I concur. The damage should work like drowning damage in wilderness. Also IMO this would be a 1-2 level priority, since we're talking about an instakilling bug. :-)

This is a very severe bug that I hope is fixed soon (actually I thought it was fixed in a previous prerelease because it's definitely been reported, but I guess not).

Also see issue 2245.

The problem I see is the following: Changing this opens a new way of cheating (kind of): Let's say you put on unknown armor while standing on an exit to the wilderness (as a mist elf). The armor is iron and you start to receive damage. Unequipping the armor takes a couple of turns which results in more damage. If that were lessened in wilderness (to no instant death) you just could exit to the wilderness, unequip the armor (which in wilderness takes but one turn) and avoid death by moving to a different location.

I don't like that either. I also don't like adding yet another special case for "a mist elf is trying t remove armor while in the wilderness and then deserves to be killed". Sooooo special :-(

So I'm right now really undecided about the issue. Thoughts?

(1) I have no problem with the first scenario at all. (2) Couldn't this be avoided by scaling the # of hits of damage appropriately? As it is now, the multiplicative factor (something on the order of x10) for times you take damage is way too high - that's the problem. Reducing this multiplicative factor for # of hits of damage you take per turn would make it survivable w/o removing the wearing of armor.

Hmm, What do you think about putting a message in a similar way like when they take damage from hostile monsters when manipulating an armor?

For example: Your skin is burned by the touch of impure metal! Do you wish to keep travelling through the wilderness? (y/N)

Does this help?

EDIT: Oh, Also, and a Variable Command ':=' to disable the prompt, to travel be able to travel with such metals and you have the immune to pain talent, OR not insisting after the first try, and Only trying again if the HP is critical.

Actually, unequipping armour in the wilderness takes 0(zero) turns. So, one can already simply go to the wilderness and equip and unequip it with no turns passing.

Noone in their right mind will equip unknown iron pieces of armor on mist elf because they ca be cursed which is usually instakill wilderness/no wilderness.

You're wrong. Grey can equip them :P

As for this whole mist elf+iron thing - why not introduce something like this:
When a mist elf character decides to put on an iron armor, there should be a notification about skin burned (as you need to touch the armor to put it on after all) and a prompt right there, asking if you want to continue putting it on.
If nonetheless somebody decides to put it on, it's their fault and they deserve to die (if it actually kills them before they take it off), irrespective of where they are - wilderness or dungeon/whatever location.
This way only a small addition is implemented and the rest is based on player choices. The prompt won't be too annoying, after all how often do you take off/put on a set of armor in a single game?

Blasphemous, the same idea could be applied to simply picking up pieces of armor (or anything that is made of iron). If it burns when you pick it up, don't equip it. However, this would make it "too easy" to avoid burning skin damage, and would defeat the purpose of having mist elves take damage from equipping iron items. If someone goes ahead and equips something that burns them as they are beginning to equip it/pick it up, then you can say that that was their fault, but this may never happen again if too much realism is applied to the game.

I feel that your fears about exploiting the wilderness for reducing burning skin damage are a bit unfounded, Biskup. If someone is on a low enough level and has low enough HP, they probably will not be going around test-equipping random un-identified items for information on what material they are made out of, since there is the risk that the item is cursed (and this test-equipping item loophole would only be useful to early-game characters that are less likely to have many means of uncursing available to get around cursed iron items). If someone is on a higher level, then they would survive the burning damage in the wilderness anyways (although that admittedly can be a fairly high level for a mist elf).

Even if it was easily exploitable, it doesn't change the fact that it is a bit of an overcompensation to cause mist elves to take ridiculous amounts of damage in the wilderness that guarantees death for even mid-level mist elves just because people may try to get around their iron allergy. There are plenty of other exploitable features in the game that need more attention than this one, so I think that reducing the damage in the wilderness is really the best way to go here. This allows the mist elf flavor to remain (which is something that would be taken away if another prompt about items burning while equipping them and a query as to whether one would like to continue were added) without unduly penalizing people who don't know that the wilderness will do excessive amounts of damage to iron-wearing mist elves.

