Steam - What is that number after my damage dice?

[ekolis]

In Steamband, what the heck is that number after the damage dice of my weapon supposed to represent? You know, like I might have a "Quarterstaff (1d9|5)"... what's the 5 for?

[Nick]

In Steamband, what the heck is that number after the damage dice of my weapon supposed to represent? You know, like I might have a "Quarterstaff (1d9|5)"... what's the 5 for?

From the help (generalFAQ.txt):

Q: I'm having trouble doing a lot of damage. I've got a dagger and four 
attacks, why am I not doing much damage?

A:Heavy weapons with fewer blows are (or can be) better.


Q:What do you mean heavy weapons are better?

A: Weapons have a new feature called 'force'. You can tell the force of 
a weapon by the description of the damage dice. A saber has a damage of 
(1d7|1). The part after the '|' is the force of the weapons. Larger 
weapons do more damage with a higher force. Each time you strike a monster
Steamband attempts another attack for each force blow on the weapon. Each
force blow that connects adds to a damage multiplier, doing progressively
more and more damage. The message that is printed after you attack gives 
you an idea of how hard you have hit the monster. Each successive force blow 
has a smaller chance of hitting. You may notice that it's fairly easy to 
connect a blow on a monster with a small amount of skill, but to strike 
with each and every force blow (and thus take the best advantage of heavy 
weapons) it requires a large amount of investment in combat skills.
One blow with a large weapon is now better than multiple blows with a 
smaller one. Multiple blows are limited to 4 without investing skill 
points into the available skills.

The help in Steam is, well, helpful.

[ekolis]

Ah, so it's sort of like free extra blows for heavy weapons, only the additional damage goes into the first blow as a multiplier instead of being spread out across multiple blows, and the more blows you try for, the harder it is to get?

So if I have a dagger (1d4|0) and my character gets 3 blows with it, that means I get 3d4 damage, but if I have a quarterstaff (1d9|5), I get anywhere from 1d9 to 6*1d9 damage, depending on what I roll on the multipliers... interesting...

I wonder if some monsters have "damage resistance" which reduces damage applied to them by some amount (akin to the Protection Value in ADOM - or the Emissive Armor in Space Empires, obscure as that is :P) - that would make heavy weapons even more useful, since no matter how many times you hit a monster with a resistance of 4 with a 1d4 dagger, you're not going to damage it!