The Tavern

...when the monster is on the other side of a wall?

As far as I can tell, the mechanic is as follows:

If the monster is in a space "closed off" from the player (so continuous wall or wall with closed door), nothing in the closed-off space is hit by shrapnel. However, once there is an opening, for example if a door is opened or a piece of the wall is destroyed, the formerly closed-off space is hit by shrapnel as normal.

You can see this clearly in Cigotuvi's Fleshworks, where you pass cells of monsters locked in by a wall of transparent flesh or whatever the wall-substitute is. If you deconstruct the wall of their cell, you can clearly see the explosion only hitting the area outside the cell, on the same side as the player. The monsters inside are untouched. If you manage to blow up a piece, though, you can hit the monsters on the inside.

I'd like to suggest that this be changed but want to make sure I understand what's going on first. This inconsistency takes some of the fun out of using LRD with Ashenzari as there's a lot of cases where you can't blow up unsuspecting monsters from the corridor.

Is it really fun to use LRD on every wall segment just in case there are monsters on the other side of the said wall?
Also of course sometimes player would try to lower Int to reduce spell power to keep the walls standing.

Your assessment is pretty much correct.

Fwiw it used to work the other way, where you could kill things on the other side of walls, where they couldn't reach you. The additional requirements were added because:

1. It became optimal to lower your spellpower in some circumstances to avoid breaking the wall (as vaf points out)
2. It was decided that killing things that can't even approach you is overpowered and stupid, particularly with ash.
3. It was optimal to stop and fire low powered lrd at walls you had never seen before just in case there was a monster on the other side which was horribly tedious, and scummy.

And maybe some other reasons too.

So to prevent degenerate play, a mechanic is introduced which is both spoilery and immensely counter-intuitive? It seems like it would be much more elegant to simply have monsters move away from the wall when it starts exploding at them. You could get one free hit, but monsters you can kill with one LRD aren't really a threat to begin with.


No, that is not fun, and it would never occur to me to do so. "Optimal play" is the hobgoblin of small minds.

And what do you do if there is a corridor on the other side of the wall, such that the critter can't move away?

As awkward as it is, there was a lot of round and round discussion about it. Most of the proposed solutions for keeping the old behavior in some form were soundly ruled out for solid gameplay reasons, and you might concievably come up with something novel in terms of a solution, but "have the monster move away from the wall" isn't it.

Plus monsters are *really* stupid. Adding stuff like a memory of which walls exploded at them so they can avoid them is really high complexity to handle a single special case for an individual spell.

Additionally such a memory, were it to come to be, could be exploited to herd critters in ways that made it safer to explore, or shove them into other locations where you could lrd them, unless that memory "expired" after some point, and if so, how that worked would be yet another level of complexity, probably with its own loopholes to exploit.

So to get rid of a spoilery and counter-intuitive mechanic, you introduce a different spoilery and counter-intuitive mechanic?

I disagree.

The current mechanic is counter-intuitive and spoilery because an unspoiled player would expect LRD to always work the same way: it creates an explosion of shrapnel in all open squares surrounding the targeted square, based on spell power and targeted material. It turns out this is not the case, although it used to be: there will be no explosion on the other side of walls which separate the player from the space beyond them, as outlined above. The reason for this is the desire to prevent certain tactics that are considered degenerate; the result is that the spell is inconsistent and doesn't really 'make sense' in the way that, say, magic dart makes sense. To discover this inconsistency, a player either needs to be spoiled or observe the use of the spell under certain demonstrative conditions.

That monsters simply stand still and allow themselves to be LRD'd to death is a broader problem in that they still do this in certain layouts when there is a gap in the wall. As far as I know there's no other situation in the game where a monster allows itself to be killed without either attacking or running away. Again, the intuitive assumption IMO would be that the monster would move when being LRD'd in that way, and the exploitable spoilery mechanic would be knowing that they will just wait there if the player is not in view.

There is one monster which consistently keeps its distance from the player: the orb spider. A reasonable solution would be to give corridor-LRD'd monsters orb spider avoidance AI based on the center of the explosion. If there's concern about herding, they could be afflicted with fright as per a scroll of fear so that they attempt to leave the area. A more drastic solution would be to not allow any spells to do damage outside of LOS, but again I think this would take a lot of the fun out of LRD.

LRD is powerful, even moreso as an Ash worshipper, formicid, or antennaed demonspawn, but I don't think it would be game-breakingly powerful even if we could LRD monsters in adjacent corridors. I know one of duvessa's goals is to eliminate all possibility for degenerate play, and it's one that many on these forums share; in this case, though, it seems like we lose more in intuitiveness and consistency than we gain in systematic spam-proofing.

You can treat lrd as an explosion on your side of the wall, it cannot damage monsters on the other side before the whole wall is destroyed.