Dispel Magic and Breach

[subtledoctor]

Currently, SR brings these spells closer together in application:

• It turns Dispel Magic into Remove Magic, only affecting enemies; so like Breach, it is solely for making enemies vulnerable.  (Removing ally debuffs is instead taken care of by Break Enchantment, Exaltation, Remove Paralysis, Cure Disease, Neutralize Poison, etc.)
• Both Dispel and Breach are blocked by Dispelling Screen, and they both remove the Dispelling Screen when used against it.

Dispel has a medium-sized area of effect, but it's a roll of the dice as to whether it works, and if the target buffs were applied with a high caster level it will very like fail; Breach, on the other hand, is single-target, but is guaranteed to remove all specific protections and combat protections.  That seems like a reasonable difference and trade-off between the spells.

However, they are unlike in a couple important ways:

1. Dispel Magic can bypass Globes of Invulnerability, since its effects have a power level of 0; what's more, Globes of Invulnerability are themselves dispellable, meaning in this case Dispel Magic acts like a "Magic Attack" against them.  But Deflections are not dispellable, so Dispel is not a full Magic Attack, and it does not have the "magicattack" sectype.  Breach, for its part, is more consistent in this regard: it can bypass Globes of Invulnerability since its spell level is not blocked by them; but it will not remove Globes, since they are not a specific protection or a combat protection, but rather a spell protection.
2. There are presumably some buffs coded as combat or specific protections which are not dispellable (looking at you, Moment of Prescience), and there are presumably some buffs that are dispellable but are not combat or specific protections.  So while Dispel and Breach are meant to be used in basically the same way, for the same purpose, their effect differs in subtle ways that might not be apparent to players.

I once mused about bring the two spells into line with each other to address issue #2 above, by combing through all spells in the game and setting all spells with the "combat protection" and "specific protection" sectypes to be dispellable, and setting all dispellable buff spells to have either the "specific protection" or "combat protection" sectype.  But it occurs to me that this can be done m ore easily: why should Breach use opcode 221 at all?  Why not just set Breach to use opcode 58, with parameter2 set to 0 so it automatically dispels any dispellable effects on the target?

Okay, that means you could use Breach to remove debuffs affecting your allies.  But easy fix, just make such debuffs undispellable.  We're already established that we don't want Dispel Magic to be used on allies, and Break Enchantment handles perfectly well any debuffs with confusion/feeblemind/sleep effects or with the "disabling" sectype.

So the steps would be:

1. Change Breach to use opcode 58
2. Set all disabling spells to be undispellable
3. Set Globes of Invulnerability to be undispellable

EDIT - huh, I see the problem: there is no setting to make spells "not dispellable, not bypass resistance." 

So looks like the only way to fully harmonize Breach and DM is as I said earlier: make all specific and combat protections dispellable, and make all dispellable buffs a specific or combat protection.  Okay, I'm done thinking out loud.  Thanks for listening!

[Bartimaeus]

7 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

EDIT - huh, I see the problem: there is no setting to make spells "not dispellable, not bypass resistance."

I've had a few ideas over the years that required this, and every time I get surprised to see that it doesn't. As far as I know, resist type 0 (nonmagical) and resist type 2 (not dispel/bypass resistance) are functionally exactly the same - that seems like an oversight.

(e): Something to note also is that Breach can break some non-magical effects e.g. potions, that Dispel/Remove Magic cannot. It may not necessarily be wise to so strongly equate Breach and Dispel Magic in terms of functionality.

Edited June 4, 2020 by Bartimaeus