Renaming of Holy / What is magic really all about?

[Gauteamus]

I have been following the discussion about renaming/reshaping the Holy (always capitalized:-) damage type in the developers forum.
Not beeing able to post there I bring my dubious posts to a new thread.

Some of the posts in the thread above seem to want a more generic replacement of the current holy, something indicating an ability countering or subduing magical effects in general, possibly including, but not limited to 'religious style' attacks like that of the White Mage.

How do magic work, what is magic, in the World of Wesnoth? I am sure there have been many threads on this topic in the history of this forum, but a search on 'magic' brought up so many hits that I rather start my own than contribute to an old. My imression is that dealing with magic draws the wielder against 'chaos' (whatever that may be) - magic users include Saurians, Dark Adepts, Wilderness elves and the red mage line that seems to draw the user at least towards neutral alignment with increased experience in the field.

My suggestion for the damage type would be Order.
-- Blade, Impact, Pierce, Fire, Cold, Order.

This name has a slight tangent to the religious/cultic, while being an opposite force to magic as I see it in WoW.

Now slaughter this idea, or explain what magic really is beyond a gameplay effect.

[Temuchin Khan]

How do magic work, what is magic, in the World of Wesnoth?

To some degree, that has generally been left to the individual fan's imagination.

My imression is that dealing with magic draws the wielder against 'chaos' (whatever that may be) - magic users include Saurians, Dark Adepts, Wilderness elves and the red mage line that seems to draw the user at least towards neutral alignment with increased experience in the field.

Yes and no. The Dark Adept and Saurian Augur are quite chaotic, whereas a White Mage is nothing if not lawful.

My suggestion for the damage type would be Order.
-- Blade, Impact, Pierce, Fire, Cold, Order.

I was thinking of proposing something similar, but the idea still needs some time to gell. I would see it not so much as ordering than as rearranging the elements of which the thing is composed.

Once I come up with a name I like, I'll probably post it in the other thread.

[Simons Mith]

I've been following that discussion quite closely too. Of the choices mooted thus far, 'Arcane' is the one I like best. Some have objected that we already have magical 'Fire' and 'Cold' attacks and therefore we have to explain what specifically is damaging about 'arcane', which is after all mostly just another simile for 'magic'. My own view is that we don't need to get too caught up by that distinction. This is because magic can be used to indirectly cause other effects. So you can use magic to make a fireball as the Red Mage does, or you can burn someone with a flaming brand, as the Orcish pillager does. You can magically call lightning down on someone, or you can get them to stand on top of a hill waving a sword above their head while shouting 'All Gods are bastards^wsilly billies!' You could have a mage that summons clouds of daggers and projects them at a target. That would produce a magical Blade attack, presumably. Cold is a bit more troublesome, but I'd hope someone could come up with a suitable magical gobbledygook explanation. So having 'Arcane' as an attack type makes a lot of sense to me as a 'catch-all' for all types of magical effects that don't readily translate to an obvious physical effect (such as a magical fireball producing Fire damage). Dispelling the magical bonds binding an undead creature into its physical body; weakening the bonds of a living creature's life force; using magical telekinesis to cruch a unit's trachea, in best Darth Vader style; and so on. These are all 'Arcane' effects in the sense that they don't correspond to any one obvious physical source of damage (in contrast to Fire and Lightning, which do) so I say 'Arcane' is a good catch-all term to describe them.

In fact this flags another attack type as suspect; one can imagine mundane or magical Fire causing damage, similarly mundane or magical Lightning. But I can't think of a credible way to produce a mundane 'Cold' attack. Which suggests to me that the Cold attack type should be the one to go. But that should be a separate debate in another thread, and that's not a thread I intend to start.

[Temuchin Khan]

I like "arcane," too -- it sounds the best. Currently, however, I think "radiant" is the option that best fulfills the developers' stated criteria.

I did decide what I would want to call the "order"-type attack suggested in this thread, though: something like "morph" or "morphic" or "remorph" or "allomorph." The idea would be that the attacker attampts to rearrange the composition of the defender.

Undead being magical constructs in the first place, it makes sense for them to susceptible to this sort of an attack.

As for demons, it is not uncommon for them to be portrayed as incapable of anything other than destruction. Such a creature would arguably be unable to resist an attempt to rearrange its fundamental composition and would therefore be vulnerable to an "allomorph" attack.

Other sorts of creatures would be more or less vulnerable depending on the degree to which they are dependent on magic and/or incapable of taking constructive action in the world.

[Stilgar]

"Exorcise" came to my mind when reading that discussion, until I saw that the idea was to move away from the concept of "Holy."

Possibly a dumb suggestion, but how about "Unmake"? It's different from "Dispel" in that it doesn't necessarily impy that it's a spell that's being unmade. It implies damage being done. It could be explained as creatures that are artificially made such as undead, golems, etc. would be more succeptible to it. More natural creatures could still be unmade, just not as easily.

Edit: Having read Temuchin Khan's recent posts, I have to say that I greatly prefer "Radiant" over "Mystic" or "Arcane".

[Darth Fool]

After having stared at the forum discussion for a while, I finally came up with the following criteria for acceptable damage words. Please consider the following sentence:

"The holiness of the sword did far more damage to the vile creature than the blade."

