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[Techhead]

Undead and many forgotten beasts (such as those composed of stone or gemstone) are near-impossible to kill mainly because:
A: They lack living parts, and require decapitation, bisection, or bodily destruction (i.e. magma) to kill.
B: They are made of tough materials like bone, stone, and gem.

An easy solution for this is to lower the material strength of body parts as they take damage. This is a realistic simulation of deformation, cracks, and hairline fractures that develop with repeated blows. The more you hit it, the easier it becomes to break. Hit something enough times with a hammer and it shatters.
This way, repeatedly striking a creature in the upper body will eventually grind the torso into dust!

[CppThis]

That would work, but maybe a better solution would be a sort of 'stealth HP' that only kicks in if/when a particular creature *should* be dead from massive trauma, but isn't for some reason.  That would also address complaints about dwarves/goblins running around with a two pages of injuries and generally provide a failsafe for any unforseen future injury system bugs.

[Max White]

Meh, I was just going to wait until syndromes work properly and then make silver super effective against undead, but this is cool too.

[Pilsu]

Let's face it, a creature made out nothing but stone would be impossible to kill. Putting in video gamey HP counters and whatnot is fixing it from the wrong end. If the game generates unkillable beasts, then clearly those beasts must be removed from the game, not the game altered so that they can be killed even if it makes no sense. Ever tried to destroy a granite boulder, let alone one that tries to kill you back? Spoilers, you are going to lose. Every time. Use dynamite instead. Even that's a bit iffy. No amount of hammering the damn boulder will make a practical difference unless the beast is made from sandstone.

Massively heavy and dense creatures like golems should probably be very slow.


Bone shouldn't be that tough. If you can slice it completely off with a sword, why wouldn't a less lucky blow crack it? Skeleton bits should probably sever when they're mangled or broken. Zombies would still be unkillable, unless we just make sufficiently broken limbs unusable. Eventually, the zombie would be too broken to move anymore and cease to be a threat. That's realistic. Making the head a magical weak spot makes no sense if the creature isn't alive to begin with. The distinction between dead and not-dead poses problems though, since the AI wouldn't want to touch the quivering heap, let alone throw it into the garbage pile. Perhaps all important joints being unusable should just automatically kill the thing? As much as I'd like to mount moaning undead heads on pikes (I shall call him Murray), it should probably count as dead by the time it can't move.

[Silverionmox]

Mmmm.. Maybe regenerating creatures ought to have a central regeneration point, that regenerates all parts attached to it (eg. the heart of a troll). Otherwise all parts would regenerate a complete creature.

That central part could also have the soul linked to it.

For undead that would imply that parts severed from that central point linked to the soul are just body parts from then on. Destroying the central point would be one way of putting the undead to rest. For example, putting a stake through a vampire's heart. For undead zombies the heart could be used as well, for skeletons the skull probably would be more appropriate. Liches have their phylactery. Ghosts might be tied to objects important to them in life. The latter two would not really be bodyparts, of course.
It could also be used to give the megabeasts weak spots, like some dragons have (the thiny white spot on the belly, the heart of the giant in the egg in the duck in the well on the island behind the seven seas and the seven mountains, etc.).

[Zalminen]

Let's face it, a creature made out nothing but stone would be impossible to kill.

Umm... Legendary miners are already mining through stone like it was paper, why should stone suddenly be indestructible when mobile?

[catsplosion]

There are natural, non-fakey solutions to most of these problems.  When sever-on-breaks works again, you'll be able to kill a colossus just fine.  A ball of foo really should respond to the amount of foo it has left -- not entirely unlike HP -- and get sickly and die as it runs low.  If it's a ball of vomit in a shell, you need only drain the vomit.  If it's a ball of stone, then your legendary miners had better have at it with their adamantine-coated lead war mattocks until enough stone is chipped away.

But in some cases, what we really need is an AI that doesn't fear a cripple.  What's the harm with an invulnerable Titan if you can hack it down to harmlessness and your civilians won't run in fear?  Have the thing chained up front as a show of your power.  Those are the features we should really be asking for.

