Resistance Issue

[WilliamRiddle]

>>Spoiler: Age of Ashes AP2<<

Playing Age of Ashes: Cult of Cinders today we had a problem with the clay golem fight. A clay golem has physical 10 (except adamantine) resistance. This (should) mean that unless you have an adamantine weapon the first 10 points of damage dealt is ignored -- PF2 Core Book page 453.

During the fight that followed we noticed that ALL physical damage was being resisted except bludgeoning, which seemed to be properly ignoring the first 10 points of damage dealt. The fighter in the party dealt 32 points of damage on a critical hit with a halberd and FG resisted all the damage. I was also able to duplicate after the game was over.

So ... is the clay golem coded wrong? Is this some other sort of logic issue in the ruleset? Or am I missing something here?

Thanks in advance for any help.

WR

[ShadeRaven]

That's a bit odd, WR. When I look at the Clay Golem, it has the following effect line:

IMMUNE: acid; IMMUNE: bleed; IMMUNE: death effects; IMMUNE: disease; IMMUNE: magic; IMMUNE: spell; IMMUNE: mental; IMMUNE: nonlethal; IMMUNE: paralyzed; IMMUNE: poison; IMMUNE: unconscious; RESIST: 10 physical, !adamantine

The bold is what will correctly deal with physical resistance except in cases where an adamantine weapon is in use.

I tested it and it is working as expected. Can you display what you are seeing on the combat tracker under Effects for your Clay Golems?

[Darkrite]

is the weapon magic by chance? I found I had to remove the immunity to magic to let the weapons work. The Immunity to spells should be all that's required

[stephan_]

It is indeed the "Immunity: magic" that is the problem if I remember correctly. :)

[Hykim]

I have run into this as well. Having IMMUNE: magic will make a monster completely immune to any weapons which are coded to do magic damage.

[WilliamRiddle]

It is indeed the "Immunity: magic" that is the problem if I remember correctly. :)

Confirmed. Thanks for the backup folks. I'm thinking we need another resistance type for FGU that separates the two. By the time characters reach 8th level there is a pretty good chance they'll have a magic weapon. Might make more sense to move the immunity:magic to text rather than list to be auto-determined. Just spit-balling ... :)

Thanks everyone for the clarification!
WR

[Willot]

What Darkrite said IMMUNE:SPELL instead

[WilliamRiddle]

What Darkrite said IMMUNE:SPELL instead

I meant the actual PF2 monster entry. When FG does conversions they're supposed to do them verbatim. In the Bestiary it says Immunity: magic, so I'm guessing they can't change that?

Anyway ... I just noticed another issue after reviewing the video of the game (yes, we record it :D ) ...

The monk in the party was bypassing the Physical 10 resistance completely like it wasn't there. In fact, under his entry for Crane Wing and Fist attacks the damage is listed as "bludgeoning, magic". In addition, I just tested his non-magical sling attack damage and that is completely bypassing the resistance too. The character is 8th level, and I don't see anything on the sheet that says all of his attacks strike as adamantine.

Any ideas?

Honestly, the entire combat was terrible. :cry:

WR

[lostsanityreturned]

When you notice something not working as intended, get people to roll into the chat box and use the modifier widget when dragging damage results over to correct the amount or do the math in your head.

This will save you a LOT of hassle mid session when something doesn't work as intended and stop fights from feeling ruined.

As for the golems, as identified above yeah the immunity to magic is parsed incorrectly sadly. I have created fixed versions of golems and replaced the ones in the adventure with them (there are quite a few golems in AoA).

As for mundane weapons bypassing adamantine I have no idea what is going on there. With the following effect (just magic immunity removed) it works fine for me


IMMUNE: acid; IMMUNE: bleed; IMMUNE: death effects; IMMUNE: disease; IMMUNE: spell; IMMUNE: mental; IMMUNE: nonlethal; IMMUNE: paralyzed; IMMUNE: poison; IMMUNE: unconscious; RESIST: 10 physical, !adamantine

Something to be wary of (for future sessions) there is no easy fix for ghost style resistances where a ghost will have double resistances against a non magical source.

E.G. "all damage 8 (except force, ghost touch, or positive; double resistance vs. non-magical)"
You can kinda get around it with a makeshift hack effect like

RESIST: 16 all; WEAK: 8 magic; WEAK: 8 spell; WEAK: 8 force; WEAK: 8 positive; WEAK: 8 ghost touch

This usually works well, but has issues with edge cases like a spirit barbarian who has ghost touch and does positive damage which will result in the target taking 8 more damage than they should.
I got around this by having the barbarian use a -8 modifier in their hotkey bar whenever they attacked a ghost during a multi type fight. If it was a ghost only fight I just removed the ghost touch DMGTYPE entry from their in play rage effect.

