ALFA Core Rules Update

We're rolling out another version of the ACR onto our servers this weekend.

Related to the discussions in Standards about adjusting loot drops by the looting party, slain monsters are now going to have wealth vary both randomly and by the wealth of the looting party.

People who are uninterested in the details need to only really pay attention to that the ACR will follow our (very old) DMA guideline to drop less in mixed parties, with the expectation of making it up to the poor people later. There is also handling for if items are dropped or exchanged between PCs before looting (with a fairly-long-term, but not permanent, definition of "before" -- giving something away a month ago doesn't count for anything, but if your best pal in the next area is suddenly at the cutoff because of all the stuff you gave him, the ACR will not drop anything for you, though that too functions with more-reasonable limits; giving low-value gear to the guy with the bag of holding doesn't really have an impact), but not if items are destroyed (as they're gone forever) or sold (as you now have money, which counts).

We might extend advice to people to try to play in diverse groups if that's possible, as being in the same mixed group every time you adventure makes it very hard to make random drops fix anything.

For actual changes...

  • The problem with #sethp behaving oddly, as recorded in the last changelog, is corrected. #sethp should now actually try to place the creature's current hit points to its argument
  • The Touch Attack monster feat now accommodates Allips (doing wisdom drain until driving their target insane) and Greater Shadows (doing 1d8 strength damage until it kills their target). The string values of "ACR_TOUCH_ATTACK" are "ALLIP" and "GREATER SHADOW" respectively.
  • The OOC horse appearance item should now weigh a little less, to help mitigate its brutal OOCness.
  • ACR_Candlekeep now stores information about all base item types, which the ALFA.Shared assembly can provide on request.
  • NPCs on the ACR AI are now better at identifying which items in their inventories are actually weapons, and should no longer attempt to wield non-weapons as weapons.
  • Slain monsters now modify their loot dropped by x4 (for very-poor parties), x2 (for poor parties), x1 (for near-target-wealth parties), x0.5 (for rich parties), x0.2 (for very-rich parties; decimal truncation is the reason this is not in practice 0.25). Parties containing members who are above the wealth cutoff will receive no loot for killing monsters.
  • The acr_wealth_i library provides ACR_CalculateMultiplier(object oPC) and ACR_CalculateCombatMultiplier(object oPC), if module-specific content wishes to work with these systems.
  • A bug that could cause incorporeal creatures to still drop corporeal things is corrected.
  • NPCs who slay other NPCs will not prompt the dropping of loot.