A Demon Haunted World

[Username17]

I agree there's wonkiness where targeting a fighters cha or a dragons dex is probably too easy but that's more an issue with stat design. You could just bake stat development straight into leveling, instead of giving out attack bonuses and saving throw progressions just hand out small stat bonuses every level, every other level.

You could do that, but having Dire Bears be super intelligent because they are a 6th level opponent is fucking retarded. But having 4 points of Intelligence damage be essentially meaningless against an Orc Berserker but 100% battle ending against a Dire Bear is also totally unacceptable.

The way to thread the needle is to have Confusion effects be arbitrary conditions and not use Intelligence damage at all. If Intelligence damage exists, either it's way too easy to use it to drop a Dire Bear into a coma or the game bends over backwards in its 4e style level treadmill retardation that it ceases to even pretend to be a cooperative storytelling game. There simply isn't a way to have Dire Bears and Intelligence damage in your game that isn't super dumb. And if one of those has to go, obviously it's Intelligence Damage. Because obviously.

-Username17

[maglag]

But isn't a classic of RPGs that several monsters simply have specific weak points that makes them super vulnerable to a specific type of attack?

Like ice monsters take $Texas damage from fire and werewolves can't resist silver and Rakhashas die to blessed bolts and Vampires with sunlight and whatnot.

Basic animals being vulnerable to things that directly attack their simple minds makes quite sense to me. Like in this thread or another Frank and other people were all going "You should totally be able to counter a tiger by wearing a mask in the back of your face, despite that not doing much against an orc".

And if you want a legendary dire bear or something, then they should be a beast that lived for a lot of time and saw a lot of things and thus has indeed developed human-level intelligence and can tank some Int damage.

[merxa]

i'm not convinced, you're still on a scale where animals have an int of 3 and at 0 they essentially become paralyzed for *reasons*, i would generally recommend creatures become vegetables around -10 instead, but you could argue that even vegetables react to stimulus.

Int always has been problematic, what's the int of a giant ant, how about a headless chicken? Assigning any number to represent intelligence is always going to be problematic, and some creatures don't need much of an int to function, plants don't have int scores, 'mindless' is a category of things.

Besides dire animals should probably be slightly more intelligent than regular bears, and no one thinks a dire animal is much of a challenge after level 8 or so anyway.

Who wants a system where every status effect hurts everyone equally, there's a reason why feeblemind targets the casters instead of the martials.

And if intelligence damage is so problematic then gate it off so PCs can't reasonably access it until they hit level 10 or whenever.

[Chamomile]

1) Historically, way more stuff targets Strength/Dexterity/Constitution than it does Intelligence/Wisdom/Charisma.
If the condition tracks are potentially very crippling or dangerous, then it’s more likely that Strength/Dexterity/Constitution based classes(read: Martial classes) get shit on.

Is that actually true? Will saves aren't uncommon, and one of the ways you can see the holes in 5e's save system is the incredible regularity with which DEX, CON, and WIS saves get targeted over STR, INT, and CHA. If you go with a model where both STR and CON contribute to Fort, both DEX and INT contribute to Refl, and both WIS and CHA contribute to Will (or alternatively, the higher of the two, which has the advantage of being backwards compatible with 3.X and also makes things less MAD, which is either a feature or a bug depending on what you're going for), then I wouldn't expect it to be hard to make sure there's monsters targeting each save at every level of play.

This also an issue under the old ability damage rules, but the inverse of Frank’s point about Ghasts vs Orges is also true. It was conceptually possible that that a Strength/Dexterity/Constitution based PC got their primary stats big enough that getting hit a few times with ability damage wasn’t an immediate issue. With 3 stage condition track where the 3rd stage is equal to a 0 in the stat, 3 hits is all it takes for anyone.

Yeah, but they're also more likely to make their saves, so you still don't want to target the tough guy's fortitude or the fast guy's reflexes.

2) Keyword Bloat. If every attribute was given a separate 3 stage condition track, each with it’s own keyword, then assuming all 6 D&D stats are still in the game(something that isn’t given), then there’s 18 new keywords.