[CppThis]

But in some cases, what we really need is an AI that doesn't fear a cripple.  What's the harm with an invulnerable Titan if you can hack it down to harmlessness and your civilians won't run in fear?  Have the thing chained up front as a show of your power.  Those are the features we should really be asking for.

That would be cool, but I think the bigger issue here is that procedural generation has a tendency to produce a lot of unexpected, really wonky results and it can be extremely difficult to check for every single possible combination resulting in a mechanically invincible monster.  I'm not saying HP is a good thing or should be applied to normal situations, but when doing things dynamically it's a good idea to include a couple of failsafes.

[Neonivek]

I think, though I am not entirely sure, that the issue with skeletons isn't that Bone is too hard

It is that I think the game assumes that a Skeleton is a solid mass of bones.

[GRead]

I don't actually see a fundamental problem in using some variant of 'HP' to track damage to a given body-part. The big problem with things like Bronze Colossi is that there is no concept of cumulative damage currently; so you can pound on him for eternity without killing him, unless you can deliver a blow that is powerful enough to instantly kill him at full health. So why not add counters to track damage to tissue layers, reducing the protection of and eventually destroying skin\muscle\bone? Just so long as it's not some single, mystical number that magically kills the entire thing from hitting zero, and rather tracks actual damage to local tissues.

[Felblood]

The potential for creepy, crawling hands or making a ZHOAS makes this feature worth trying to save. DF's design philosophy isn't about giving up on awesome things just because they are impractical.

I think the real problem is that minor damage to your enemy doesn't occur if your weapon is softer than his surface material. Bending an iron sword over a bronze collosus' heads won't even scratch him. Wasn't part of the tissue layer re-write supposed to make it possible for minor wounds to accumulate until they could actually be a threat?

The other thing is, if the soul can be bonded to each part of a shattered creature like Jenova or Rah-Sep-Re-Tep (the creepy, immortal, undead guy from Wizardry 7), then we need a way of deciding that the broken pieces of an enemy are no longer a threat. It's implied that even if you grind him to dust and scatter his parts, Ra-Sep-Re-Tep will manage to reassemble himself eventually. However, once you shatter him into chips, the battle ends, and you can rob his house with relative impunity (the chest is trapped).

Maybe the undead's limbs need to be turned into crafts, before they can be truly defeated, but those crafts will always carry a part of that consciousness, and the undead's soul will haunt the various pieces, and try to gather them in one place, so that a one armed skeleton would wear the necklace made from his other arm, if he could find it. Items can have souls attatched to them right?

[Draco18s]

Mmmm.. Maybe regenerating creatures ought to have a central regeneration point, that regenerates all parts attached to it (eg. the heart of a troll). Otherwise all parts would regenerate a complete creature.

I believe there was a Pigmy Troll from some edition of D&D that that actually happened with.  So there was a build where the character would rip off his own arms and legs, wait for regen (now having 5 trolls) and each of them repeat the process.

I don't remember what the goal was though (kill the tarrasque at level 1?)

[Mel_Vixen]

Um to cry out loud: cant you kill without whacking things with stuff?

Ok it doesnt works for undeads but poisoning and drowning should work for a good number of Elemental's. Dumping a shitload of stone on them should work too. And has somebody tested the wave motion gun siege weapon yet? My favourite is the trapdoor with the steel spikes at the bottom.

I havent encountered thought the real tough things like Bronze-collosi with that approach.


Anyway back to topic: The undead.

The undead are magical in nature obvisiously anyway i wouldn't give them a health meter at all. Therefore i would propose that they check the overall healthiness of theyr structure say if X% of the structure are destroyed or gone they just break apart. (Didnt get bones quite brittle anyway if they get older? If so the skeleton should break apart rather easily.)

Stuff like the unliving hand just could stay a-un-live for a small while being severed and not reattached.

[Scribble]

   In myth these kind of vast monsters usualy have a weak spot (otherwise the hero cant kill them); as these forgotten beasts are obviously magicaly or divinely animated, why not give them some kind of 'magical' equivilent to a brain that when destroyed renders them inert?  A soul stone, clockwork heart or similiar.

[Deimos56]

The question remains how one is supposed to deal with steam based cre...
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