Shields

A shield is a quantity of harm that will happen to something other than you.

There are three pools:

Not a statistic, and not a vital

This distinction is load-bearing, not pedantry.

• A statistic changes what a blow is worth and is spent by nothing.

• A vital is a resource you spend yourself, and it comes back on its own.

• A shield is neither: it is spent by being hit, and nothing regenerates it.

Keeping shields out of PlayerVitals is what stops them being regenerated, costed or healed by machinery that has no business touching them. The moment a shield lives next to mana, something will eventually tick it upward.

The spending order

The matching pool is spent before the general one.

This is the only interesting decision in the whole system, and the reason is that the alternative punishes you for owning two shields. A physical shield can answer exactly one kind of harm; a general shield can answer any. Spend the general one first and you burn the flexible pool on damage the specific pool was sitting right there to take — leaving a physical shield that the next magical blow cannot use. The defender ends up worse off for having been given a second shield.

Least flexible first is the rule that makes owning both never a downgrade. There is a test named after exactly that case.

True damage does not bypass a shield

True Damage ignores statistics — Armor and Magic Resist. A shield is not a statistic; it is a pool that is spent. True Damage spends it like anything else.

Put the other way: True Damage is the answer to a defensive build, not the answer to a defensive resource.

What a shield does not do

It does not stop a death that is not damage. Losing a vital volume kills by setting health to zero directly, and never asks the pools anything. A shield absorbs harm; it does not keep your head on.

It also does not survive dying. Health, mana and stamina come back on respawn because they are what a body is worth when it is well. A shield was granted to you by something, and that something does not reapply itself because you got up.

Where they come from

Nothing yet. There is no spell, item or effect that grants one — the shape landed first so the numbers the HUD draws are the numbers the server spends.

Until there is, the debug console is the only producer:

shield general 200
shield physical 50
shield magic -30

It grants rather than sets, which is what a second cast of a shield spell would do, and a pool floors at zero rather than going into debt.

In the HUD

Drawn on the health bar rather than beside it, because that is what it is — something in front of health, not another pool. When a shield is present the track is scaled to health plus shield, so absorption taken at full health is still visible instead of silently having nowhere to be drawn.