Magic, melee, and things that block them

[Therem Harth]

Narvius' post in the traps thread gave me some ideas about spells that block melee or magic Some of these are borrowed from external sources...

Silence: I believe this was mentioned in another thread somewhere, as being included in D&D - not sure, I've never played D&D. Anyway it would be a lasting effect that would block the character both from spellcasting and from reading scrolls until it wore off.

I'm thinking this should be something that high-level sorcerous uniques cast - Vecna and Omarax for instance, and of course the Mouth of Sauron.

Antimagic Cloud: from the Exile games. A persistent ball spell that prevents spells from being cast (and anything magical from being used) in its area of effect.

This could be both a monster and a player spell. The main problem I see though is that it would allow ranged weapons, so good archers could potentially abuse it. Maybe arrows going into the AM cloud should have a high chance of missing due to the cloud's different aerodynamic properties?

Motion Shield: like the shields in Dune. Creates a persistent area of effect in which all melee attacks are blocked, be they from monsters or the player character. Also causes arrows to fall at your feet, and monster's projectiles not to work. Spells and breaths work fine within the shielded area.

On entering a shielded area, "smart" monsters should probably switch to spells and breaths exclusively. This effect should probably be available as a player spell, as well as a monster spell and a trap, but casting it on Morgoth should *not* be a wise idea.

How does this stuff sound?

Edit: and just to be clear, yes, I do recall that Dune shields didn't block slow-moving objects. But I have a hard time seeing how to sensibly implement "the slow sword penetrates the shield" in Angband.

[bio_hazard]

With the speed issue, seems like you could assess relative speed. So a normal speed char would be protected from faster speed monsters, but vulnerable to physical attacks from slow monsters. Would also provide a new tactical use for wand/potion of slow, where if the player encountered one of these shields they could purposefully make themselves slow. Of course, this would not be a good idea if casters or breathers were around.

(note Crawl has a "Slow God" that has some sort of mechanic vaguely like this but I don't know the specifics)

Another related effect to the ones you mention might be "blurry vision" (also borrowing a bit from Crawl), where scrolls have a chance to fail or be unreadable, pseudo-ID doesn't work, and maybe seraching/perception is penalized.

[Therem Harth]

With the speed issue, seems like you could assess relative speed. So a normal speed char would be protected from faster speed monsters, but vulnerable to physical attacks from slow monsters.

Brilliant. I could see this leading to all kinds of things. For instance it would be interesting to have a class devoted entirely to shield-fighting, who would have to worry about having the *right* speed instead of just speed. That would probably be way outside the scope of Vanilla, but it would be a great addition to a variant, I think.