My proposition applies only to a single slot in inventory - armor - not other items you can equip.
The justification is that other items only require one turn to equip, so they should stay as they are.

Putting an armor on is a complex action and the game recognizes this by requiring more time to do so.
There are plenty of item slots to make life nasty for mist elves, I don't think changing only armor slot makes it too easy - it actually makes more sense.
I don't see a problem with this, it's a small sacrifice in order to manage an otherwise serious problem with wilderness iron damage.

It wouldn't defeat the purpose of mist elves taking damage from iron - you still can't use two iron rings, elemental gauntlets, iron helmets, bracers etc.
The only difference is that you won't be able to put on an iron armor and die from iron damage without confirming the prompt.

Again, just a single item slot, I see absolutely no problem with that.
Mist elves and their iron allergy has been an issue to me not because of the danger of equipping iron items and dying - that can be easily avoided.
The challenge was to work without certain useful items, like elemental gauntlets, rings of regeneration or bracers of resistance.

Alright, I somehow thought that you meant that all items should give a prompt if you want to equip it before it starts damaging you. Even so, there is still the issue of consistency (Why isn't a mist elf able to tell that an item is iron just by picking it up, since it would burn their skin?), which is not a high priority in this case (in my opinion). However, changing the behavior of armor still
doesn't change the fact that putting on any iron item in the wilderness can result in instant death, so this still needs to be fixed.

How often do you actually put items on while in wilderness? Personally, I don't remember a single instance, at least in the past ~20 games I had.

As for my suggestion, I merely think that it would fix the problem with iron armors damaging mist elven PCs when equipped, I don't question how consistent it is (or isn't to be precise), for a simple reason: there are a great many inconsistencies in game mechanics which mostly serve to simplify things, streamline gameplay and cut down on extensive programming work that results in little actual perceivable content, at least from the players' point of view.

When you look back at how in the medieval ages warriors/knights wore their armors, you will find out quickly enough they never put it on bare skin.
There was always a layer of cloth and/or hard leather to take on the rough edges and pressure points from prolonged usage of a ~50kg metal armor (modest weight estimate).
The same is true for iron boots, girdle, gauntlets etc. - those were never worn on bare skin for the same reason; if you ran around just in iron boots, swinging an axe and what not, you'd have blisters the size of pancakes (to quote Vin Diesel from Triple X movie) in no time.
Given that information, mist elves should not suffer any damage from wearing mentioned iron items at all - it stands to reason that no armored character in Ancardia wears their armor on bare skin because that's just silly.
But this is a virtual game world and since we have a race that has certain useful characteristics, this comes at the cost of iron allergy (and some other downsides) to balance it out.

I think it's very difficult to find the right amount of balance between realism and concessions of the fantasy world for the purpose of game playability.
Consistency, even within the confines of this gameworld, is also subjective to that, and in this context, it simply remains a variable to be changed or more/less accurately adhered to.
Hence, you can put iron items on, but you can't tell just but touching them if they will burn your skin when equipped.
Armor is another story, since it's bigger and takes more time to put on than any other item and by a large margin.
Thus, I think it's the right idea to make it start burning your skin as soon as you begin putting it on, to still give you a chance to stop.

I don't put iron items on in the wilderness very often at all either, but when I do it is usually a ring of the fish right before I enter the WDC (I also enter the wilderness to bless it). Otherwise, I may not equip it in the wilderness, but I do have it on before exiting to the wilderness, either from a dungeon or WE (wilderness encounter?). This is the point where I receive the same barrage of messages of "Your skin is burned by the touch of impure metal!" until my mist elf dies. You would think that the same thing you are suggesting about the armor should apply just the same (if the item begins to burn in the wilderness, you should have the chance to take it off, as it makes realistic sense and is, in my opinion, good game design). However, apparently Biskup intentionally made it to where you took great amounts of damage from being in the wilderness with iron items equipped so that people couldn't exploit the wilderness, so this isn't technically a bug (even though at least a couple of people see it as a big enough issue to post it as a bug report).

