Originally Posted by
JellySlayer
PCs don't get multiple attacks, ever, unless they're dual-wielding. Instead, they get reductions to the energy that attacks take via weapon skill, class powers, etc., which kind of works out to the same thing. And in the event that the PC is dual-wielding, yes, both attacks will strike at an invisible monster.
That's probably because invisibility in monsters is very rare (and see invis intrinsic is rather common). If there were fairly common monsters that had intrinsic invisibility, you'd probably see this happen fairly frequently. Think about it this way: As a PC, you probably see 10000 monsters in a game, and if you were invisible for an entire game, you might see a monster randomly bumping into you like this a handful of times. OTOH, the player only sees maybe 2-3 invisible monsters in the game before getting -SeeI, so based on the same statistics, you'd expect to have to play ~3000 games before randomly stumbling into an invisible monster a comparable number of times.
Okay look, lets go over this again:
Five hits from a giant while invisible
is a developmental oversight. In all likelihood, the default situation is that when an actor moves into a tile occupied by a hostile, their attack function is called or some sort of very similar procedure. It's the exact same thing that happens when the target is visible. ADOM does not differentiate here. It's an example of code that isn't very detailed. Very, very likely, nobody said 'hey, I think fire giant kings should attack invisible pc's 5x.
Probably nobody thought of this case at all.
You want to know why the pc doesn't 'bump' into monsters? Because there is no way of determining whether the player has figured out that there is a monster there. So ADOM does the sane thing and just attack()s. With enemy actors, we
can know when the pc has been detected vs when Brownian motion is occurring. It makes sense to take advantage of that. Pc's don't bump into monsters because of technical limitations (game can't read player's mind). We can't fix that.
But we can fix monster behavior.
You aren't thinking of any of this from a game design perspective, you keep trying to rationalize monster behavior in a way that is totally unrealistic. The situation is what it is because of the limitations of the medium and because of oversight, in all likelihood.
Originally Posted by
JellySlayer
Yeah, that means that 87.5% of the time a hostile monster is next to you, it won't hit you. That's a pretty powerful intrinsic. Back in the 1.1.1 is was the most powerful intrinsic by a wide margin, not only because you could bolt any monster lacking SeeI to death with impunity, but also because ~90% of the game's monsters you could simply walk right passed without ever having to engage them?
It is a powerful intrinsic, because
that is what you would expect from being invisible. Teleportation is a powerful intrinsic too. On demand, it is much more powerful than invisibility. You don't even have to try to sneak past monsters, you can just teleport around them. And nobody has a problem with that
because it's supposed to be powerful.
Originally Posted by
JellySlayer
How about we also greatly increase the rarity and danger level of potions/cloaks/spellbooks/rings of invisibility to reflect the strength of the intrinsic then?
Personally, I think that is a fine solution.
Originally Posted by
JellySlayer
On the realism point, just because the monster doesn't see you doesn't mean that it can't detect you. If you're wearing heavy metal armor and carrying two tonnes of gear in your backpack, then the monster can probably hear you even if it can't see you. Animals can probably smell you.
Look, do we really want to go down the 'realism' road? The 'animals' issue, where they can smell and hear you, isn't even related to the situation in question. If you want some sort of special case for bats and cats, fine, I think bats are already a special case, though. You're carrying heavy armor, but you also have superhuman strength and dexterity. That's why the whole realism argument is pointless. You are dealing with situations that would never come up in reality. I can't believe you are even trying to pair 'carrying tonnes of armor' (sometimes almost literally) and 'realism'.
Face it: you bring up realism when it helps your point, and that's the only reason you bring it up.