Ignoring things that ignore the ignoring of...

[Koumei]

Okay, so I'm just going to talk about things that annoy me, starting with the constant one-upping of "I ignore that" "Oh it's unignorable" "No but I ignore unignorable".

This is obviously dumb in D&D. We have Immunities handed out (to monsters, and then to players via spells) like fucking candy. I mean "Fire elementals are made out of fire, and thus immune to any amount of fire"? That's a given, that they're not healed by it is weird. Red Dragons? Okay, fine, they exhale the stuff and swim in lava, so I guess we'll give them that and not just "Fire Resistance 100" or whatever. Baatezu? Fucking why?

And then, to deal with that, when making a class that only does one thing and that thing is HP damage via fire, we have "You ignore Immunity to Fire". I'm not complaining about the character in the game I run who is a Puppeteer, because he legit does other things (the bit that makes it a Puppeteer). And this was a complaint that was brewing since before that anyway. Puppeteer is closer to what "I'm an Elemental Caster" should be. Fire Mage should be "Volcano Mage" who has shockwaves and toxic smoke and shit, or "Forge Mage" who makes items and encases people in molten steel and so on. (Also they're immune to the thing against which they ignore immunity.)

And as a result of this, for creatures that totally have to be immune, someone made a feat which is "No you actually ARE immune." Should there be a feat of "Nuh-uh, I override THAT immunity too!"

It's probably too late to change any of this in D&D, because it's just a lot of work to go through. It's never too late to complain though.

But now, let me tell you all about some scribbled notes that pass for rules, that exist to prop up toy sales, called Warhammer 40,000.

For longer than I've been playing, maybe since the original Rogue Trader? It's had an Armour Save, to let you survive getting hit by attacks. Seems reasonable. If you wanted Armour to instead exist as a bonus to your Toughness (a penalty to the To Wound roll), that would also be reasonable, but Armour Saves are fine, sure.
And then weapons have an AP value (which sometimes means "If your Save is X or worse, we flat-out ignore it", and sometimes means "We reduce your Save by X, which can indeed push it off the RNG so we ignore it"). So it's possible to have a weapon that ignores saves. Seems reasonable.

Then there are Invulnerable Saves, where magic forcefields or whatever mean you get to ignore the thing that ignores your saves, you always get the saving throw. Except then some weapons ignore Invulnerable Saves, which are the saving throws you have when they ignore your saves. In some editions they're rarer than others. Currently it's handed out left and right, and combined with using the shitty AP-as-reduction rules, the fact that it's paired with high-AP weapons means if you have a 3+ Armour Save, you should never pay points for a 6+ Invulnerable (and 5++ is barely worth it because half the things that reduce you to your Invulnerable also ignore it).

But the thing is, there are Daemons. They all have Invulnerable Saves, and in many cases they only have Invulnerable Saves. So now Daemons need a way to have their saves they always have, so they are given special Daemonic Saving Throws, which are Invulnerable Saves that apply even against things that ignore Invulnerable Saves. Which is at bare minimum, a bridge too far. And then special anti-daemon things get weapons that ignore Daemon Saving Throws, the saving throws daemons have to ignore all those weapons being able to ignore invulnerable saves which are supposed to be there even when weapons ignore your saves. Oh also there are Mortal Wounds, which are different and simply bypass the entire "saving throw" thing (and sometimes mean "you were hit by an ICBM" and sometimes mean "you were hit by a rending weapon or a motorbike rode into you"), except also some things have a special roll that lets them ignore Mortal Wounds, but it's not a saving throw (in name).

So here is my proposal: fucking cut that shit out.

[OgreBattle]

Burning a fire demon to death with Giga Hell Super Flames is a cool story thing that should work in "the everything fantasy RPG".

I had that conversation with someone buying a box of grey knights at the shoppe.

They have a system with a To Hit roll, To Wound roll, Saving Throw, and Wounds to deplete, but for whatever reason dodging and being extra tough and tough to penetrate force fields and daemonic toughness and flickering in and out of reality is all dumped into the Saving Throw. 8e "removed comparative weapon skill and initiative to simplify things" and end stage 9e now has a bunch of extra rules to represent comparative weaponskill and initiative, all worded differently.
-

There's a shaky unfounded denied rumor that warhams 10e will reset how saves work, removing toughness and only including that (or FNP?) as an extra roll for extra tough things. So in this denied rumor you roll to hit, then defending player rolls a save, unless it's a vehicle or monster and an extra step is done.

