[CF-Devel] Future crossfire changes/projects

[Mark Wedel]

On Wed, 16 May 2001, Peter Mardahl wrote:

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      >  Agree.  I would also like to see fewer monsters, but make those
     
     >
     
      > out there more interesting/tougher.  Ideally, also try to balance
     
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      > monsters and players more equally - right now, monsters have 10 times
     
     >
     
      > or more hp monsters that players.  The end result of this is that a
     
     >
     
      > group of players accidentally casts a spell in the wrong direction, that
     
     >
     
      > party may be toast, simply because for the spell to be effective
     
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      > against the monster, it does a lot of hp and kills the players.
     
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     >
     
      Have you seen my earlier comments on this phenonema?  I believe it
     
     >
     
      may be completely unavoidable.
     
     
 Maybe.

 I realize that currently big monsters (ie, multisquare) have some
problem in that more squares = more damage when it comes to area
of effect spells.

 One thought on this was to do it like we have suggested for things like
confusion & paralyze - insert a object that says 'this creature has
already been hit by fireball XYZ, so other parts won't take damage'.  But
I just realized that gets somewhat complicated - things like lightning
bolt last several ticks, so the monster should take additional damage,
but only for once space of the monster.  Even if you do things like
record the last tick the monster was damaged by that spell, there
is still some problems with things like cones, where the center
does more damage, so you don't want to negate that extra damage when
monster just got hit by the fringe (hard to really predict the ordering
of the objects).

 Another thought I just had would be to give each part of the monster
hp independent of the other parts.

 Thus, for example a hill giant, which lets say currently has 200
hp total, would instead have 100 hp for the head/torso and 100 for
the legs.

 If either of these parts is reduced to less than 0 hp, entire
monster dies.

 If you do this, the result is that area of effects spells would damage
both of those about equally.

 The problem is that for characters like fighters who are doing
physical attacks, they will need to keep attacking the same part - switching
between the legs and torso would effectively mean the monster has twice
as many hp in that case.

 There would not be any requirement that all parts have equal hp.
Thus, for example, you could make monsters whose legs are the weak point
(ie, have worse hp than the rest, or worse AC, etc).

 Unfortuantely, the example above isn't all that realistic, as tall
monsters have their legs to the south, and head to the north.  So while
attack the physical heads could in theory maek sense (fewer hp), and
is entirely possible with curretn map layout, realisically, that head
might be 30' in the air, and the character would not be physically able
to reach it.