Calculating Weapon Damage pt 10: Introducing the Monster & Alignments

So far we have only considered a generic monster, one whom we can always hit (except on a natural 1 which always misses) and against whom all damage applies.  This is not always the case however. Each monster has several characteristics that can drastically change how much damage a weapon might do.  These include alignment, type, resistances, armor class, damage reduction and fortification.  Part of the reason I have continually expressed weapon damage as component parts (ie showing how much damage is done by a weapon’s holy property) is so we can easily subtract these properties when they do not apply.  This is also how the floaty numbers are more or less displayed (some weapon abilities are just incorporated into the base weapon damage – specifically [D], [E], and [S] so the first floaty number is the sum of these numbers).

Let’s start with alignment.  There are 2 parameters for alignment that are independent of each other.  The first parameter is good, neutral, or evil while the second is lawful, neutral, or chaotic.  Some weapon abilities are alignment based and will only deal damage to creatures of a specific alignments.  Holy for example only does damage to evil creatures.  Neutral and good creatures are immune to this damage.  Anarchic damage only affects lawful creatures, those that are neutral and chaotic are immune. If we remember our weapons from last time many of them had damage specific to evil creatures.  Let’s see what happens against non-evil creatures.

We can see that this is an easy adjustment to make.  We simply set the now negated properties to 0 and redo our summations.  We can also make similar adjustments with weapons that depend on creature type such as bane and vorpal effects.  These abilities only affect a specific set of creatures and against other creatures they do 0 damage just like alignment based damage.

Edited 4-21-2012: fixed an error with the greater bane and vorpal falchions where [D] and [S] were being added into damage totals.

If you have a topic or a build you’d like me to look at drop me an email (ddoepiceducation@gmail.com) or leave a comment.  I am in no way guaranteeing that I will consider, reply to, or let alone read comments in anything resembling a timely manner (sorry, time is unfortunately not an infinite resource of mine until I am high enough level to cast time stop).