This seems like a good idea to me, because current system wise a one shot elite sniper hitting on 2+ wounding on 2+ and penetrating saves still only wounds 69% of the time, so they need extra rules to get around it. Without a toughness roll a lasgun killing a guardsmen if they don't make a 5+ save means you can keep the lasgun something that shoots once or twice and not add extra killy rules like they did in 9e.

[Koumei]

because current system wise a one shot elite sniper hitting on 2+ wounding on 2+ and penetrating saves still only wounds 69% of the time

Nice

[angelfromanotherpin]

I concur that layering bypass-bypasses is dumb. There are so many levers in 40K that if you want some unit to be particularly effective at killing e.g. Daemons, you can just say they have some other extra benny against Daemons. I haven't kept up with 40K, so I don't even know what all the existing abilities are called, but I'm certain that there's something else they could do that would both reduce the ridiculous rules bloat and have a very similar mathematical outcome.

I also think that Fire Mages shouldn't be able to burn things which logically shouldn't burn. Frank's Fire Mage was written to be super-simple, so that a player didn't have to think around burning things, but the obvious thing to me is that a Fire Mage defeats a Fire Elemental by controlling it, because it is fire and controlling fire is what a Fire Mage does. Fiends that are fire-immune because they live in a burning hell can have the [fire] subtype and be subject to Fire Mage control as well. But yes, that would be part of a ground-up Heartbreaker thing I sure don't have the energy for.

[Thaluikhain]

IIRC, ignoring invulnerable saves started out not too bad. You had the Vindicare Assassin who had one shieldbreaker round which could ignore an invulnerable save given by wargear, but not inherent to the target (so a demon gets its invulnerable save, some person carrying a forcefield generator does not). Then they added necrons who had some close combat weapons that ignored saves and invulnerable saves cause they were super special.

And for a while that was it, one special guy has one special bullet, and some special monsters from the dawn time have special weapons. Even the latter seemed a bit overpowered to me at the time, but ok, that's not too bad.

As for setting fire monsters on fire in D&D...well, could sorta see that making sense. Like you've got immunity to fire attacks up to level 3, but level 4 is super firey and can damage you, but only as a level 1 fire (or something, maybe). Could be made to work, but looks really fiddly. Though angelfromanotherpin's idea of having fire mages control fire monsters (or maybe just messing with them) would probably be much easier to work and more or less fills that niche anyway.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

If your complaint about a series of potentially complex mechanics is that sometimes they go to far then sure fine. Sometimes just about any mechanical interaction gets stupid and of course GW related properties are going to screw up anything that can be screwed up.

But that's basically tautological, when too many immunity and bypasses happen, then by definition of the statement too many have happened.

So whats the simplest most direct example outside of GW related properties I don't want to know about and totally believe could have gone beyond any and all arbitrary lines too far?

You know other than your example of "that one Puppeteer guy from my personal game" that for all the fuck most readers may know might be a Larry Niven alien OR Matthew Corbett from Sooty. Because let me take the time to point out how very NOT illustrative as an example that choice was.

Well. You don't seem to even like giving an immunity in the first place. But you seem, weirdly grudgingly, willing to give it.

Then you seem actively dismissive of giving a single element specialist a SINGLE layer of immunity bypass.

ONE SINGLE LAYER OF BYPASS.

You start drawing the line there.

Fuck off.

ONE layer of immunity is fine. ONE bypass of immunity is fine. Especially in the simplest and most direct meanings of those terms. Depending on context you can go further and it is FINE.

You use "Nuh Uh" language to disparage the basic concepts, but remember this entire hobby is formalized cops and robbers The Nuh uh and the Nuh uh trump cycle is the most basic element of introducing mechanical complexity that allows players personal moments in the spotlight by pulling out their related special abilities. And you condemn it? What even IS an acceptable game mechanic at that point?

You are also critical of, get this, Fire Wizards. You are critical of them, you seem to think, for real mechanical reasons because of elemental immunity/bypasss interactions. AT ONE SINGLE LAYER OF BYPASS.

Then you propose that thematically much more obscure Volcano and Forge wizards are mechanically better at a design level.

