Less luck-based magic resistance

[morazor]

I don't post much, so I hope for the best... I've searched the forum and the dev wiki, I didn't find any discussion on this topic.
Anyway...

The way magic resistance works feels very luck-based. According to the game philosophy, too much luck-based stuff is not good.

I understand that random results are an interesting challenge:

- the player must plan a strategy keeping in mind the worst case scenario
- the player must change the strategy on the run, as the fight goes on

Keeping that in mind, I'd like to see a bit smoother approach to magic resistance anyway... in some cases the outcomes of certain actions can range from "omg i'm dead" to "easy win lol" just based on luck. This is evident when playing an hex-based stabber for example.

A way to have less random outcomes may be using some sort of resource pool, let's call it "resistance points".
Resistance points is a score that grows when the player or monsters is target of a resistable effect. Instead of having just a chance to be resisted, the effect will add some value to the magic resistance score... how much it will add depends on magic resistance and spell power, it can be a value like the currently used chance of success multiplied by a random coefficient.

The idea is to keep a history of how much the target has resisted and avoid super-lucky success or failure.
Every time the target goes over 100 resistance points, the effect will pierce his resistance and the target will lose 100 resistance points.
So if I cast a spell that sends a monster to 150 resistance points, the spell will work and the monster will retain 50 points, making the next cast easier to break the 100 points threshold.
If the target gets in one cast over 200 points, he will be victim of a stronger/longer version of the effect and reset his score to 0.

With this approach the luck factor in magic resistance will be reduced a bit: it won't be possible to make long unlucky failure chains or one-cast lucky shots.

I hope that I've been clear, my english is a bit rusty

[Sar]

That seems complicated. Maybe MR should just influence the length of a hex? So if you got paralyzed through high MR you get ~1 turn of paralysis (bad, but manageable), if you got marked through high MR it doesn't last forever, etc.

[morazor]

Well, the basic idea is that now magic resistance has 2 possible outcomes: yes or no.
I'd like to make it more smooth, with other outcomes like: "no, but the next time will be better", "no and don't think that the next cast will be the lucky one", "no, but if you try harder you'll eventually win".
I'd like to see multiple outcomes, like damaging spells: with Conjurations you can miss, you can injure, you can kill... Luck is involved, but its effect is mitigated by the fact that usually you need multiple successful casts to obtain the final effect (ie: the enemy dies).

The length and strength of the magic effects are already changing according to spell power and monster level or resistance. Making just shorter or longer effects can lead to other issues... for example: with a stabber if you can put to sleep a monster with Ensorcelled Ibernation at melee range, you need just one turn to kill it; for Banishment there isn't a power gauge, it's just success or failure. Because of these factors, I think that would be better to keep the current works/doesn't work approach, but keeping track of how many time the effect failed.

[Sar]

What I mean by "complicated" is that this proposal would require adding something like another HP bar to almost all monsters that you need to attack with Hexes.

[morazor]

Ah, I see.

It can be achieved using the messages you get when you hex something. "The foo barely resist" would mean that his resistance points are about to finish or "The foo resists with almost no effort" would mean that you just dented his resistance pool.

[Mankeli]

What I mean by "complicated" is that this proposal would require adding something like another HP bar to almost all monsters that you need to attack with Hexes.

Spoiler: show

You can also have one made out of steel or aluminum.

I support making magic res less binary, like in Sar's proposal, but this seems way too complicated. Also it would be tedious to constantly read some kind of vague messages about the change in resistance points.

[Sar]

I didn't mean that showing those numbers/bars would be difficult, just remarking on how it will generally make Hexes work in a more complex way and would require complete rebalance of monster (and player, if the chance is symmetrical) MR and Hexes overall.

[morazor]

Well, the implementation I've proposed it's an example made to keep the spells mechanics similar to how they work now... while adding some kind of memory of how much the target has resisted and avoiding one-cast lucky wins when the chances are low.
IMO would be harder to balance the strenght of the effects, because sometimes magic resistance effect are just win or lose (as in the Banishment or Ensorcelled Ibernation + stab examples).

Well anyway, I'm happy to see that someone is concerned about how MR works

[Quazifuji]

This sounds a bit like Dark Souls' status effect system. When you get hit with an attack that causes a status effect, there's a bar that starts filling up. The bar rains over time. When it gets full, you get afflicted with the status effect. So when an enemy can sometimes cause a really nasty status effect, it's not a chance of causing it each attack and you have to either never get hit or get lucky, instead you'll get the status if you take too many hits, but you can see when you're getting close to it and play more defensively or run away if things get too dangerous.

I like this idea for Crawl because it would have the same tactical component too. I think this would work well not just for casting hexes on enemies, but for getting hit by status effects yourself too, especially for nasty ones like Paralysis and Banishment. I've had at least one character die due to being banished in Elf despite having a respectable amount of MR. Similar frustrating things can have paralysis - you can have enough MR to resist an enemy's banishment or paralyze 99% of the time, but you still have to either play like you could get paralyzed at any time or risk an unlucky death. This system would instead give you warnings. With a decent amount of MR, there's no risk of just suddenly getting hit by that 1% banish or paralyze, but instead you might get your resistance meter filled up and then you know to get out of there because you could get banished or paralyzed at any time.

Honestly, while I think figuring out the way to display it is something to figure out, I think this would be fantastic way to make resistable magic more tactical and less luck based whether you're casting it or the enemy is.

One possible simplification that might make it easier to display: instead of a bar, just have a single partial status effect. Decrease the odds of effects bypassing magic resistance entirely in one turn, but add the possibility for some effects to be partially resisted. When an effect gets partially resisted, then a status effect is gained that makes it so the next time the effect would be partially resisted, it hits instead. For the player, partially resisted effects could just be represented by grey status effects similar to small amounts of magic contamination (to my knowledge, none of the status effects this would be used for - confusion, paralysis, banishment - ever appear in grey text currently). For monsters, it could maybe be a gray version of the normal status icon. No new bar, just a reduction of the possibility of an effect hitting right away but an increased chance of repeated attempts hitting and a warning when you're vulnerable.

Another, even simpler possibility that doesn't require any new status effects would be to make any resistible magic effect have a chance of applying a vulnerability-style -MR effect, but decrease the effect of resistible effects working on things that aren't vulnerable. This lets different status effects interact but doesn't require any new interface things at all.

[Lyrick]

Reduce target's MR every time their MR is checked.
The amount reduced depends on how well that particular roll did (if the roll failed miserably a negligible amount of MR is removed, if the roll nearly succeeded a great deal of MR is removed). Repeatedly hexing a single target will eventually reduce their MR to shambles.
MR is recovered a little every turn, depending on HD and their initial magic resistance.
When you finally pass the MR check, their MR is refreshed.
Vulnerability negates MR regeneration for a while (including MR refreshing upon successful hex)