Also, I wasn't really suggesting that it should be the case that picking up iron items should tell you that they are iron (although it may have seemed like I was saying that). I was just saying that if Biskup wanted to make certain things more or less exploitable, there were more important exploits to change first. Biskup apparently implemented this behavior because he thought it was exploitable enough (that is, changing armor in the wilderness, or even any iron items, for that matter).

By the way, if you accept Wikipedia and its sources as reliable ones, then it was only jousting armor (and jousting was a sport as far as I know, rather than an actual war tactic) that weighed around 50kg. Actual full plate armor that one would wear in a war was closer to 15-20kg (this makes more sense, because it would be harder to fight in 100lbs of armor and maintain mobility).

I pretty much took that 50 kg from thin air as I wanted to cover the worst case scenario.
Indeed, 15-20 kg sounds more reasonable.

Also, I agree that there are more important exploits to address than this.
Frankly, I don't see this as much of an exploit at all, after all how many things can you actually do in the wilderness with skin burning iron items equipped versus any other location?
Sure, you can travel to someplace where you can get something to remove mentioned iron item if it wasn't possible before but that is a stretch, I would still be hard pressed time-wise to pull this off.
We're talking about low-mid level mist elves with low-mid toughness score since they are the most vulnerable here.
More advanced will have more HP and possibly some damage reducing talents/regenerating items that will offset this enough to prevent death, not to mention holy water, extra healing, spenseweed, scrolls of uncursing etc.

I might be wrong but I don't see this as an exploit or a cheat. When I play a mist elf (1 in 100 chars, maybe even less), I take special precautions before equipping unknown stuff, especially armor since if it's cursed, this means death.
Even if it took only a single turn to take it off/put it on in the wilderness, I'd most likely not do it, for two reasons:

- It may be cursed which means I'm dead if I don't remove it in time (impossible mostly in the early game)
- I know from experience the materials from which various items are made and wouldn't intentionally put such an item on, even in wilderness with 1 turn cost of action, just to identify it

I don't know about others but I don't really see anything wrong with having a single turn removal/equip of armor in wilderness; its potential to identify item's dv/pv stats is more than offset by the chance of it being cursed and besides, except Grey, people don't equip-id items with mist elves without ample supply of uncursing.
There is no tremendous advantage gained by 1-turn unequipping of iron armor in the wilderness when the skin begins to burn.

I'd say that what Biskup intended to prevent is avoided by most experienced players who already know what is iron and what isn't because of weight, while it punishes newer players heavily and probably turns them off of mist elves for at least a little while, if not permanently. Let's see what he decides to do.

Well, it also punishes Grey. So, perhaps it should remain as is.

I recognize that mist elves are meant to be played by advanced players that know what they're doing.
However, despite being an experienced player myself, I don't play mist elves anymore.
It's too annoying when some of the most useful items cannot be worn due to some stupid allergy.
The ups don't compensate for the downs in my book, especially with that abysmal HP.

I've won with multiple mist elves (including when their HP was MORE abysmal). So have other players. The lack of iron is no hindrance at all and you can wear pretty much anything you want once you've gotten them off the ground (which is not hard since you start with mithril equip) or get Immune to Pain. Aside from some pretty serious bugs (*scrolls up*) they are fine.

Well, I have an ultra with a mist elf, it's not such a big problem but it was a nightmare to complete.
Couldn't use rings of regeneration because they are iron. Same for bracers of regen and/or resistance.
Couldn't wear elemental gauntlets when I had to use the orbs a few times and got plenty of corruptions.
When my other gloves were burned in the tower, I had to go back and find another pair because I couldn't use my artifact weapon anymore.
Couldn't wear a nice early game metal helmet with 2 pv.
In the recent ADoM challenge, my team had a mist elven archer and it was the least enjoyable of all the chars (maybe save for CK) and had problems with destroyed gauntlets and thus inability to use the desired weapons.

Plenty of examples of the little annoyances that effectively make me skip this race entirely. They have nothing worth all the trouble that grey elves don't have, except half damage in melee.
Sadly, damage from traps and magic is not halved so here you go. Also shop prices suck for mist elves, the reason behind this eludes me. Just one more thing to tip the scale even further for me.
We got a bit off topic though, it's mostly a matter of preference anyway.