Re: (TFT) Hurting undead / other dimensionally / other worldly creatures

[srydzews@ix.netcom.com]

Rick Smith wrote:
>Hi all, 
>I have been working on and off on a many page 
>expansion to TFT undead. One thing I've been 
>playing with is making tougher monsters immune
>to normal weapons. For example, some creatures
>can only be hurt by silver weapons, or by magic
>weapons, etc. 

I think the better way to handle this is to give
the creatures generally high armor/hit points, 
but then make them vulnerable to certain attacks.

The traditional approach is to leave the creature
fairly average in terms of hit dice/armor class, 
but then throw on an "immunity to normal weapons"
for good measure.  The "INW" approach gets into 
messy questions like 'so is he immune to falling
damage?  If not, why not?  How about thrown 
boulders?  How about hundred-ton boulders or 75mm 
ATG rounds?'

If you quantify it, and just give the creature 
eight points of armor that isn't effective against
magical weapons, you've short-circuited a lot of 
potentially messy questions while still leaving
the critter effectively immune to the townsfolk's
"pitchfork and short sword squad".

To make a creature to more vulnerable to serious 
magic weapons and less so to the +1 stuff that 
everyone seems to get ahold of, you could give 
it, say, an incredible 12 points of armor against 
everything, but triple any magical bonuses to 
damage.  That way a +3 weapon would be pretty 
effective, but a +1...not very.

If you really want blanket immunities, it's 
probably better to take the approach that steel/
wood/whatever just harmlessly passes right through
the critter rather than bouncing off.  

Another possibility would be to have the creature
only take damage from the enchantment on a weapon.
All weapons pass right through, but enchanted ones
somehow disrupt the critter's integrity.  Perhaps
the damage equals the weapon's bonus to damage plus
half its bonus to-hit?  (with apologies to EGG and 
his Yeth Hounds, of which this is a rip-off.  But 
it can make for a really nasty critter.)

-----------------------------------------------
Stan Rydzewski
 (And regarding Polish heritage and TFT, let me 
  just say that I'd think that 6d+2 wouldn't do 
  too bad against a Pzkw II's side armor.)


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