Why would we wanna do it that way, though? Even if we keep STR and CON separate, I don't see any reason why we'd want different condition tracks for each. You can come up with ways in which being drained of strength and being drained of stamina are very slightly different, but it's a lot easier to just not do that. The question of how many conditions do we need is not "how many attributes are there" but "what's the lowest number of condition tracks necessary to represent our Monster Manual?" I think we can cut that down to poisoned, frightened, paralyzed, petrified, confused, exhausted, and blinded/deafened, and I'm not convinced we need poisoned to be its own thing separate from paralyzed, exhausted, and confused. Plus, not all of these need to be a full track. We probably don't need rules for someone who needs glasses versus someone who's outright blind, nor do we especially need there to be a half-petrified condition where you get some DR but also lose some mobility or something weird like that. The only ones that need to be full-on tracks are poisoned, frightened, paralyzed, confused, and exhausted.

That's not a huge reduction in complexity, but it's also easily chunked (i.e. instead of remembering 17 distinct conditions, you are remembering 5 sets of three and then two stragglers) so long as being further down a condition track is basically the same as being further up, but more so. If you're dazed, you can only take your swift action on your next round and lose half your DEX bonus to AC (assuming that we've removed negative AC for reasons argued in, I'm pretty sure, earlier parts of this thread), if you're stunned, you can't take any actions and lose your entire DEX bonus to AC until you make a save to end the effect, and if you're paralyzed, it's like you're stunned except you can only make the save once every five minutes (which basically means "until you are healed or given some amount of downtime to shake it off").

People still aren't going to remember that if paralyzing monsters show up only once in a blue moon, but if the Monster Manual is dense with monsters using just four or five condition tracks (plus petrification and blindness/deafness), people will learn them.

[Mr. Z]

1) Historically, way more stuff targets Strength/Dexterity/Constitution than it does Intelligence/Wisdom/Charisma.
If the condition tracks are potentially very crippling or dangerous, then it’s more likely that Strength/Dexterity/Constitution based classes(read: Martial classes) get shit on.

Is that actually true? Will saves aren't uncommon, and one of the ways you can see the holes in 5e's save system is the incredible regularity with which DEX, CON, and WIS saves get targeted over STR, INT, and CHA. If you go with a model where both STR and CON contribute to Fort, both DEX and INT contribute to Refl, and both WIS and CHA contribute to Will (or alternatively, the higher of the two, which has the advantage of being backwards compatible with 3.X and also makes things less MAD, which is either a feature or a bug depending on what you're going for), then I wouldn't expect it to be hard to make sure there's monsters targeting each save at every level of play.

You aren't reading the key part, and all this is literally gibberish.

The key part you cut out is:

I do see some potential pitfalls with escalating conditions as a replacement for ability damage:

Bold for emphasis.

Ability damage does mostly focus on STR, DEX, and CON. Just take a look at 3.5's poisons and diseases:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm#poison
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm#disease

I'm not going to hunt down and count every monster that has some ability that deals ability damage, but taking those as representative as the different forms of ability damage then yes, most things deal damage to(read: target) Constitution, Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Charisma, in order of most often to least.

Yeah, but they're also more likely to make their saves, so you still don't want to target the tough guy's fortitude or the fast guy's reflexes.

This is also a complete non sequitur. The things that deal ability damage do not, and usually don't use the related stat in the save. Every poison and disease is a fort save, Ray of Enfeeblement is a ranged touch spell that has no save that deals strength damage, Feeblemind is a will save that sets Intelligence and Charisma to 1, etc. The only stat that usually resists damage to itself is Constitution, by virtue of being added to Fort saves(but even shit like Cloudkill does Con damage on a successful save).

2) Keyword Bloat. If every attribute was given a separate 3 stage condition track, each with it’s own keyword, then assuming all 6 D&D stats are still in the game(something that isn’t given), then there’s 18 new keywords. Why would we wanna do it that way, though? Even if we keep STR and CON separate, I don't see any reason why we'd want different condition tracks for each. You can come up with ways in which being drained of strength and being drained of stamina are very slightly different, but it's a lot easier to just not do that.

Because the existing ability damage do very different things? Your example of STR and Con is actually literally the worst example, because a STR of 0 means you're still alive, and a CON of 0 means you're fucking dead. The actual counterpoint would be STR and DEX, because both of those leave you paralysed on the ground at 0.

