Author: Marzo Sette Torres Junior
Date: 07-22-09 01:37
For all intents and purposes, the difficulty setting does the following things:
* Increases enemy Combat, damage and armor;
* Decreases your Combat, damage and armor.
The change in the value is equal to the difficulty rating; you add it to enemy statistics and subtract it from yours.
The to-hit roll is effectively a 30-sided dice; 30 always hits and 1 always misses. You take your Combat value, subtract your opponents' and add 15; if the die roll is at least equal to this value, you score a hit. So a difficulty of +1 effects a change of 2/30 in probability, or 6.666...% (it is actually slightly different from that because of 1 and 30). There are some other bonuses or penalties (some weapons and missiles give bonuses to hit, some always hit, missiles have range penalties), but that is the basic.
Damage is rolled differently: a random value from 1 to 1/3 your strength (if nonzero), plus a random value from 1 to all weapon and missile bonuses (if the total is nonzero). Enemies increase their damage by a fixed amount equal to the combat difficulty, while party members lower it by the same value.
Damage is reduced by armor; armor protects by a random value between 1 and the total protection of all armor pieces. Enemies add difficulty setting to total armor, party members subtract it (this is before randomizing); armor can never be negative.
Damage is further complicated by the fact that some damage types do not use strength (e.g., lightning), some ignore armor (lightning, ethereal and sonic) and a weapon that does 127 damage (e.g., glass swords) do a fixed 127 points (ignoring strength and difficulty) *and* ignore armor. Also, some armor and monster flags give immunity to a damage type, and some monster flags give vulnerability to a damage type (doubling final damage).
Moreover, paralyzed, sleeping or unconscious characters may still take damage even if armor gives complete protection (the strength portion of the damage, regardless of damage type or anything else).
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Marzo Sette Torres Junior
aka Geometrodynamic Dragon
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
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