I have two small-ish quality of life improvement requests.

First, make auto-run stop if you are adjacent to a door (open or closed). This will help when running down long corridors with closed doors that you want to open; it will also make it slightly easier to get to the Priestess in New Attnam.

Second, can we get an adjustment to vision mechanics? Currently, we get situations like this:

?.????
#...??
#....?
#@....
#....?
?###??

Note the non-visible bit in the lower-left corner. While not really a PROBLEM per se, this is a bit annoying. Makes it more difficult to satisfy my completionist urges.

Wow, you're hard at work! How long until we can get our grubby mitts on this?

So here's a simple plot, using Iron as a test armor material. I ran with weights 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, and 1. (I don't recommend a weight above 1; the effects get a little extreme.) In my mind this would be best applied as a modifier to existing AC - so an iron plate VS a copper sword at 0.25 weighting would gain ~20% AC.

This sort of effect would also make metal armor substantially more potent against wooden weapons, bone (which I figure would include most bite-type attacks), and leather (e.g. whips).

One possible implementation could use different weights for different types of armor against different attack types. Blunt would, perhaps, have no modifier. Slashing might use a 0.25 modifier against chain and plate armor. Piercing might use a 0.5~0.75 modifier against plate only.

Hmm. Doing it in that particular way - with plate being less vulnerable to piercing damage - seems a little counter-intuitive from a gamer's point of view. Most games are designed such that piercing damage is the go-to way to hurt heavily armored opponents.

Since the Dawn of Time, there has been a massive gap in one of the most-used materials chains in the game: the iron/iron alloy chain.

00 Int: Tin -> Copper
00 Int: Copper -> Bronze
05 Int: Bronze -> Iron
10 Int: Iron -> Steel
15 Int: Steel -> Meteoric Steel
???
40 Int: Meteoric Steel -> Adamant

This has always felt a little silly. Any ideas on how to smooth this curve out a bit, while preserving balance?

I agree with both of your points. This idea would really be just to add a little additional gradation in armor classes - who knows, something between leather and chain might be really nice!

Re: Capristo's point in particular: One way to think about (resolve? change? idk) the "changing armors" situation could be through a combination of different dungeon environments, and different player stats. Current PCs have a specialty (i.e. some PCs are born needing less XP to level up arm/leg strength than agaility/dexterity, and vice versa). Someone with much higher mobility than strength would, naturally, want to favor a lighter type of armor that doesn't impede them as much. This could further be tweaked by having certain dungeon environments favor lighter (slow, heavy hitters) or heavier (lots of fast, weak attacks) armors. Thus if an agility-centered character wanted to do a dungeon full of bats, he might do well to wear ring (or chain) mail instead of simple leathers.

Just a thought/option.

Thinking about it, though, *if* this sort of addition is ever to be implemented, it might be best to do it *concurrently* with armor balancing. Additional armors will require additional balancing - both for the new armors, to make sure they fit the curve, and for the old armors, to make sure they don't become obsolete.

Armor balance is such a big issue (which probably ought to encompass shields as well!) that I doubt anything definitive could be done for the next release.

I'll see what I can whip up tomorrow morning before work. (I would do it now but the beer is already out.)

So we currently have three (ish) types of armor: soft, chain, and plate. This covers a wide variety of cases and we already are struggling to get the balance right between the three (soft armor is generally held to be superior in most cases, with the possible and transient exception of Atavus' arcanite plate).

However, I think it would be interesting to include other in-between options for armor. two possibilities are ring mail (leather armor reinforced with a metal secondary material, between soft and chain) and scale mail (metal armor with a leather secondary material, would lie between chain armor and plate). Alternate names for the same armors could be studded/reinforced leather, and coat of plates.

I was thinking about this, between classes today. We could take a page from Dwarf Fortress' book (and real life) and have the material of the armor matter for more than just "how much AC does it give". For blunt damage it probably shouldn't matter, but an additional modifier of

Ah = hardness of armor material
Aw = hardness of weapon material
n = some weighting factor for how strong this effect should be
matFac = (Ah/Aw)^n
damage = damage * matFac

might be applied to (say) slashing damage vs chain mail, slashing/piercing damage vs plate armor.

This might add an additional consideration for deciding which weapon to use: a high-hardness, low-mass sword might deal less listed damage than a lower-hardness, higher-mass sword, but it would actually end up being more effective against chain and plate armor.

Why would anyone want to use a spear? The chance to insta-kill an orc is not worth the chance of dealing half damage three hits in a row while fighting an iron golem. This would probably just serve to make blunt weapons a more popular choice, and piercing a less popular one. Consistent damage is almost always worth more than a chance for higher damage.

If you want to go this route, I would bump the upper bounds on the damage ranges. Give slashing 75%-135%, and piercing 50%-200%. I still feel like this will mostly serve to make maces more common in victory games, but the proposed bounds are too low, IMO. I mean, with proper balance it could work, probably; I just don't see it with the proposed ranges.

Aside from that, differentiating damage types is something that has been tossed around for years and years and years, but no satisfactory solution was ever arrived at. Personally, I think the simplest way would be to make some monsters resist certain damage types - hammers aren't too effective against slimes, spears don't really work against undead, swords tend to glance off of metal golems, etc...