A bare minimum, any ability damage replacement needs these things:
Something that causes big muscular guys hit less, hit less hard, and carry less stuff.(Strength)
Something that makes it harder to dodge(Dex)
Something that functions as a ticking time bomb where people waste away and die(Con)
Something that makes spellcaster's magic worse, both in terms of DC and potentially keeping them getting off their biggest spells.(Int, Wis, and Cha)
Something that makes the target more easily effected by mind control and other mind effecting magics(Wis)

There needs to be something at emulates all of those, and all of those are going to want to have tracks to them. Because if every source of Strength damage was replaced with Paralyse for example, then a lot of monsters have Save or Sucks that take a PC out in one hit. In fact, when we take into consideration that the standard encounter is a number of monsters equal to the party size, actual save or dies and save or sucks need to be limited. A party of 4 running into 4 Shadows or 4 Medusa or whatever) needs to not be a potential round 1 TPK on a blotched set of initiative rolls. And the best way to reduce that is to have weaker statuses that snowball in to Save or Suck or Save or Die conditions, since then there's multiple point of failure(multiple rolls) and the PC(and Player) gets at least a chance to react to it.

[Chamomile]

You aren't reading the key part, and all this is literally gibberish.

The key part you cut out is:

I do see some potential pitfalls with escalating conditions as a replacement for ability damage:

Yeah, no, I got that. I just kind of assumed you were smart enough to make the connection that replacing ability damage with conditions means actually doing that and not making new conditions that are literally the exact same thing as ability damage. We aren't discussing making new conditions to serve the exact same purpose as ability damage. We're discussing scrapping ability damage completely because conditions cover pretty much the exact same territory.

Yeah, but they're also more likely to make their saves, so you still don't want to target the tough guy's fortitude or the fast guy's reflexes.

This is also a complete non sequitur. The things that deal ability damage do not, and usually don't use the related stat in the save.

Are you really so stupid that you can't make the connection that, seeing as how we are in fact discussing an entirely new game in this thread, we have no incentive to port in the exact mechanics from 3.5? Do I really have to explain to you that when I say "higher saves can make people resistant to attacks targeting their strong stats even if it takes the same number of failed saves to disable them" that this implies that attacks should actually behave this way?

Like, I asked you "why would we wanna do it that way" in my last post, and your entire response here is based entirely on the assumption that we definitely want to do it that way. You seemed to have missed the crux of the disagreement, here: Your insistence that conditions to replace ability damage should produce outputs almost identical to ability damage is dumb. The entire point of getting rid of ability damage is that it's just a second, stupider way of doing what conditions already do. The goal is not to make conditions that function the same way that ability damage does. The goal is to get rid of ability damage because it is stupid.

Because the existing ability damage do very different things? Your example of STR and Con is actually literally the worst example, because a STR of 0 means you're still alive, and a CON of 0 means you're fucking dead. The actual counterpoint would be STR and DEX, because both of those leave you paralysed on the ground at 0.

Firstly, you're an idiot, because being reduced to 0 STR and DEX is not the only potential outcome of STR or DEX ability damage in 3.5. Someone reduced to one STR is facing considerably different penalties than someone reduced to one DEX.

But secondly: Have you forgotten what thread you're in? Why, in a thread about totally redesigning the entire Monster Manual and then writing new classes to fit those redesigned monsters, is it so hard for you to grasp that our goal is not to port 3.5 as-written with slightly different math for no reason? No, there does not need to be something that emulates literally everything that ability damage does in 3.5, because a lot of that bullshit is stupid. Your own example reinforces my point: There is no goddamn reason why the exhausted condition can't start by giving debuffs to attacks and dodging and then progress to flat-out killing you. What the Hell does a poison that makes you slowly waste away until you die but not weaken your attacks at all even look like? How could a poison that makes you too weak to hit things properly possibly avoid making you too sluggish to dodge things properly?

Because if every source of Strength damage was replaced with Paralyse for example, then a lot of monsters have Save or Sucks that take a PC out in one hit.

It's really weird that you picked specifically the one condition track that I actually wrote out in its entirety. I mean, this would've been stupid no matter what you picked, because my post very unambiguously declared that everything except blindness/deafness and petrification should be condition tracks with three steps each, but it's especially stupid that you picked the one specific condition track that I actually wrote out prototype rules for each individual condition. What actually happens when you fail your save to a paralyzing monster is you get dazed, and then that can stack to stunned or full-on paralyzed. Because that is the entire point of having a condition track, and while you can make monsters that skip straight to paralysis, you obviously need to balance them around the fact that they can accomplish with one save what takes most monsters three (petrification, for example, should probably work that way, but that also means monsters with petrification need to be designed with that in mind, and should probably have lower save DCs and be more fragile and so on).

In order for four monsters with standard condition-inflicting abilities to incapacitate a party of four adventurers, they 1) all need to survive for three full rounds to make it happen and 2) every party member needs to fail every save three times in a row for a total of twelve failed saves straight between them. And odds are at least one party member is having a high save targeted. It's far more likely that what's going to happen is the monsters are either going to spread out their milder debuff conditions or focus fire on one party member to incapacitate them.