Not that you like the obscure flavor more than the one that oh I don't know significantly more people actually want. You have told yourself an entirely false story that giving a fire wizard one single layer of "nuh uh check it out I'm doing something cool that not everyone can do!" is bad at a design level.

A game without Fire Wizards with Forge and Volcano Wizards instead is FINE, whatever, you feel like something thematically different whatever. But stop fucking coming up with unreasonable bullshit rationalizations to pretend it is superior at a game design level with no better excuse than GW managed to alienate you with a stupid rule implementation (what the hell GW or their brand supported surrogates doing that? Total first.)

This is like one half a step away from the point I made with the whole "Rock Paper Scissors Does Nothing" thread. You are mistaking and misrepresenting a FLAVOR CHOICE as a game design choice.

You are very clearly and demonstrably wrong. On the internet.

So in your own words.

fucking cut that shit out.

edit : ... wait the BBC tried to ban Sooty from having a "girlfriend" because they thought Soo was going to sex things up too much? FFS in the 1960s? Maybe Puppeteers ARE a bad character class. They should all be replaced with Roland Rat instead, that should go fine. And is a design value not a flavor choice.

[Hicks]

Goddammit. I was reading an insightful critique of invulnerability and bypass oneupmanship by koumei, some good responses, and then some fucking crazy fucking take, "if we can't have N layers of immunity and P layers of bypass then what is even a role-playing game?".

And it was fucking Phonelobster.

Always Phonelobster. And I'm torn between ignoring the dumbest thing I've seen today and walking away... or responding once.

So here it is: the entire *reason* why RPGs is so they do not and I repeat do not devolve into an N layer deep mess of immunity/bypass.

That is the fucking point. To resolve conflict where the structure dictates that such an impass fail state does not happen and everybody takes their ball, goes home, and the story ends.

As to my personal opinion, I'm fine with an irresistible attack and a defensive immunity existing simultaneously, with exactly one level of each where the irresistible attack automatically overrides any defense and the defensive immunity cannot be defeated, but when they meet then they are just both ignored and rolls happen as if neither were present.

[Kaelik]

I personally think this is a problem of class design in the D&D sense.

Like you could make an argument for any possible set up of immunities and bypasses if it produced good gameplay, but fundamentally D&D 3.5 already existed when the Fire Mage was written, and it was a problem of class design to make the class work the way it does that fails to interact with the rest of the game the way most people seem to think it should.

Alternative options did exist. Certainly making a bad class when constrained by arbitraty self imposed guidelines is not a crime (which is why I remain free to keep posting) the argument that "it had to be designed to allow the player to never have to think ever" is not a compelling argument for a specific class design decision.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Always Phonelobster. And I'm torn between ignoring the dumbest thing I've seen today and walking away... or responding once.

And like every dumb fuck who opens with being angry at me just for posting you managed to demonstrate so little understanding that you managed to by the end of your post, basically argue yourself into agreeing with me without even realizing it.

Also. Lets not misrepresent this as N layers. The OP mentioned more, but also was critical starting at ONE LAYER. Just ONE. You don't get to argue about "N Layers" when N starts at one and I primarily directly addressed the case of one being absolutely fine, and YOU agreed that one is absolutely fine.

[Omegonthesane]

I will say that "giving the Fire Mage something else to do besides fire damage" is more interesting design than just letting them shoot special fire that can't be blocked by immunity to fire. And even if you have to give the fire mage special fire that ignores immunity to fire, you can do something like the Tome Warlock and say that they can drop their base damage to do Untyped damage due to having access to special fire that behaves differently to normal fire, rather than directly saying that they can ignore fire immunity while still explicitly doing fire damage with all the advantages thereof. While the difference in any one given combat is no greater than if it was all flavour, if you're giving select groups the ability to work around immunity by dealing damage the immunity would not be expected to protect against, you aren't setting a precedent that things get to outright ignore an immunity that would normally apply to them.

Once you've got one outright layer of "nuh uh!" that opens the door to "nuh uh!" being a valid response to a mechanical interaction, because while you can argue that "magic super-fire that not only ignores my immunity to fire but ignores my immunity to super-fire which would normally leave me immune to fire damage that ignores immunity to fire" is too many layers of ignoring immunities, you can't argue that ignoring immunities is just not a thing in your system.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

This is literally how 99% of Yugioh games play out. "My monster can't be targeted by your effects" "Well, my effect isn't targeting you!" "But I'm also immune to monster effects!" "Well my monster effect is actually replicating your spell card's effect so this is ACTUALLY a spell effect and you aren't immune to it!"
I cannot recommend applying YGO logic to tabletop games.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I will say that "giving the Fire Mage something else to do besides fire damage" is more interesting design than just letting them shoot special fire that can't be blocked by immunity to fire.

