[Magiclysm/XE] Wielding iron or steel weapons should not trigger intolerance through gloves

[railmonkey]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

An intelligent being, which the fey are, would have to worry about being attacked by a weapon of iron or steel more than they'd have to worry about wielding one. It only makes sense that if you go out of your way to protect yourself from direct contact, you should not have to worry about causing a reaction.

Solution you would like.

I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement, but if there is a layer between skin and the offending object, it should not cause a reaction. A steel wristwatch is understandable, but a knife in a gloved hand is not. Also, most dedicated weapons have grips or handles of a different material, which sidesteps the issue entirely.

Describe alternatives you have considered.

If making the trait too weak is a concern, we could add a flag to iron and steel weapons that would essentially be a reskinned poison attack, possibly a strong poison attack, but only triggered for those with the intolerance. The intensity could increase with each successful strike landed. This, I feel, would be a more reasonable implementation. As far as allergies to worn items goes, at least one setting I've read gives Sidhe an allergy to synthetic fibers, and that's a lot more prevalent by far. Iron burns. Lycra itches.

Additional context

I've been away from CDDA for a while now, and I actually love that an iron allergy was implemented. I just want to make it better.

[Standing-Storm]

I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement, but if there is a layer between skin and the offending object, it should not cause a reaction.

The fey vulnerability to iron isn't a physical reaction, it's a metaphysical one. Simply saying that the handle of a weapon is bone (or wood, or what have you) doesn't stop the fact that you are attempting to harness the ancient bane of the Fair Folk. The same reason that you can't wear a full gambeson and then put chainmail over it and expect to be safe.

Realistically this should also extend to carrying items made of iron or steel, but doesn't because there's no way to do it in a way that isn't very invasive (e.g. scanning your entire inventory every single second and checking for iron or steel items).

For Magiclysm one could argue that it should work differently, I mostly just implemented them the same way because it was easier.

[railmonkey]

You raise a good point about metaphysicality. "Because magic", in other words, and if that's how it works, I guess that's how it works. If I can argue my case, though, the metaphysical is entwined with the physical. I'd say that it affects them physically because of their metaphysical nature. Historically speaking, there are several interpretations given for their metaphysical weakness to cold iron. Personally, I favor the interpretation that Sidhe are weak to that which is unnatural, with cold iron being the epitome of that. If they were under the Hill (is that a thing in Magiclysm lore?), I'd fully expect the sort of interactions you're talking about, for those reasons, but in the mortal realm, I'd expect at least some insulation via physical laws. To give an example, I'm not sure how much of an urban fantasy reader you are, but one of my favorite series is the SERRAted Edge, which features Sidhe mechanics. The iron weakness is very much present, but at least partially mitigated by physical protection. Some even built up a limited tolerance to direct skin contact due to how extensively they worked with the stuff. I'm not saying that we should do it that way just because other settings did, but as it currently stands, I feel that it could benefit from a more nuanced implementation. The allergy to synthetic fibers, for instance. Or plastic.

[Standing-Storm]

In XE, "cold iron" is alchemically-treated iron that's made specifically to kill the Fair Folk (and doesn't feature much into the existence of a fey character because zombies aren't walking around with cold iron weapons). I extended that out partially to explain the existence of changelings/the elemental fae practice of leaving babies behind outside the Elflands to find their way home--being born/raised in the mortal realms makes you more resistant to iron than you otherwise would be. Sure, wood elementals have real problems with iron but a wood elemental born and raised in the Bright Lands would probably start dying if they went to the mortal realms and touched iron, to say nothing of cold iron.

This is all XE stuff, though. Iron Intolerance in Magiclysm is more of a quirk that shows up in elves and goblins sometimes (and that you can take too if you want) and doesn't really have any of that metaphysical component, so I do think changing it to work based purely on skin contact for Magiclysm makes sense. I will say, though, that at the moment there's no good infrastructure that would allow me to do that (there's no moddable way to check if you have gear with a specific flag worn on a specific body part, for example).

SERRAted Edge,

Man, I read all those books I could find like 30 years ago and I've literally never heard anyone else talk about them in my entire life.

[railmonkey]

Gotcha. I was thinking purely in terms of Magiclysm, yeah. I actually haven't played around with XE, honestly, so that's on me. I added it in the title because I did a search of the pull requests and saw that iron intolerance was added to it. And okay, I can see how it would be difficult, though it still seems a shame. So it's a hard code issue, then?

And yeah, Mercedes Lackey's stuff is all great.

[Standing-Storm]

Oh, yeah--Magiclysm is more traditional elf/dwarf/orc fantasy so elves are just guys who live down the street (other than that maybe your elf neighbor fought in the Revolutionary War), and XE is urban fantasy where the Fair Folk live Underhill, werewolves hunt malign spirits in the wilds, etc.

So it's a hard code issue, then?

Yeah--we can check for flags on gear, but it's not bodypart-based, it just checks whether you have the flag on any piece of gear you're wearing at all, so for this change I'd have to go through the very-invasive process of adding a flag to every single pair of gloves in Magiclysm and that gets untenable pretty quickly.

[PGR-14]

Could we do something similar to the uncomfortable wearables? Would require some C++ shit though.

[railmonkey]

Oh, yeah--Magiclysm is more traditional elf/dwarf/orc fantasy so elves are just guys who live down the street (other than that maybe your elf neighbor fought in the Revolutionary War), and XE is urban fantasy where the Fair Folk live Underhill, werewolves hunt malign spirits in the wilds, etc.

Sounds right up my alley. I'll have to check it out, then. Do it and Magiclysm play well together, or are they mutually exclusive?

I'd have to go through the very-invasive process of adding a flag to every single pair of gloves in Magiclysm and that gets untenable pretty quickly.

I'm not entirely certain on this, but aren't there object classes that you can apply the flag to instead? I haven't looked at the code in ages (read: several stable versions ago), but I guess if there was, you'd have done it already.

[Standing-Storm]

Sounds right up my alley. I'll have to check it out, then. Do it and Magiclysm play well together, or are they mutually exclusive?

The lore won't make much sense--XE had the Cataclysm takes place slowly over decades instead of over months, so the dimensional walls got thinner and thinner and more weirdness started to break through, magick became easy enough that some ordinary people discovered it worked and how to do it, the government started quarantining areas of the country (that were becoming essentially dimensional cross-over points), and so on. It's hard to fit that in with a world like Magiclysm where magic has existed and been studied since prehistory and where a goblin might have served you your daily latte before work.

Mechnically, through, the only problem is that if you learn too much magic from too many mods you'll be basically unstoppable. I honestly think Magiclysm already gives you too much magical versatility (I always mod my own Magiclysm games so you can only learn two schools).

I'm not entirely certain on this, but aren't there object classes that you can apply the flag to instead? I haven't looked at the code in ages (read: several stable versions ago), but I guess if there was, you'd have done it already.

Sometimes but not always--it depends if there's a base object that most other things copy off of (this is how zombies work), or if they're their own individual items. If the latter, flags need to be individually assigned.