What about treating environmental protection as “good” anti-acid armor, and otherwise just dealing with coverage and layers?
Is the special case really needed? It sounds rather confusing compared to just always treating it the same way as other damage types (ie. subtract armor and that’s it).
Current formula is pretty good - not perfect, but generally solid. It only really sucks for armor piercing barfs of the acidic zeds and only because those are single-hit high-damage. If barfs were changed to one “triple attack” with each hit only being at 33% of current damage, it would work just fine.
it might be somewhat reasonable to build an ensemble that will deflect a weak flamethrower stream briefly, but you’d expect it to rapidly degrade clothing that isn’t designed to be fireproof
That’s actually handled already - heat damage hits do not cause physical damage to armor, but they cause “burn” accumulation, just like to items that sit in fire on the ground (although at different rates).
It’s just a bit hard to see, because you need to step in a fire and there is generally zero reason to ever do that in the game.
Similarly, if this does get used for spitters with their super-strong acid, it would start degrading and even destroying outer clothing layers unless they’re specifically acid-proof.
Yeah, that should be handled before anyone creates spitters that melt items. For now we can still use the whole handwave that goes like “if it was strong enough to melt leather, it would deal hundreds of damage per turn to flesh”.