But "interesting" is a flavor choice, not a balance choice. Giving immunity bypass to your fire wizard or not is fine and fine regardless of whether you also make the fire wizard more "interesting" or not by other means. And because RPS doesn't matter... having a typed immunity bypass or not doesn't really matter in any form of balance sense. You just decide if you like the idea of an immunity bypass or not and pick the flavor you like. You however at that point didn't make the game in any way mechanically better regardless of which choice you picked.

you can do something like the Tome Warlock and say that they can drop their base damage to do Untyped damage due to having access to special fire that behaves differently to normal fire,

So... you want to replace simple immunity and immunity bypass with... a very slightly different slightly more elaborate immunity bypass interaction?

FFS why?

Bypassing an immunity by altering a damage type isn't a terrible mechanical interaction, and there are reasons to use it, but "being simpler/better than a directly stated immunity bypass" IS NOT one of those reasons. You use it because you want the additional functionality and further interactions, or in other words to add MORE (potentially beneficial) complexity.

you aren't setting a precedent that things get to outright ignore an immunity that would normally apply to them

Yes you are, that's what the thing you just did does in the interaction you just described. It literally bypassed the immunity by making the immunity no longer apply to the thing it normally applies to, that makes it an immunity bypass. Just because you did it with a mechanical tool that also could bypass more typed immunities when also used in other contexts doesn't change that.

In fact. Let me take this opportunity to point out something I really shouldn't have to point out.

Immunity vs Immunity Bypass. In the simplest most direct meanings of those words is really just a convenience for my argument (and SHOULD have been a convenience for the OPs argument to keep it concise).

But even in the OP there was also effectively RESISTANCE vs RESISTANCE bypass. (or in other terms simply a rolled chance of immunity vs bypassing that rolled chance).

And now there is Typed Damage Immunity vs Bypass by technicality of changing type.

Let me also add Defense Bonus based on Type vs Attack Bonus based on Type. Because once resistance is on the table we are DEFINITELY talking about things that can be considered equivalent to just attack and defense bonuses.

The argument presented was not really about WHAT exactly each layer of Defensive Thing vs Ignore Defensive Thing actually does.

It was an argument against How many layers of Defensive Thing vs Ignore Defensive Thing was acceptable.

And the argument presented originally thought that Demons having special defenses against normal stuff and yet being susceptible to special anti demon attacks was wrong and hard and should fuck off. And that kinda fucking reasonable thing to want a game to do was the FAT end of the wedge it argued against.

If one single layer of a Defensive Thing vs Ignore Defensive Thing is the thin end of the wedge and you, and the OP are critical of it. You don't get to say "Changing damage types to bypass immunity is not an immunity bypass" to "solve" the "problem" of ignoring defensive things even once because in the end, it's just another fairly direct way to "Ignore Defensive Thing".

[merxa]

This issue is also exemplified by antimagic powers and leads to silly things like pathfinder's aroden's spellbane.

So what's a better antimagic gimmick for a game that practically requires using magic after the first couple of levels?

[deaddmwalking]

Fire damage versus fire immunity is fine.

Fire damage that bypasses fire immunity is problematic - but it should be allowed if handled carefully.

Fire damage that bypasses fire immunity but it doesn't actually because of super-fire-immunity is really bad.

Immunity should be handed out very rarely and very carefully. It's not hard to think of a situation where a creature should be immune to normal weapons but becomes vulnerable when the weapon is 'blessed' or something else. Saying 'demons are immune to normal weapons' but 'blessed weapons bypass immunity' is easy and generally works. If you then want to make demons that totally aren't vulnerable to blessed weapons, that's defensible as long as you don't then create super-blessed weapons that bypass that immunity. Just say that these demons are vulnerable to something ELSE.

In the case of 40k, it would help if they used more limited types. Instead of 'invulnerable save' if they had 'force shield saves' it would be much easier to give a weapon/attack that ignores force shield saves without automatically ignoring all 'invulnerable saves'. So Daemonic saves are their own category, Armor Saves, Reactive/Ablative Armor saves, etc.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Immunity should be handed out very rarely and very carefully.