The really weird thing is that after decrying my post about condition tracks leading to one-round TPKs for no goddamn reason at all, you then go on to propose a solution which is identical to the thing you just said would lead to one-round TPKs. I don't know what you thought my post said, but condition tracks are tracks, as in things that you progress along. Again: I prototyped the entire paralysis condition track and it was more than one condition. How did you miss this? Why are you so terrible at reading comprehension?

[Mr. Z]

Chamomile, can you re-read the thread?

Ability damage is a stupid mechanic. You've abstractified general injury to hit points, and you've abstractified a range of other impairments to various conditions, why do you need yet a third orthogonal system of keeping track of impairments that don't stack with being stabbed?

I don't think anybody would care much if the conditions were expanded so that more of them were on tracks with increasingly worse effects, like Fear currently works (Shaken < Frightened < Panicked). If people get Petrified after the third successful attack of a cockatrice (the first attack reduces speed, the second slows), I'd have less problems with everybody's favorite cock monster appearing as a "CR 3" challenge.

The expansion of the condition system could also cover for ability damage. If Shadows inflict the Weak condition (-2 to attack / damage and Strength based checks) and then this condition can worsen to Decrepit (-4 to attack / damage and Strength based checks, is considered burdened) and finally to Powerless (prone, helpless, can't move or take physical actions) then you still have undead with the bad touch without having to stop mid combat to figure what are your attack numbers now that your Strength went from 20 to 15.

nockermensch literally started the ability damage/drain conversation(by suggesting cockatrice do dex damage), and DrPraetor called out ability as a dumb system, largely because it's a third system to track damage/conditions, but also due to the dumb outcomes in certain cases. In quite literally the first post suggesting that conditions as a replacement for ability damage literally talked about expanding conditions to cover ability damage, complete with them creating a Strength Damage(complete with 3 Keywords) track.

At no point did anyone disagree with it, and indeed, that's when everyone started to agree that conditions as a replacement. So yes, a plain reading of the thread is expanding conditions to get the good aspects of ability damage and discarding the undesirable ones.

[Chamomile]

Your reading comprehension is abysmal. Firstly, no, Nockermensch did not suggest that a cockatrice should do DEX damage, he said they should reduce movement speed, and then inflict the slowed condition, and then petrify you. None of those things involve DEX damage. And honestly, it's fine if a cockatrice is just a glass cannon provided that methods of reversing petrification are easily available to level 3 parties. I get where Nockermensch is coming from on cockatrices, but I think that problem is better solved by making Stone to Flesh more readily available rather than expanding petrification out to three different conditions. Getting people to remember all those conditions is already a design problem for our Monster Manual, it'll only get harder the more conditions we add.

Second and more importantly, Nockermensch very explicitly was not suggesting that condition tracks should be expanded for the purpose of emulating ability damage. He said that condition tracks should be expanded for an unrelated reason, and that as a happy side effect this could be used to also cut down on mid-battle accounting by using conditions to replace ability damage. His stated goals were to prevent monsters with condition attacks from one-shotting party members and to reduce mid-battle accounting when fighting monsters like undead that traditionally weaken their targets with their attacks. Neither of those goals requires emulating the effects of damage to each ability with a specific condition track. Using a condition track that emulated strength damage was his method, not his goal. You wrote a post about the flaws of that method, and I wrote a post about why the method was bad, and you responded with a bizarre non-sequitir that asserted that the goal was to emulate ability damage, but it's not, it never has been, that was a proposed method for achieving completely different goals and it is not a very good method.

[OgreBattle]

I figure if you want the incremental debuffs of ability damage you should just have a hitbox system with penalties for certain boxes ticked in.


Here's an old thread that we're circling back to on ability damage or conditions:
http://tgdmb.com/posting.php?mode=quote&p=250192

This is a really good idea. But the tree should go both ways. In addition to there being a number of advanced conditions you can add to a basic condition, you should also be able to layer a specific advanced condition onto one of several different basic conditions.

Interesting but seem potentially very complicated, can I ask for a small proof-of-concept mockup of stacking statuses in this sort of many to many relationship?

