>but certain individuals keep claiming a resist cancels out a
>vuln completely.

I would be one of those people. :)

>That frankly doesn't make any sense, by what
>reasoning is a resistance "stronger" than a vulnerability, so
>that it would completely cover it up?

The short answer is that that's just the way ROM worked, but the better answer is that after some consideration we intentionally chose to keep it because the game is more interesting that way.

If I'm an invoker and you're a fire giant and the two cancel out, cold magic is pretty much always the right answer against you. If I can type who, I know the smartest thing to do to you, no matter how mentally deficient I am otherwise.

As things work now... do I use cold against you? Maybe. If you don't have the vuln covered, it's my best move and I can rack up big damage. If you DO have it covered... not only is it not the best move, it's actually probably one of my worst choices. The burden is on you now to pay attention to my gear, my preps, my allies, etc... or, at least, how much damage you're doing to gauge if cold is the right choice or not.

>Vulns do stack, anyway, you can see that easily (and I think
>using a metal+elemental weapon against a druid would be a bad
>idea, though I've no test data on that).

Material vulns go in their own bin to some degree and are independent of damage-type vulns. Using an iron flaming axe on an elf with fire resistance but no iron resistance probably is about a wash.

>Uh, and to keep it in the line along the conspiracy theme:
>whichever is the true answer, one of you imms obviously coded
>it to take advantage of a secret item hidden in a nameless
>container on the eastern road that grants you resistance to
>X.

Damn, you're on to me!