Bzzzt WRONG. Remember. RPS does nothing for balance. Because frequency of occurrence in your rules design has no correlation with frequency of occurrence in your game play.

You put fire immunity on a minority of monsters at a design level? Well they might never turn up at a game play level at all, or maybe ALL the monsters that turn up at the game play level will have fire immunity. One thing for sure your "careful" attempt at doing a balance will NOT result in the SAME rate of very carefully tuned appearance at a game play level.

The ONLY genuine "doing a balance" consideration we can really make with things like fire immunity (and it's bypassing) is to ask the question "Is it ok if this sometimes happens, at all?". Is it OK for one of a characters damage types to be sometimes useless, period? Is it OK if a character that hyper specialized in one damage type is, some unknown amount of the time, almost completely useless? Is it further OK if one of the characters immunities is bypassed sometimes?

Or in other words is it OK if some characters in some contexts (the frequency of we CANNOT predict or distribute fairly) are more or less useful than they "normally" are?

If you answer is no, well, again, try and remember RPS doesn't matter, you aren't doing a game design balance moment by fighting that, you are just having a little obsessive compulsive cosmetic list tweaking moment.

Also if your answer was "no" you should also fuck off and get a grip.

[Omegonthesane]

not dignifying the NPP screed with a quote.

RPS can indeed impact balance when talking about an explicitly competitive game like Warhams 40k. The fact that you can't really discuss balance in a vacuum does not change that. The contents of the environment determine the degree to which RPS has an impact.

Conversely, it is fair to say that any D&D game is 90% vacuum by volume, and so you can't really talk balance in that context.

As for how long it's acceptable for a hyper specialist in a TTRPG to be totally useless for one scene, well, that depends. If they're a PC, then no, they have to have a fallback option, scenes where one player is playing Smash Brothers are unacceptable*. If they're a villain, then sure, especially if the PCs get to carefully organise around the villain's overspecialisation.

* more precisely, when and where such a scene is acceptable is a function of the players and their real-life situation and not a function of mechanics, and therefore it is unacceptable for mechanics to impose such a scene.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Omegon. Are you an actual child?

Because your thinking and your ability to discus it is seriously child level stuff.

The idea that every character must be and even CAN be all rounder generalists who never have a bad day in an unfortunate combat match up is serious child level moron juice. It is an unreasonable goal for practical reasons, but also just a really bad goal to have that would make games more homogeneously boring IF it could be achieved.

The idea that the frequency of an ability appearing at a design level influences the frequency of it appearing at a game play level especially in a competitive wargame where various motivational forces are actively working against that outcome is the sort of thing a not very bright 8 year old might think or say. The smarter ones just quietly load their army lists with the good stuff only.

And of course (trying) to directly address someone's points while opening with a childish and petulant refusal to quote what you think you are addressing at the cost of making your post even more nonsensical in an unforced error is, also, the behavior of a child.

[Thaluikhain]

Not sure if I'm reading NPP right, is the argument that the rules providing a monster that's immune to fire and thus making the fire mage useless against it not a problem because the DM can avoid using that monster if there's a fire mage in the party? Or is it that the person playing the fire mage just needs to so sit there and accept being useless for an encounter and that's not a problem?

As an aside, WHFB and 40k used to vacillate about stuff like poison immunities, as some most armies had little or no poison, whereas for some it was an important factor. Being immune to poison could therefore vary between totally unimportant and very useful, depending on he opponent, so sometimes it was magic poison that affected everyone the same, and sometimes it wasn't.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Not sure if I'm reading NPP right, is the argument that the rules providing a monster that's immune to fire and thus making the fire mage useless against it not a problem because the DM can avoid using that monster if there's a fire mage in the party? Or is it that the person playing the fire mage just needs to so sit there and accept being useless for an encounter and that's not a problem?

My argument is that none of that is solvable at a design level. Because you cannot design in reliable occurrence rates of specific advantageous or disadvantageous encounters.

And we have massive preexisting evidence that advantageous and disadvantageous encounters as things that exist at all work fine and are actively a good thing to have. Also not having them would be the sheer definition of a bland experience. So we should not (and probably cannot) eliminate such occurrences entirely.