Sure. In order to whip out a proof of concept mock-up, we should procedurally generate these things, because that is fast. Let's say that you decided that your six basic conditions were going to be tied to the six basic stats:

• Fatigued happens when someone pops you in the Strength
• Slowed happens when someone pops you in the Dexterity
• Sickened happens when someone pops you in the Constitution
• Shaken happens when someone pops you in the Charisma
• Distracted happens when someone pops you in the Wisdom
• Confused happens when someone pops you in the Intelligence

OK, now each of these basic conditions has three secondary conditions that are each keyed to a Save, but each of the secondary conditions has two entrance points. That means that there are Nine Secondary Conditions: Three "Fort", Three "Ref", Three "Will".

• Exhausted (Fatigued or Slowed)
• Poisoned (Sickened or Confused)
• Pinned (Distracted or Shaken)
• Dazed (Fatigued or Distracted)
• Entangled (Slowed or Confused)
• Blinded (Shaken or Sickened)
• Insane (Distracted or Confused)
• Frightened (Fatigued or Shaken)
• Nauseated (Sickened or Slowed)

Now, you have finishing states, these finishing states end combat one way or the other:

• Dropped
• Asleep
• Paralyzed
• Petrified
• Panicked
• Charmed

Now, we have 21 conditions. We probably also want a category of temporary bullshit conditions like Prone and Off Balance. Let's say there are three of them. Then we remember the "bloodied" condition that kicks in at half hit points. When you bring someone to bloodied, you also get to hand out a basic condition based on what you hit them with to make it feel like a real milestone. That would get us to 25.

Obviously, you would probably want to swap some of these around, but for a two minute proof of concept on the back of a piece of paper I think it works well enough.

-Username17

[Mr. Z]

Can anyone one confirm that Chamomile is reading the same thread?

Your reading comprehension is abysmal. Firstly, no, Nockermensch did not suggest that a cockatrice should do DEX damage,

I don't think anybody would care much if a cockatrice's touch dealt 1d6 dex damage (Fort Save negates).

[Chamomile]

So when you said "Nockermensch suggested that cockatrices do DEX damage," you didn't mean, like, in such a manner as would actually support your point. You meant that he initially said that, and was then convinced that this was a bad idea and switched to something completely different. I mean, fair enough, I guess, but that still means that Nockermensch's post at no point supported a 1:1 correlation between ability damage and condition tracks as a goal of the system, so this doesn't actually help your point at all.

[Mr. Z]

Dropping the issue with Chamomile to avoid further shitting up the thread, my original points were:

My first point lot of shit in the past dealt STR/DEX/CON damage moreso than things that dealt INT/WIS/CHA damage. If STR damage is straight replaced with Fatigued while drawing from a similar pool of monsters, then Fatigued will (likely) show up more frequently than confusion or whatever replaces Int damage.

I then noted if Fatigued and it's siblings showed up more often, and disproportionally affects Martial or Strength based characters, we may want to give them more counters or ways of dealing with it(as a consequence of it being more frequent). Or you could just apply the different conditions more evenly, my concern is at the implementation level.

The second point is simply to be careful with adding multiple tracks and multiple unique keywords per track that all mean different things.

Frank's Outline as posted by OrgeBattle works and avoids the second point, but could run into the first point where Fatigued, Slowed, and Sickened show up more often, but it doesn't have to.

[erik]

Ogre. Your link is fucked for reference to the condition thread. FYI

[RobbyPants]

Ogre. Your link is fucked for reference to the condition thread. FYI

In the mean time, here's the link.

[DSMatticus]

Jesus, Mr. Z.

We want monsters to be able to do [bad things] at PC's and PC's to be able to do [bad things] at monsters. In 3.5, one of the [bad things] people do to one another is hold person, an enchantment spell that targets will saves and inflicts the paralyzed condition. In 3.5, one of the [bad things] people do to one another is stinking cloud, a conjuration spell that targets fortitude saves and inflicts the nauseated condition. In 3.5, one of the [bad things] people do to one another is strength damage, which is a stacking penalty culminating in the helpless status condition.

You are pinning parts of 3.5 in your mind instead of thinking of this as a general problem of which 3.5's ability damage is a specific implementation of a subset of such abilities - an implementation that might be done differently. You are forgetting regardless of what becomes of ability damage the game is still going to ask wizards to make fortitude saves (or equivalent) to resist stinking cloud (or equivalent). Which is why Chamomile opened with:

Is that actually true? Will saves aren't uncommon, and one of the ways you can see the holes in 5e's save system is the incredible regularity with which DEX, CON, and WIS saves get targeted over STR, INT, and CHA. If you go with a model where both STR and CON contribute to Fort, both DEX and INT contribute to Refl, and both WIS and CHA contribute to Will (or alternatively, the higher of the two, which has the advantage of being backwards compatible with 3.X and also makes things less MAD, which is either a feature or a bug depending on what you're going for), then I wouldn't expect it to be hard to make sure there's monsters targeting each save at every level of play.

