Significant rebalancing of Drakes & Undead

[autolycus]

Here are some meta-suggestions...

Magic: as a descriptor of game effects, it describes the kind of energy effect which appears anti-statistical, i.e. consistently against the laws of probability but which can be measured directly.

Mental: as a descriptor of game effects, it describes the kind of effect (e.g. charming, paralysis) which originates from an intelligent mind and can only be used against another intelligent mind. Mental domination is pure mental, telekinesis is mental-actuated magical.

Let's agree that 'heat' has a tendency to transfer from regions of high energy density to regions of low density, 'cold' is the relative absence of heat.

Then 'magical cold' is when a heat sink of great magnitude appears for no apparent reason, vanishes a huge amount of what should have been heat energy, and disappears leaving a zone of totally frozen targets while the area immediately outside the zone is still at room temperature.

Consider a drake doing fire damage: fire appears, you can feel the heat, the fire that has appeared behaves like any other fire once it has appeared. On the other hand, a fireball is an example of 'magical fire'. It appears as a sphere which, if it can be touched without triggering, is at room temperature. It streaks off to a target point (with no conservation of momentum), detonates (with an oddly muted sound), and inflicts fire damage only in its radius of effect, with intense heat in that area and room temperature only a few inches beyond that area.

I would say that magical has directly measurable physical effects without the normal physical antecedents to those effects. By this token, 'mental' has got no directly measurable physical effects, but the effectuating organ is the mind. Mindless organisms don't generate 'mental' and do not suffer 'mental' damage, although they might suffer magical. Drunk characters are bad at mental (whether being damaged or damaging others), and so are berserk units (who are acting mindlessly).

[Darth Fool]

Gameplay reason fror having a magical/energy/mystical/spirit/whatever damage: to have a damage type that is unaffected by mundane armor, that is powerful against magically animated units, and that only units with magic can defend against.