The desire to "carefully regulate" such contextual disadvantages as a mere fire immunity ability through design level rarity of occurrence is therefore the game designing equivalent of a moral panic. Contextual disadvantage has existed forever WITHOUT being "carefully regulated" and it has been fine and helpful and it in fact CANNOT be carefully regulated by your rules design.

And if you go back far enough I was also pointing out that complaining about "too many layers of complexity" starting at ONE layer and then depicting the doomsday fat end of a wedge argument at TWO LAYERS is obviously on its face fucking stupid.

[Omegonthesane]

I hadn't explicitly put NPP onto ignore until I saw the first line of their reply called me out by name.

I have now, in fact, put them on ignore without reading either reply. I guess someone might have to paraphrase if there was any legitimate counterargument to "having a player sit out a scene for in-game instead of out-of-game reasons is bad" or to "a competitive environment's balance can be impacted by RPS".

As an aside, WHFB and 40k used to vacillate about stuff like poison immunities, as some most armies had little or no poison, whereas for some it was an important factor. Being immune to poison could therefore vary between totally unimportant and very useful, depending on he opponent, so sometimes it was magic poison that affected everyone the same, and sometimes it wasn't.

also something something competitive meta, but I am aware that there's less room for that when one match is a couple hours of pushing tiny men very carefully around a table instead of fifteen minutes playing cards.

[deaddmwalking]

NPP, you're being an idiot again. I mean, you've never stopped, but whatever.

Immunity is a powerful ability. As has been explained by others, having literal immunity to sitting on the surface of the sun is very different than having large amounts of resistance. But none of that is really germane to the conversation. Immunity should mean immunity, not bypassable by 'super attack' of the same nature. It's literally just as easy to add a new descriptor rather than adding another layer of immunity bypass and then immunity that isn't bypassed.

Ie, if you have a creature that is immune to fire damage, but you want to make your fire attacks deal damage to that immune creature, you say your fire attacks count as both 'fire' and 'radiance' damage. If a creature really should be able to sit on the surface of the sun then they should have 'fire' and 'radiance' immunity, and you're going to have to find a way to change your damage type or fuck off. What you should not do is add 'super radiance' that bypasses the radiance immunity unless someone tags that creature's radiance immunity as super-immunity.

Stacking multiple levels of immunity and immunity-bypass under the same tag is dumb. You haven't said anything to illustrate otherwise. This is a problem that was basically solved in D&D by things like energy admixture or considering fire damage to be both [fire] and [holy]... If you want those spells to be less effective against certain creatures than you can say those spells do half of each - thus your holy fire spell does half damage to creatures immune to fire; if you want those spells to be equally effective you say the spell is considered 100% fire AND holy so the creature doesn't take any fire damage but they take the same amount of damage, anyway, it's just typed differently.

Words mean things. Immunity is easy to grok. If you don't want a creature to be ACTUALLY immune, give them resistance. If you do want them to be immune but you want it to be easily bypassed, give people options to alter their damage tags. And if you don't want people to overcome immunity it's probably a bad design decision to give them hyper-specialization in a way that they can't meaningfully contribute against expected opposition.

I've seen Bastard! and super-fire that overcomes immunity is going to be silly in most games. I'd say I'm surprised you don't think so, but I'm not. Clearly your aesthetic preferences are unique.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Immunity is a powerful ability.

But FIRE immunity isn't. Typed damage immunity is small potatoes, and if you don't understand that, well, there's a large part of your problem.

having literal immunity to sitting on the surface of the sun is very different than having large amounts of resistance.

First of all I doubt anyone other than you was stupid enough to pretend this is about sitting on the sun.

Secondly the OP itself specifically describes this problem with defense/bypass layers as interchangeable despite it being immunity OR resistance.

So take that one up with them, not me.

Immunity should mean immunity, not bypassable by 'super attack' of the same nature.

That's an unsupported assertion.

It's literally just as easy to add a new descriptor rather than adding another layer of immunity bypass and then immunity that isn't bypassed.

So instead of supporting your assertion that bypasses should not exist because ???? you go back to repeat the false at first principles argument that Omegon presented way back. The very dumb idea that it doesn't count as bypassing immunity to a damage type if you change your damage type in order to bypass an immunity. Only Omegon presented an actual ability that changed types on the fly, and you think you should just add more damage types from the get go.

