Demons, Devils, and Angels - and their spawn

[Primitive Screwhead]

Random thought regarding monster building in WOIN, which {of course} involves a rules tweak.

What if all Demonic/Angelic creatures received a Soak {Evil} equal to their Grade. This special form of Soak boosts the value of all other forms of soak {except itself} and is treated as double value against Fire, Heat, Cold, and Ice damage. A successful Good attack negates the Soak {Evil} until the creatures next turn starts.

In a battle of Demons versus Angels, everyone on the battlefield has protection from Evil damage. Demons can then wield their Evil damaging attacks in large blasts knowing that their allies are mostly protected while Angels resort to targeted attacks as the Good allies defenses would be disabled.

With this a Terror Dog would have a Soak {Evil} of 8 {16 vs fire/ice}, a difficult challenge but a Cleric that could deal Good damage would mage defeating this beast much easier. {Turn Evil!}

I can see the villagers fearfully gathered behind the local Cleric facing down a Terror Dog, knowing that without the Cleric's faith they would be at the creatures mercy.


.... or not. Tis a random thought.

 

[Morrus]

I didn't quite follow that!

However, monster creation guidelines are only guidelines. You can literally do what you want, so if you want all demons to follow a certain SOAK rule, by all means go for it! I tried to provide flexible guidelines but not strict Pathfimder-style rules so that you have complete freedom in developing organic monsters.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

It probably makes much more sense in my head.

My thought was to have a mechanic that supported the narrative of super-natural opponents {ones with Virtues} being harder to defeat than their non-super-natural counterparts.
If you take a War-Dog and make it Demonic, what simple mechanic turns it into a super-natural bad-ass?

In most stories it boils down to 'really hard to hurt by mortal means', which in WOIN equates to SOAK. But if you just add SOAK, you also have to work around how super-natural creatures fight each other. One option is to amp the damage.. which makes the critters even more bad-ass against mortals and in play turn into large bags of hit points... not too different than other mortal large bags of hit points.

A better option is to have a means to negate that super-natural protection. This adds a tactical option to combat and allows the supernatural beings to be lower level challenges without the risk of TPK.

The creature might have normal SOAK that still has to be defeated, but by negating the super-natural SOAK it becomes much easier for mortals to defeat them.

So our demonic War Dog might have natural armor with a soak of 2 and a supernatural soak of 5. Normal mortal attacks have to penetrate the total value {5+2=7}, but if you have the means to negate the supernatural soak you only have to penetrate the natural armor {2}.

This provides a mechanical hook for narratives like blessed weapons, holy-water, etc.

Why {EVIL} for both angels and demons? To support two narrative conceits;
1) constant warfare in hell. With the supernatural soak not as many demons are killing demons.
2) difference in tactics between Good and Evil. As mentioned in the OP, the demons can spread damage widely while Good has to avoid negating the protection of their allies.