No subject

something like (if spell->owner == victim) do_no_damage?

 That is certainly a reasonable approach - it means monsters won't hurt
themselves.  However, it also seems to mean that the monsters could immolate
itself and by safe.

 Now in AD&D, I've played with some DM's that say your immune to your own magic
(damage wise) - the above described approach seems to be doing that - no big
deal.  It will probably be advantagous to the players in the end (they can
wander into a room full of monsters, wait for the monsters to surround them, and
cast large fireball on themselves). 

 As AV said, this doesn't really help out cases where there are bunches of
monsters - I'm sure many of the spellcasters when in groups will still come
their friends.  So it doesn't completely fix the problem (there will now be at
least 1 spellcaster remaining instead of none, but the room still could have
started with 10).



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      What you describe above is true, but a seperate issue.
     
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      Currently, mapmakers must ensure that special monsters
     
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      don't get any equipment to apply. That works.
     
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      (Set "randomitems none", "pick_up 0", etc)
     
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      This could be fixed by storing "special" resistances in
     
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      a force and applying that to the monster at loading-time.
     
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      Unfortunately this is hard to realize, because it would
     
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      need to be implemented into the Crossfire object-loader
     
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      which is a great pile of sh... eh... *complicated stuff*. ;)
     
     
 Actually, that should all work - the only thing that may be slightly suspect is
it calling fix_player on loaded monsters.  but if it doesn't, it then means it
is using the values as saved.  So if you did something like put 'resist_fire
100' in the monster, and then an applied force object of 'resist_fire 100' in
the inventory, the right thing would happen - monster starts with 100
resistance.  IF it then applies something, fix_player is called then, and it
will find the applied force object which has that value, and then use it.

 The problem with this is that it is more work to set up.  And you still have
cases where you don't want the monster to kill itself, but you want players to
be able to kill it.  Think of the conjurers, which may have any of a variety of
spells - you don't want them to kill them, but it would be pretty unfair to make
them immune to every attacktype they might ever cast.


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      What I intend to fix is the problem that many boss-monsters
     
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      suck because they either self-destruct due to low resistances,
     
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      or they're too hard due to immunities.
     
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      The patch is designed to help map-designers to create
     
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      special monsters of a more balanced kind.
     
     
 I don't see any real problem with it.  I would think it should be a pretty
minor mod, so would also be easy to adjust or remove later if it just doesn't
work for some reason.  If further refinement is needed, something like a
FLAG_IMMUNE_OWN_SPELLS could be added to control it to a finer degree.  You
could also make rings/amulets with that properlty as some bonus for players.