You understand right that immunity and bypass is a very simple and intuitive mechanic and a system with multiple mechanically different sorts of fire type damage (and then multiply ALL other damage types as well) is not right? No?

Well it is, and part of the problem with this argument of immunity vs bypass as a mechanic somehow being bad is that so far, proposals to replace it have been MORE complex and unintuitive. Which is not hard because immunity vs bypass is VERY simple and intuitive, even elegant, as a mechanic. You can explain it to most people in plain English in those exact words and they know what it means. You want to sit down and explain at least two sorts of fire damage, three sorts of lightning damage, 2 sorts of cold damage, 3 sorts of acid damage, etc...?

Player : "Hey GM wtf is 'Scintillating damage'"
GM : "Er... a sort of brilliant laser i guess?"
Player : "On a fire toad? Why isn't it fire damage?"
GM : "It can't be fire damage for mechanical reasons, it would make the toad too low level"
Player : "How?"
GM : "Because fire immunity exists. So the damage type needs to be something other than fire"
Player : "OH, so Scintillating damage is just fire damage only it's super fire damage that bypasses fire immunity only it isn't as obviou..."
GM : "HOW DARE YOU!" *punches player in face*

Ie, if you have a creature that is immune to fire damage, but you want to make your fire attacks deal damage to that immune creature, you say your fire attacks count as both 'fire' and 'radiance' damage.

Woah there. You want your immunity system to use multiple damage types to allow bypass but instead of just changing from fire to the rebranded version of "super fire" you instead just add it, and then have your immunity mechanic have no effect if the damage has additional types? And since your new types only exist for and only are added to damage to tag it in order to ignore immunity you have at that point rendered them to as absolutely synonymous with an "Ignore X Resistance" tag as you could get but instead of plain language they say something like "Pyrosuperior!" but sometimes instead say "Cryonemesis!". Damnit, just Fuck off, really?

That's actually the needlessly more complex version of your own stupid idea. And it undermines your claim of championing the inviolable nature of the word immunity. It's like sticking a new strawman element onto it for no reason. If you want your damage type to be "super fire (but rebranded)" just use that type, it's the simplest and most direct version of your proposal that doesn't go bringing in added needless complexity. But I guess your inability to recognize that IS the underlying problem here. You could have walked away without ever bringing in the new tangent of what to do with multiple typed damage sources to needlessly muddy your point.

Repeatedly arguing that immunity and bypass are fine as long as they work in the least intuitive, most complex way you can think of that does exactly the same thing but with these three easy added steps for no reason is a stupid argument made for and by stupid people. Your attempt to differentiate Immunity and Resistance when the OP didn't and it has no bearing on your or my differences on Immunity alone is you doing nothing but throwing smoke bombs not even sure yourself of anything other than trying to obfuscate your own bad argument.

You failed at any point to explain why Immunity should not be bypassed by an ability that simple states it bypasses that immunity. That is one of the simplest possible mechanical interactions to achieve a simple goal and you plan to "fix" it by instead INFLATING THE NUMBER OF ALL DAMAGE TYPES LISTED IN THE GAME. Where now BY DESIGN as damage sources reach higher levels you MUST increase the number of damage tags on it by additive inflation in order to "fix" immunity bypass)... ITS A FUCKING STUPID PLAN.

Your only excuse that immunity bypass as a mechanic must not be allowed (even at ONE layer) is that "words mean things" which is stupid, because "immunity bypass" is made of words, very direct and simple ones people understand that directly describe the mechanical interaction. Much more simple than, lets be charitable and pretend its small, 5-12 rebranded synonyms for "Super Damage Type X" that you need to go find in a thesaurus that do not on their face even explain why they exist or what their mechanical interaction is.

[Grek]

PL, how much do you make on commission every time you make a bad faith argument? Because damn dude, you had better be making bank if this is your full time job.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

PL, how much do you make on commission every time you make a bad faith argument?

Point out what you have issue with and describe whats wrong with it.

Anything else is you just being a dumb shit.

[Thaluikhain]

Would it work to have levels of fire damage and resistance that subtracts from that? For instance, if being hit by a flaming stick is level 1 fire damage, and you have resistance 1, you take no damage, but if you are attacked by Martian heat rays that are level 5, you take level 4 instead? Or would that be too fiddly?