cramming into nightlies (which I don't play incidentally).

For too long the dungeon has been taking precautions for the player, that should instead be left up to the player. I see the unwillingness to let an item be destroyed by acid yet another example of such. No, I don't have any other examples.

[Derakon]

I'm gonna take Eddie's side on this, unless you want to have less easily-achieved conditions to destroy equipment. As he noted, if you have acid hit base AC and destroy the item when base AC hits zero, then at best acid-susceptible boots are 4 hits away from destruction (that's the iron-shod boots), which can be done very, very quickly with little choice on the part of the player.

I could go for the "magic holds the tatters of the armor together" concept. If we're going to go for "acid makes equipment unusable" then I'd prefer the "can be equipped but confers no benefit" over "item gets destroyed outright". There are plenty of ways to make the game harder that don't mean that the player might take a huge step backwards in capability from factors largely outside their control.

Incidentally: FA is still a player-killer. You won't get killed by a floating eye any more, and you have a decent chance to survive remembering that homunucli can paralyze, but beyond that point you should expect that getting paralyzed will kill you.

[buzzkill]

I'm not opposed to Eddie's idea either, I'm just not focusing on it because I was also, quite possibly in error, assuming that that there would be some rare or cumbersome way to repair acid damaged items. Rare enough that you would seek to avoid acid damage in the first place.

[PowerDiver]

I'm not necessarily in favor of my idea. AFAIAC we are just brainstorming.

However, changing wielded items to be destroyable *at all* is a big change. Letting it happen in 1 round because the stairs drop you in a room with a pack of water hounds is an enormous change. A variant-level change IMO.

If someone constructs a poll and gets something like 75% in favor of the nastier changes, then I'll happily code them up for the nightlies. Short of that, I think what I proposed is big enough to start testing.

I thought I detected an overall sentiment, in the last couple of years, in favor of making egos more comparable to artifacts. If egos corrode away and artifacts don't, that's further reason just to toss susceptible egos once you wield an artifact in the given slot. E.g. I might currently toss Cammithrim to keep a good pair of gloves of thievery, but I'd never consider that if a pack of water hounds had any noticeable likelihood of destroying the thievery gloves in 1 round.

[Magnate]

I'm not opposed to Eddie's idea either, I'm just not focusing on it because I was also, quite possibly in error, assuming that that there would be some rare or cumbersome way to repair acid damaged items. Rare enough that you would seek to avoid acid damage in the first place.

This could go well with item forging, were such a concept ever to make it into V, but I can't imagine any other way to repair damaged items. An alternative would be NPP-style store services, I guess, but we've always resisted those, as they seem to validate the "game of shopping" approach (I was reading the comp100 thread yesterday, and Jeff twice mentions how much stuff he expects people to haul back to town to sell).

But both of those are very big changes, so in the short term I don't see much point in damaged items being unusable-but-not-destroyed.

I'm ambivalent about the "held-together-by-magic" thing. I guess it does make a big difference for items with low base AC, like gloves and boots. Also, being able to enchant them back up provides a way of repairing them (er, do we still have enchant scrolls? I'm out of touch).

I don't have a problem with worn equipment being destroyed. Swap items you're carrying in your pack can be destroyed by a single attack at the moment, so the idea of boots of speed being destroyed by half a dozen is not intolerable (Derakon, check the new base AC values in 3.2). Yes, it elevates packs of water hounds from merely annoying to bloody dangerous, but that's ok.

[Derakon]

(Derakon, check the new base AC values in 3.2)

Ah, I'd missed the steel-shod boots, likely because I hardly ever see them. Mithril-shod boots are immune to acid and thus didn't get mentioned, and iron-shod, as I said earlier, have a base AC of 4.

As for swap gear, it's swap gear, and therefore presumably not absolutely vital. IMO allowing worn equipment to be readily destroyed would mean that the player would have to have swap gear ready for every armor slot -- and would have to carry said swap gear with them if the item susceptible to being destroyed were covering something vital like FA.

[Magnate]

As for swap gear, it's swap gear, and therefore presumably not absolutely vital. IMO allowing worn equipment to be readily destroyed would mean that the player would have to have swap gear ready for every armor slot -- and would have to carry said swap gear with them if the item susceptible to being destroyed were covering something vital like FA.

Let's explore this a little bit. IIUC, the proposal isn't that worn gear is destroyed by a single attack, but only when its base AC drops below 0 (or, in the magic variant, when ac+to_ac drops below 0).

Now, leaving aside the fact that this will make IGNORE_ACID insanely valuable (but I'll leave that for another thread), it's going to take quite a long time to destroy anything except standard +0 cloaks and leather sandals (2 hits). Any adventurer relying for FA on an item which has been reduced to base AC 0 or 1 deserves what they get - especially if ?restore_item sets the base AC back to its starting value. I guess this will increase calls for a bigger home, but that's ok. It will also make ego cesti and steel boots much more valuable than lower AC items. That's good IMO.

I'm assuming we aren't going to be really nasty and allow the loss of more than one point of AC in a single attack. OTOH I think we should allow all four base elements to damage wearables unless @ has immunity or the item has the ignore flag ...

[TJS]

If acid can damage equipment then why can't fire as well?

It should be able to damage leather items at the very least. Cold could damage items such as crowns and perhaps lightning could damage metal items (doesn't it already do this on the ground?).

[takkaria]

What if we allow negative base AC, but only up to the magical bonus? Then the idea is that the magic is holding together the item that would otherwise have disintegrated. So you could have boots [-5, +5] for a total of AC 0, and one more acid attack would destroy them.

I'd say that implementing this, without

This is maybe too lenient, in which case acid attacks could be changed to reduce AC by 2 or 3 or a variable amount depending upon damage.

would be a good starting point. (It's better to start with a more lenient effect and make it more serious in this case, I think.) I think inflating the value of IGNORE_ACID is a pretty good thing and will lead to some better choices.

Fire probably should damage worn equipment too. Just sayin'.

[Nomad]

OTOH I think we should allow all four base elements to damage wearables unless @ has immunity or the item has the ignore flag ...

Maybe split what type of wearables they damage? Have an ignore flag for each element, and give different items/materials their own properties. So maybe fire can damage cloth and leather but not metal, while cold can damage rigid armour but not flexible stuff, and electricity damages iron and steel but not cloth or mithril. That way there's more of a tactical choice between two types of item with the same ego, instead of just looking at the AC.

Edit: ...Which is basically what TJS just said, if I'd been paying more attention.