From: Alex Ferguson (alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Fri 04 Nov 1994 - 01:16:59 EET
Colin Watson writes somewhat earlier in the "Characteristics for spirits"
thread:
> But think of it like this: DEX & STR are what allow a creature to
> move around and interact with the physical world; CON gives the ability
> to respire - breathing, eating etc. Upon death these faculties depart
> from the body immediately. (Good thing too, otherwise corpses of the recently
> dead could wander about mindlessly (with no INT or POW) as do animate
> Skeletons.)
Skeletons indeed lack INT and POW, but what they have instead is a controlling enchantment, so that's no evidence that a body with DEX, etc, should be up'n'about, anymore than a skeleton with a broken enchantment is.
> But corpses don't breathe or move around; they don't have STR or DEX or CON.
I think they do, in some notional sense, they just can't use 'em. If a spirit has all the characteristics it needs, why can't it possess any creature, however incomplete, and use that as a body? Or possess a rock, say. And if a spirit possesses the "wrong" body, does it really supply all its own values, regardless of those of the previous occuppant?
On the other hand, it'd certainly make sense to assign "physical" characteristics to spirits in some cases: perhaps ghoul spirits have a "special" STR of 1D6 which they add to that of their possessee. Similarly for all these Giant spirit possessions that're all the rage suddenly.
Alex.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 10 Oct 2003 - 01:37:32 EEST