Chamomile is telling you how to solve the problem of assigning status-inflicting attacks to defenses in a way that is balanced. You are responding "but I only care about the status conditions we might replace ability damage with though." And that is frustrating, because why? What the hell does that matter? If in 3.5 shadows had forced a fortitude save versus a stacking condition track that layered on increasing penalties to strength-related tasks until you were helpless, the arbitrary division would not have existed in the first place. Shadows would have just been a monster that wizards were bad at resisting at but got a couple chances before total existence failure and fighters were good at resisting but would actually notice the incremental suckage of fighting them. Which is an almost exact description of the existing 3.5 shadow experience.

Status-inflicting attacks need to be balanced with respect to the defenses they target in general. Ability damage is a subset of such attacks, and needs to be part of a balanced whole. That's it. That's the whole deal. Or, I suppose, you can accept that some defenses aren't worth as much as others and hand them out more easily, but that's a separate topic.

[Dean]

Has anyone found a satisfactory replacement or houserule for Ability Damage in 3.E? It is probably the most common effect that I absolutely fucking hate the implementation of. Making a player recalculate their sheet on the fly every time a giant centipede lands an attack sucks and is one of the most obnoxious mechanics in 3.E. The only ability damage monster I ever use is the Wyvern because dealing 2d6 Con damage per hit basically just says "Save or be KO'd in 2 hits"

[Mr. Z]

I'm entirely willing to concede I'm communicating badly, but:

Everyone is reading way to much into my mention of 3.5; I only used it as a reference point(as a problem) for what’s happened in the past. But fuck it, that’s not the point my post, so fuck 3.5, let’s make very simple example:

We’re making SimpleRPG. There are two classes, Fighter, and Wizard(which for our purpose here are balanced). In our game we have 3 Conditions:

[Make Fighter Sad]: Which makes fighters bad and feel bad.
[Make Wizard Sad]: Which makes Wizards bad and feel bad.
[Make Fighter and Wizard Sad]: Which makes both fighters and Wizards bad and feel bad.

Now we make 5 monsters, each with a random and equal chance of appearing:

Monster A: [Make Fighter Sad]
Monster B: [Make Fighter Sad]
Monster C: [Make Fighter Sad]
Monster D: [Make Wizard Sad]
Monster E: [Make Fighter and Wizard Sad]

Now, if the classes were balance before considering conditions, does anyone have the issue with this statement:

That there is twice as many sources of [Make Fighter Sad] is a potential problem, and that if it is a problem that it could be addressed in any number of ways, the big obvious two being:

Give Fighters counters to [Make Fighter Sad]: Better Saves, Abilities that ignore [Make Fighter Sad], or twice the access to Cure [Make Fighter Sad]
Or rebalance the number of [Make Fighter Sad] and [Make Wizard Sad]

Does anyone have an issue with that? I feel like everyone has agreed to the general gist that whatever conditions show must often need to be easier to deal with by the PCs, but then focused on the 3.5 mention, which as nothing more than noting that in the past there were more [Make Fighter Sad]s than [Make Wizard Sad]s.

[Mord]

2) Keyword Bloat. If every attribute was given a separate 3 stage condition track, each with it’s own keyword, then assuming all 6 D&D stats are still in the game(something that isn’t given), then there’s 18 new keywords. If all those keywords do specific things, it can be a pain to memorize and slow up gameplay at table time. This is probably isn’t(or less of) an issue with a Gaming Den regular, but probably is for the average table.

This is also something of a namespace issue; every keyword used for a condition summary is a word that can’t(or at least shouldn’t) be used elsewhere. There’s already 35 condition summary keywords in 3.5, just doing a quick count off the SRD. 18 new keywords would mean there’s a 50% increase, and if there’s a strong push for more condition keywords, that number can grow.

[...]


The second point is a bit more complex, because presumably the different conditions should do different things. Having the all the stats use the same set of keywords(Damaged&#8594;Drained&#8594;Depleted) solves the keyword issue, but then the player would need to know that Strength(Drained) means something different from Intelligence(Drained), so it may be something of a wash.

Presumably the "new" condition tracks here would by and large supplant or replace the conditions we're familiar with from 3.X.

