Shields and Armor Rules Types

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Zelknolf
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Shields and Armor Rules Types

Post by Zelknolf »

Just a nudge to folk who may be doing toolsetting and are confronted with masterwork or special material shields, as I've scrubbed some misleading statements from Drupal pages in the last couple weeks--

Shields are treated by NWN2 very much like armor when determining the protection they provide. They thus have an Armor Rules Type setting which (while it doesn't reliably update the default text) controls the statistical benefits of the item. It is wise to debug misbehaving shields by checking their rules type settings (it is possible, for example, to tell a shield that it is cloth armor-- in which case its only benefit is in that it can carry enchantment), and special shields (e.g. masterwork, darkwood/zalantar, mithral) should be tooled with the matching Armor Rules Type setting.

I expect to have systems to help with this starting with ACR v1.91 (which would, for example, notice a rules type vs. base item mismatch and call attention to the item-- or correct a mismatch between the material field and the rules type field and clean up common workarounds), though the information seems likely to be useful in many places.
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Re: Shields and Armor Rules Types

Post by Curmudgeon »

My experience has been that folks tooling armor models need to be reminded of this as well.

Is there enough space in the 2da for us to include rules for the Special Materials we do not have already?
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Zelknolf
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Re: Shields and Armor Rules Types

Post by Zelknolf »

Absolutely. To both parts.

ACR v1.91 already has material entries for all of the currently-approved special materials, and I'm working through armor right now (hence the latest standards threads from me trying to interpret our existing documents), which I expect to produce appropriate rules types entries to accomodate all of our approved armor types' AC/max dex/weight/ACP/ASF (though we'll still need to use item properties for things the elemental resistance of Darksteel armor or the quirky not-quite DR of Suzailian chainweave-- the functionality I mention in the previous post will help with that as much as a computer can be confident in doing).
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talonbreak
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Re: Shields and Armor Rules Types

Post by talonbreak »

Quick question: Does ALFA have Adamantine Shields?

From what I have read they have been scrapped due to a bug. I was testing it in the toolset and added DR/1 under Item Property, instead of Damage Reduction and it worked fine.

If this is allowed, how much would a light buckler cost?
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Brokenbone
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Re: Shields and Armor Rules Types

Post by Brokenbone »

Neither pnp nor ALFA give a benefit of DR for adamantine shields. I suppose pnp would give some benefit for the hardness of such a shield vs. a sunder attempt.

Back to point of thread, will MW shields or I suppose other "types" of shields ever give the right ACP simply by picking right drop down? On paper (the 2da) they should but its never worked in game.
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Zelknolf
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Re: Shields and Armor Rules Types

Post by Zelknolf »

ACP "works" and "doesn't work" by context, unfortunately.

I don't have a viable solution for all of the places it "doesn't work," but there's no sense in damning the bits of good we get because there's also bad in there. For the vast majority of cases, though, this will happen automatically with v1.91-- it spots magic shields and says "Well, this one must be masterwork, because it's enchanted" and just changes it-- similarly, a "mundane" shield with "mithral" material type will just be changed to the mithral rules type.

Also, yeah:
http://www.alandfaraway.org/node/2186

ALFA doesn't do adamantine shields. But it's not true that there's no benefit to doing so on PnP-- that shield is still a non-magical +1 enhancement weapon, which will bust /magic DR in dead magic/ antimagic/ after a disjunction, and it allows a fighter to switch two and from two-weapon fighting reasonably-effectively without changing the contents of his hands (which, in the case of a shield, would otherwise cost a standard action). NWN2 isn't very accomodating to this, though, and systems that attempted to implement it would be ugly at best.

// edit-- also, it breaks through things with lower hardness than adamantine. An adamantine shield goes through a stone door like butter.
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