bleed effect

[Dakk]

"Somewhat ok" is not a condition that I'd deem sufficient for a spell caster to gain the appropriate mental concentration.

I would readily agree, were it not for one simple thing - how can the very same character can cast without any restriction in "Nearly Dead" condition?

 

I agree with you there Salk, but Ardanis counter-argument is pretty solid. Eventually however, for me it comes down to this:

I thought "we" invented Bleed just to have an effect that wouldn't affect spell-casting?

I'm not against Bleed affecting spell-casting per se, but aren't everything with Bleed balanced with it NOT affecting spell-casting in mind? If it is, we would either have to rebalance those items/spells/whatever, or rename Bleed (to Minor Internal Bleeding / Nosebleed / Stubbed Toe / The Masticator Got Your Ear?).

[Demivrgvs]

I'll try to cover everything...

 

Spell failure: I wouldn't mind having bleed effect impose a concentration check, but in the current state the choice was between having it completely ruin spellcasting or not affect it. The answer was rather obvious to me, both in terms of balance and concept (I second what Dakk said about), but know that I think about it, we could add a small % spell failure chance if we really want to achive this, should we? Mmm...

 

Animation: as Ardanis says, I do not think that spamming the display with damage lines is a good idea, but I do thought about adding an animation effect. Afair there's no need to modify acid damage bam, as we already have a red version of it (haven't we?), but I didn't tried it because I also thought that having the target spray blood like a fountain could have been worse, no?

[polytope]

A damage tick is not guaranteed to disrupt spellcasting if it occurs only once per round (few spells take an entire round to cast). However, in the current implementation it's not possible for a creature to die of bleeding damage, which is unrealistic. Also, bleeding as opcode #17 goes straight through stoneskin, ofc if it were physical damage it would remove stoneskins on a per-round basis, but the gnasher club already does that and it is not a bad way to simulate a "wounding" effect. Perhaps #174 could be used to overide the hard-coded slashing damage sound.

[Demivrgvs]

A damage tick is not guaranteed to disrupt spellcasting if it occurs only once per round (few spells take an entire round to cast).

It might not be 100% spell failure (actually, for spells with casting time 9 or full round it already is a 100% spell failure), but it's really close to it unless the target only casts fast spells and times them well. Not to mention that a wounding weapon can hit the target more than once, and multiple bleeding effects stacks, resulting in multiple ticks (on average a double hit means that you can only cast spells with casting speed 4 or lower, and only if you are lucky and start casting right after one of the two "damage tick"!).

 

However, in the current implementation it's not possible for a creature to die of bleeding damage, which is unrealistic.

That's why I was thinking to replece the current "hp loss" with "stunning dmg", so that at o hp the target would at least be unconscious. But even in the current state it's absolutely impossible to notice this issue. You'll never know if the target has '1 hp' or '0 hp', but only that he's "Near Death", thus you can safely assume it has "very few hp" and the next hit will kill it.

 

Also, bleeding as opcode #17 goes straight through stoneskin, ofc if it were physical damage it would remove stoneskins on a per-round basis, but the gnasher club already does that and it is not a bad way to simulate a "wounding" effect. Perhaps #174 could be used to overide the hard-coded slashing damage sound.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here...do you want bleeding damage to remove stoneskin layers? If yes, I cannot agree, actually it probably shouldn't even work on a stoneskinned character. If not, the current solution works exactly as it always did, bypassing stoneskin completely.

[polytope]

Also, bleeding as opcode #17 goes straight through stoneskin, ofc if it were physical damage it would remove stoneskins on a per-round basis, but the gnasher club already does that and it is not a bad way to simulate a "wounding" effect. Perhaps #174 could be used to overide the hard-coded slashing damage sound.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here...do you want bleeding damage to remove stoneskin layers? If yes, I cannot agree, actually it probably shouldn't even work on a stoneskinned character. If not, the current solution works exactly as it always did, bypassing stoneskin completely.

 

In the vanilla game bleeding and poison both share opcode #25, stoneskin protects against this effect as well as the poisoned portrait icon (an interesting concession to realism by the developers, for injected poison anyway). However, it's obviously undesirable for every creature immune to poison to be immune to bleeding, or for bleeding to be curable via antidote.

 

Poison actually interacts strangely with mirror-image effect as well: Mirror-images can block both poison and the poisoned portrait icon (again, realistic if it's not AoE poison), but if you manage to cast MI while poisoned the damage tick will remove mirror-images even though the damage itself is not prevented by MI.

 

Delayed damage of any sort called through opcode #12 (like melf acid arrow) will also remove the mirror-images. This is kind of annoying, either it hit your character and MI should not protect against it in successive rounds, or it hit an image and you character shouldn't incur further damage...

 

Overall, I think delayed physical damage is the least buggy way to implement bleeding; it will still behave strangely with mirror-images, but at least it won't go straight through stoneskin (as in vanilla). It will remove stoneskins, but this is possibly justifiable, as whatever "wounding" factor which makes the sword work can also eat away at stoneskin.

 

Also, a mirror-image should realistically be removed by every attempted attack since any contact would reveal that it's an illusion - if they wear off faster than normal due to a hit from a wounding weapon it's not such a big deal, this should happen anyway in the course of combat.