CF: Re: Are these bugs?

[Peter Mardahl <peterm@langmuir.EECS.Berkeley.EDU>]

> 
> Some odd things I've noticed that may or may not be bugs:
> 
> 1) Holy Word vs Banishment

>     As far as I can tell, there are three differences between these two Holy
> Effect cone spells.  Banishment adds Death to the attack vector, it does
> zero damage, and it gets no wisdom bonus.  That zero damage stumped me for a
> while, until I realized that Death attacks don't depend on damage, only on
> the relative levels of the caster and target.  So, with that zero, the Holy
> Effect vector does 3 * 0 damage.  Why is it there?  Shouldn't Banishment at
> least hurt a little even if the target is strong enough to resist being
> destroyed?

No, when I wrote the spell, I intended it to be a 'clean up the annoying
small fry' spell, not a general utility spell.  It works exactly as intended.
If you want to do damage to things, you have Holy [Orb|Word]. 


> 2) Undead
> 
>     Only priests of a cult that considers undead their enemy (or unaligned?
> priests) can banish them or slay them with Holy Word, but any priest (of
> sufficient level) can Turn or Command them.  Should Turn Undead and Command
> Undead be usable if undead are neither friends nor foes?  Lythander and
> Mostrai, for example, should have _no_ power over undead, while Gaea and
> Valriel should be better than "unaligned" at turning them, but not so good
> at controlling them.  Devourers on the other hand, should be able to Command
> Undead especially well, but unable to turn them at all.

These are all good ideas, in my opinion.  Why not see if you can build
a consensus and code these changes?

> 5) Rare Prayers
> 
>     From reading the gods.c code, when a god considers whether to grant a
> rare prayer, only prayers of aligned paths (and non-repelled - redundant? if
> not redundant, why isn't non-denied checked?) are considered.  That makes
> them extremely rare and encourages priests to switch gods to learn all the
> spells.  Wouldn't attuned or neutral be better?

Hmm, you should probably forget prayers learned when you switch gods.

> 6) Protected && Vulnerable == immune to protection?
> 
>     It's possible to be protected and vulnerable to the same attack type,
> which apparently cancels out.  (dam *= 2; dam /= 2;)  That kinda makes
> sense.  But why would Lythander grant his priests protection from confusion
> AND make them vulnerable to confusion?  It not only cancels out, but it
> prevents any other Protection from Confusion magic from working.  This /has/
> to be a mistake, right?  Even if protection is made additive, it just
> doesn't make sense.

This HAS to be a problem with the archetype.

> 7) Your weapon still hungers to slay enemies of ... nobody in particular
> 
>     Gods only grant slaying power to weapons that aren't already enchanted
> to slay something.  Any particular reason for that?  I don't see why Valriel
> should decline to make a Dragonslayer also slay demons and devils.  It would
> just become a Dragonslayer of Valriel.
>     The gods' refusal to bless each other's sacred weapons already prevents
> one weapon from being blessed to slay the enemies of multiple gods.  There's
> no problem with adding a god's attacktype to a magical weapon.  If it's just
> a matter of merging the slaying fields, I have a patch for that.  I'm
> testing it now and it seems to work okay.

I thought I'd used strstr to search for stuff in the slaying field,
which means you'd just have to add stuff to it:  a slaying field like this:
"undead, demon, bear, vulture, Ross Perot"
would slay all of these things.  Or at least it would once.  Is strstr not
used anymore?

PeterM
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