Magic & Metal, was Re: fighters & magic

[Nick Williams <>]

Does everyone know the D&D (or AD&D, I'm not sure) reasoning behind
*why* mages can't wear armour?  It's not just an arbitrary class
distinction, it's reasonable!

The idea is that magic is a bit like electricity.  Works fine, but you
can short it out real easy with quite catastrophic effects.  If you
attempt to cast a spell while wearing armour, the likelihood is that the
magical energy will "short" on the metal contained within the armour and
cause Badness.  Perhaps cause a fireball to detonate inside your
armour....  This also would affect the victim of a spell: assuming a
mage successfully casts an offensive spell without it detonating in his
underpants, and it is cast at a barbarian wearing a veritable smithery
of armor, then the spell will have good effect against said barbarian.

Note that the metal/magic phenomena is quite seperate to
electricity/metal phenomena: casting a lightning spell around metal
should be doubly Bad, and casting fireballs while wearing cloth robes
should also have their pitfalls.....

So before casting a spell, a mage should be careful of what metal she/he
has on their person.  So wearing a robe+4, with good boots and other
non-metallic armour would be perfectly fine.  The mage could even wear
metal armour for a while, so long as they didn't cast any spells. 
Simple to implement in crossfire: just keep a count of how much metal a
person has on them and then adjust spell effects accordingly.  Crossfire
already "knows" what objects are made of and how much they weigh.  The
"check-to-see-if-metal-broke-the-spell" check should be done before
entering the specific spell code, as it's a general thing.





Nick Williams, Systems Architecture Research Centre, City University, 
London, EC1V 0HB.  UK.

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