If you really wanted to include all the effects of ability damage in the new paradigm (which we don't necessarily, but for the sake of argument), all you would have to do is have the conditions directly modify the statistics derived from the ability score in question. So, if we wanted to replace any sources of WIS ability damage with a condition set, we could have something like "Distracted, Dazzled, Blind."

Distracted (equivalent to 4 WIS damage): -2 to perception checks
Dazzled (equiv. -8 WIS): -4 to perception checks
Blind (equiv. -16 WIS): -8 to perception checks in general, automatic failure on visual checks

Then to flavor things up a little, we add some other rider effects...

Distracted: -2 to perception checks, -1 to hit
Dazzled: -4 to perception checks, -2 to hit, -1 AC, 1/2 DEX bonus to AC
Blind: -8 to perception checks (auto-fail visual checks), all enemies have total concealment*, -2 AC, no DEX bonus to AC, 1/2 speed

* however you want to implement this concept; maybe it's the classic "50% miss chance" or maybe it's just -4 to hit... whatever.

Then you can also have other effects that affect Perception checks that are not part of that three-step progression, e.g. "Deafened" as a standalone condition that separately inflicts -2 to Perception checks, stacks with Distracted/Dazzled/Blind, and also reduces Initiative by -4, which is something you don't get with the D/D/B track progression.

Cribbing directly from the SRD, here's what I came up with for condition names and relationships that we could easily cannibalize for our nefarious purposes:

• Dazzled -> Blinded
  Deafened
  Fascinated -> Confused
  Fatigued -> Exhausted
  Sickened -> Nauseated
  Dazed -> Stunned -> Paralyzed
  Slow -> Petrified
  Shaken -> Frightened -> Panicked

[Username17]

That there is twice as many sources of [Make Fighter Sad] is a potential problem

Sure is. But the core issue is that none of the monsters should be written with "Make Fighters Sad" powers, they should be written powers and the Fighters written to what the monsters actually do. Yes, the broader issue with designing character classes first and challenges afterward is that it's rather likely that some character classes are going to end up with abilities that are relatively or absolutely worthless because they apply against monsters you'll rarely fight.

You need to design your character classes with the actual opposition in mind. And that means that you need to figure out what the demographics of the opposition are expected to be. And then set each character progression to be able to handle a majority of opposition one would actually face.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Having horrible stomach aches affects a person's ability to study books as much as it does their ability to swing a sword, getting clubbed over the head or flash bombed to the face is going to affect one's ability to bench press as much as it does their ability to do math. Going through verbal abuse that really shakes up up is going to affect your performance in matters of the hand and head alike, etc.

I dislike when D&D does the thing where getting your hamstring sliced is only bad for warriors and has zero impact on the wizard's ability to recite something he memorized earlier that day. I'd prefer fewer condition tracks that affect mental and physical stuff alike instead of strictly dividing things up like your character is a battleship with multiple independent compartments.

Like you have...
Physical Stress
Mental Stress

Getting stress on either fucks you up for various tasks.
Here's a list of modifiers and situational modifiers I made a while back, I forget if I updated it in some other thread

Fiddly modifiers
Training/Mood related
*attributes
*Level
*Proficiency/Skill/Feat
*Morale (Encouragement/Fear, going berserk?)

Material properties
*Item
*Force (force fields, magicked weapons)
*Weakness/Resistance (Silver vs werewolves, magic vs golems)

Positional
*Swarming (formation fighting, mob of zombies)
*Cover (light, medium, total)
*Distance (short, med, long, extreme)
*Footing (slippery, on horseback, on a storm wracked ship)
*Height/Size (giant vs dwarf, cavalry vs infantry without reach weapons, high/low ground)

-------

Advantage
Bonus earned through stunts or temporary effects.
+Positional advantage: Target is flanked/prone/restrained/flat footed
+Cognitive advantage: Target is unable to see you, target is surprised

Disadvantage
Penalties from temporary effects
-Cognitive: sensory overload, darkness, illusions, super distractions
-Physical: entangling vines, webs, getting grappled, beetles crawling all over you

Double Down
-Stunned/Nauseated

[Username17]

I dislike when D&D does the thing where getting your hamstring sliced is only bad for warriors and has zero impact on the wizard's ability to recite something he memorized earlier that day. I'd prefer fewer condition tracks that affect mental and physical stuff alike instead of strictly dividing things up like your character is a battleship with multiple independent compartments.

Getting your feet stuck to the floor and then shot at with fire bolts is a worse scenario if you are sword guy than if you are crossbow guy. Getting your feet stuck to the floor and then trampled is a worse scenario if you are crossbow guy than if you are sword guy.