Note that for any damage type we ought to be able to swap the correct form of the word used for the damage type in for either holiness or blade and still have a meaningful sentence. Note that this works for holy(holiness), blade, impact, fire, and cold(coldness). Piercing kind of works for pierce. If you have to add an extra word after the damage word to make sense it doesn't count. This eliminates some of my own and other suggestions in the other thread.

As for mundane ways to cause cold damage: dump liquid nitrogen on something.

On another note, don't expect any discussion of the names in this topic to significantly effect the decision about what to name it.

[Stilgar]

In case no one else says it,
"The radiance of the sword did far more damage to the vile creature than the blade."

I'm liking it even more now, for what it's worth.

[YbeRn00b]

Yes.
Make holy a weapon special, not a damage type.

[Temuchin Khan]

In case no one else says it,
"The radiance of the sword did far more damage to the vile creature than the blade."

I'm liking it even more now, for what it's worth.

I just said it, in the other thread, before seeing that you said it in this one.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

[Simons Mith]

After having stared at the forum discussion for a while, I finally came up with the following criteria for acceptable damage words. Please consider the following sentence:

"The holiness of the sword did far more damage to the vile creature than the blade."

Note that for any damage type we ought to be able to swap the correct form of the word used for the damage type in for either holiness or blade and still have a meaningful sentence. Note that this works for holy(holiness), blade, impact, fire, and cold(coldness). Piercing kind of works for pierce. If you have to add an extra word after the damage word to make sense it doesn't count. This eliminates some of my own and other suggestions in the other thread.

A good attempt, but I don't find it entirely convincing. The fact that it doesn't work for piercing damage raises a red flag in my view. Also, for cold damage - if you wanted to do damage to a fire elemental, you could chuck a bucket of water at it. So we could add wetness damage to the game. Which would be really dumb.

My perspective is to ask whether both magical and non-magical versions of the attack are credible in-game. This works for pierce, impact, blade and fire damage, and lo, we have non-magical versions of all of these. I'm not aware of any non-magical cold attacks, so cold fails this test. And if you can't come up with a way for a non-magic user to inflict your hypothetical damage, I think it should default to Arcane.

My preferred criterion is whether I could easily explain why we use the term to someone newly-come to the Wesnoth game.

Radiant, morph, unmake, allomorph, exorcise are all too obscure and/or over-specific, and fail the Wesnoth-newbie-test. Hell, just from looking at the words, I really wouldn't want to guess which units would suffer most from 'radiant' or 'unmake' attacks. But they all fit under 'Arcane' if we use Arcane as an umbrella term. 'Radiant' is probably the best second choice, but I still think it's too specific, and I also think it impinges slightly on 'Fire' damage. So why isn't a fireball Radiant damage? After all, it must have a significant radiant heat component.

As for mundane ways to cause cold damage: dump liquid nitrogen on something.

Hardly a likely outcome in combat in a fantasy setting, methinks. And if you threw snowballs or icicles at someone, you'd do impact or piercing damage. Yes, cold damage happens, but not as a result of combat, as far as I can see.

[Noy]

As for mundane ways to cause cold damage: dump liquid nitrogen on something.

Hardly a likely outcome in combat in a fantasy setting, methinks. And if you threw snowballs or icicles at someone, you'd do impact or piercing damage. Yes, cold damage happens, but not as a result of combat, as far as I can see.

Yes but he's right though. Just because they don't have the means to do it like we do, does not in any way refute the point that a certain type of damage can occur. Given that certain magic users have the ability to generate extremely cold temperatures means that they CAN do cold damage like we do, though through different means.

[Temuchin Khan]

After having stared at the forum discussion for a while, I finally came up with the following criteria for acceptable damage words. Please consider the following sentence:

"The holiness of the sword did far more damage to the vile creature than the blade."

Note that for any damage type we ought to be able to swap the correct form of the word used for the damage type in for either holiness or blade and still have a meaningful sentence. Note that this works for holy(holiness), blade, impact, fire, and cold(coldness). Piercing kind of works for pierce. If you have to add an extra word after the damage word to make sense it doesn't count. This eliminates some of my own and other suggestions in the other thread.

A good attempt, but I don't find it entirely convincing. The fact that it doesn't work for piercing damage raises a red flag in my view.

However, this would work:

"The point of the sword did far more damage to the vile creature than the blade."

"Pierce" damage is nothing if not damage inflicted by the point of a pointy object, so I tend to think that his example would justify the use of the term "pierce" as a damage type.

Besides, "pierce damage" sounds better than "pointy damage."

[peet]

First off, I should point out that I don't really have a problem with the "holy" damage type. I don't think it's a big issue, since the concept of attacks that have special power against undead are pretty common in RPGs.

It does bother me that the Paladin is rather weak against living units, since his sword is always "holy" and therefore any living opponent will have resistance to it.

However, if a new name is needed for the damage type, how about these:

Purify
Cleanse

These suggest that they work by eliminating the impure or darker forces at work within an object. So against ordinary humans they would do very little.

Also, there is:

Life

Since these attacks are generally held by units that posess the Heal ability, it could be understood that adding "life" to an attack actually reduces it's effectiveness against living units but act negatively against units that are not living.

Peet

[Temuchin Khan]

It does bother me that the Paladin is rather weak against living units, since his sword is always "holy" and therefore any living opponent will have resistance to it.

That's why I proposed making the Paladin's holy attack into a "hallowed" weapon special about two months ago. That way, his sword would do either blade or holy damage, as appropriate.