[Willot]

I meant the actual PF2 monster entry. When FG does conversions they're supposed to do them verbatim. In the Bestiary it says Immunity: magic, so I'm guessing they can't change that?

Anyway ... I just noticed another issue after reviewing the video of the game (yes, we record it :D ) ...

The monk in the party was bypassing the Physical 10 resistance completely like it wasn't there. In fact, under his entry for Crane Wing and Fist attacks the damage is listed as "bludgeoning, magic". In addition, I just tested his non-magical sling attack damage and that is completely bypassing the resistance too. The character is 8th level, and I don't see anything on the sheet that says all of his attacks strike as adamantine.

Any ideas?

Honestly, the entire combat was terrible. :cry:

WR

If you drag the uneditable monster into the bestiary, you will wind up with two copies, one (the original) uneditable one and the other editable one.
Edit that golem to IMMUNITY Spell and replace the one in the combat tracker with the one you just fixed.

:)

[ShadeRaven]

You can also make your own entries for creatures by creating copy of them in the Bestiary, where you can then make changes that will effect every future use of their placement in the combat tracker, so long as you use your newly created version of the creature.

I am more than willing to look into possible fixes within the Bestiaries that will address these issues and I am sure that Trenloe will make note of any issues with how creatures are built onto the Combat Tracker so that he will look into fixing issues he has control of on his end.

In these cases, is it essentially that a creature designated as IMMUNE: magic (especially, the golems' antimagic feature) is the cause of the problems in these cases? Do we have any other examples where immune magic comes into play where it's clearly intended to only affect spell and spell-like damages?

[Trenloe]

@WilliamRiddle - sorry your combat was terrible. Golems have a terrible statblock. Just reading and trying to make some automation of the golem antimagic hurts.

To give some context - FG parses the immunities out of a NPC statblock when it's added to the combat tracker. As mentioned above, FG sees "magic" in the immunities section, so it adds an "IMMUNE: magic" effect. Attacks with magic weapons do magic damage, so FG matches any "magic" damage with the immune effect and so no damage is done.

My philosophy is to try to work with the statblocks as presented by Paizo, so that users can pretty much copy/paste from a source and use right away. However, I don't want to have any hard coded logic in the ruleset - for example, "if it's a golem remove "magic" from the immunities" - because that can have it's own issues.

Originally the ruleset added "magical" damage to the damage types of magical swords. But this caused a bunch of creature resistances to not work correctly, and other problems as product text seem to use magical and magic interchangeably, and so I changed magical weapons to use "magic" damage. Maybe that was a bad decision, but it seemed to fix more problems than it caused - to this point, golems seem to be the main issue.

I have on my plans to spend a few weeks really delving into the damage subsystem at some point. I don't know if this will ever be fully catered for though, as it's such an edge case - especially when you look at the actual details of the golem antimagic.

So, what's the short term solution? Edit the NPC statblock and change it from it's base Paizo text? Maybe change the immunities "magic (see below)" text to "special (see below)" and have a PERMEFFECT automation entry to add "IMMUNE: spell" to try to cover most of the spell damage? Then the rest of the anti-magic has to be handled manually? Or don't have any related "IMMUNE" effect entry and let the GM work it out? In the end there's no reliable solution that will automate all of the weird and wonderful things that can happen with a golem.

[Hykim]

Trenloe, as always, thanks for the response.

What is "IMMUNE: magic" doing that "IMMUNE: spell" is not already doing? Are there really monsters that should be immune to damage from magical weapons? Maybe it is there to stop spell effects from doing damage? I guess I'm just wondering if any monster should ever be "IMMUNE: magic".

[Trenloe]

What is "IMMUNE: magic" doing that "IMMUNE: spell" is not already doing? Are there really monsters that should be immune to damage from magical weapons? Maybe it is there to stop spell effects from doing damage? I guess I'm just wondering if any monster should ever be "IMMUNE: magic".
The way FG works with things like this is that they look for one or more damage types in the damage roll - you can see these being reported in the chat window. This will trigger additional processing if one of the damage types matches an immunity, resistance or weakness damage type. This is all attempting to codify the rules and sometimes doesn't quite fit into what Paizo write or intend.

I can't remember exact details off the top of my head, but there were Paizo statblocks that were treating "magic" and "magical" as the same thing, so I had to change the PFRPG2 ruleset to do the same. Also, damage types of "magic" and "spell" are different - for example, runes on a weapon cause "magic" damage but they're not "spell" damage.