The other types of damage would be characterized according to the devs' perception. It's not like there are no templates to go by: many RPGs, many TBS, many other games as well. If you cast a spell called "Iron chef's swirling blades" that spell will do physical slashing damage, as blades "materizalize" and do damage. As for the rest of the spells, those that negate armour would of course do that. As for the armour piercing spells and those that actually get stopped by armour, I guess you can work them out the same way as fire protections work in DomII. The question in SPB would be do you have a basic protection value, and the resistances are added to it subtracting from all damage that goes above that protection value, or do you just take into acount resistances, and there is no basic protection. If latter is the case, then you would need to attribute protections to all specific types of damage, and characterize them as well (and also rework the current system more thoroughly). If former was the case, then you simply subtract that basic protection from damage, unless otherwise stated, and specific resistances diminish the damage of a certain type that goes over the protection value.
Examples:
scenario 1.
You have 8 prot. and 25% resist piercing, and the damage dealt is 16 piercing. 8 is stopped immediately (as it is now), and 25% of the remaining 8 is also neutralized, hence the actual damage received is 6. If that damage is armour piercing at the same time, you would stop 4 at once, and 25% of the remaining, hence resulting damage would be 9, unless AP means that it halves resist as well, in which case it would be 10 or 11(depending on rounding up or down for unclear cases). If it's armour negating, you receive the full 16. If there is no specific resistance specified for that damage type, but it's not armour piercing, you would stop 8, and get 8.
scenario 2.
If you have no basic protection, and have only 25% resist, the damage would be 12. If it's armour piercing, it halves the protection, hence the damage would be 14 (only 12.5% would be stopped). Armour negating again gives full 16, as well as if no specific resistance for that damage type is specified.
I think I favour scenario 1 a bit more myself. Well, in fact, I would favour an even more complicated scenario, where each weapon can do more than one type of damage etc. , as I described previously when I was talking about Siege of Avalon system, but out of these two, the first is more appealing. Of course, these scenarios don't take into acount the random dice, but it would work the same.
And you can of course have a third scenario, where you would simply have different protection numbers for different damage types that would behave as a current system, i.e. no percentile values, but different basic protections. That would also be ok.
As for the kinetics argument, that giants should do crushing damage in addition to e.g. piercing because of the impact, methinks that's already factored in with addition of strenght to the equation. Against the same level of protection and using the same weapon, a stronger unit will always do proportionally more damage, since the damage = weapon damage + strenght, and that, in my view, covers the difference in kinetics. After all, it's not like the hoburgs fly around when hit by a troll anyway.... Not that I can't think of a system that could incorporate things like that as well, but, since people already have problems with this one, I'll stop now....
[ October 09, 2003, 19:32: Message edited by: HJ ]