MR & SP

[Zooko]

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...rt=&PHPSESSID=

Look at the table in that thread.

Take the enemy's magic penetration and subtract your magic resistance. Call this value the enemy's "penetration advantage". If he is casting a normal spell his penetration is 11, if there isn't magic+2 or drain+2 scale, and he doesn't have a Spell Focus, and he doesn't have sufficiently high magic levels in the required path, and so on. So if your guy has magic resistance 18 then the caster's "penetration advantage" is -7. Looking in the table, his chance of penetrating your magic resistance (each time that he tries) is about 4%.

But keep in mind that repeated attempts can always get lucky. For example, if he casts this spell at you seventeen times in a row, then he has about a 50% chance of getting through at least one time.

[magnate]

Zooko - thank you, that's a very helpful table. It assumes that a tie equals a save, so presumably all the equations are > not >= (so a tie means a miss in combat). I don't think I realised that 2d6OE was also used in damage calculations, but it makes sense.

So with MR 16 I am 90% like to save against a spell cast by a mage with no bonuses (extra paths, spell focus etc.), and with MR 20 I am 98% likely to save. Good.

Now, what about attacks which require an MR check, such as paralysis - are they just a basic 11? There are no paths involved, and it would be silly if spell focus helped a barbed tail paralyse you ...

... so MR of 22 or higher is pretty much proof against those annoying little paralysing buggers (dispossessed spirits?), right? (Notwithstanding the Markov principle in a large number of attacks etc.) *That's* what I was after!

Thanks to Boron, Arralen and Gandalf for the extra info - my SP games will definitely get a new lease of life. I tend to play with most settings unchanged, though I put random events to rare (otherwise you get stupid numbers of them even with Order 3) and the HoF to 15 because I love heroes. I used to play with indys 9 but that's actually worse because I can beat tough indies sooner than the AI can, so I've put it back to 3 and the AIs expand much quicker, which is tougher for me (except when they start killing each other).

I'm really hoping that Dom3 will feature some dynamic diplomacy for the AI so it can make strategic decisions about peace and war with its neighbours. In the meantime I'll check out some of these pre-allied maps you've pointed me to.

Thanks again,

CC