If your conditions are meaningfully different and your characters are meaningfully different, you should expect that some conditions would be more severe than others for specific characters. Characters being able to work around or flat ignore certain conditions is an important and easy way to define characters into having advantage against certain enemies. If the Psion's mindblast still works while blinded or paralyzed, that's an obvious advantage in battles against Ghouls. If the Paladin is straight up immune to fear, that's an obvious advantage against the Yeth Hound.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Has anyone found a satisfactory replacement or houserule for Ability Damage in 3.E? It is probably the most common effect that I absolutely fucking hate the implementation of. Making a player recalculate their sheet on the fly every time a giant centipede lands an attack sucks and is one of the most obnoxious mechanics in 3.E.

I haven't tried anything. If you wanted to turn this into stacking penalties that resulted in less calculation, and could skill KO/kill you, maybe something like this would work.

When you have an ability get damaged, you take a certain* amount of nonlethal damage (lethal damage if it's Con damage). In addition, roll the die for ability damage, as normal, halve the result, and apply a stacking penalty based on the type of ability damage:

• Str - attack rolls (and damage?)
• Dex - AC and Reflex saves
• Con - Fort saves
• Int - DCs for prepared arcane spells (and something else?)
• Wis - Will saves and DCs for divine spells
• Cha - DCs for spontaneous arcane spells (and something else?)

This stops you from having to recalculate everything, and applies a penalty to a small number of things (like many status conditions). You'd have to rework how spells like Lesser Restoration that heal ability damage work.

A side effect will be that hitting animals for Int damage won't likely drop them, and the penalty might be pointless to them. The same is pretty much true for hitting fighters with Int/Cha damage. I think this is largely a good thing.


*I'm not sure how much damage to deal. The dice you roll for ability damage are tiny. My first two thoughts are either "double the rolled ability damage" or "multiply the ability damage (or dice rolled) by the target's HD". The first one is simple, but high level targets will almost never drop from ability damage. Still, 2d6 * your level is a big threat to a lot of PCs. I'm not sure if there's a simple answer.

The only ability damage monster I ever use is the Wyvern because dealing 2d6 Con damage per hit basically just says "Save or be KO'd in 2 hits"

Nitpick, but Con damage kills you. It's the other five that knock you out.

[Username17]

The six attributes aren't particularly good. Strength is the one that is easiest to define and easiest to measure, and even it has problems. Crocodile jaws snap closed very strongly, but people can hold those same jaws closed with bare hands. All the other stats are much worse than that in one or more ways.

Intelligence is something that people can by and large acknowledge is a thing. Newton is smarter than Trump, and you can imagine a numeric scale that rates people who fall somewhere in the middle. But while it's easy to rate fictional and even real people from smartest to dumbest, it's difficult to reach agreement as to what any particular level of intelligence means. How smart do you have to be to get out of the Minotaur's Maze? Do you have to be smarter than someone who can solve the Sphinx's Riddle? While there are certainly people we'd describe as very smart and people we'd describe as very dumb, most people are actually better and worse at various mental tasks, and ranking them in importance is highly arbitrary.

Charisma is certainly a describable trait. But how do you rank a sexy celebrity you want to follow into the bedroom versus an inspiring warlord that you want to follow into battle? Some creatures are given low charisma scores because you don't want to suck their dick and some creatures are given low charisma scores because they aren't impressive on the battlefield and some creatures are given high charisma scores because you do want to suck their dick and some creatures are given high charisma scores because they are impressive on the battlefield, and sometimes you could make equally valid arguments for high or low charisma scores on the same creature using alternate criteria of dick sucking or flag waving. Without looking it up, do you know if a War Fiend has a Charisma closer to 7 or 17?

Dexterity is a measure of active proficiency. Having a high dexterity makes you good at doing various actions. Are machine working Cyclopses supposed to have a high dexterity because they work with gears or a low dexterity because they are bad at hitting things with ranged weapons? More generally, how is Dexterity supposed to differentiable from general competence? Tasks like sneaking through a cave or hitting someone with an arrow or defusing a bomb are all things that are supposed to go up with level, so what the fuck is supposed to be the difference between a low dexterity character of Level X+1 and a high dexterity character of Level X-1?

Constitution is a garbage trait that has no effect on active tasks at all. It's a resistance trait first and always, but to an even greater degree than even Dexterity, resistance to poisons and petrification and shit is just a function of badassery. In a level based system, Constituion has no reason to exist.

No one can even coherently explain what Wisdom is even supposed to be. That's the beginning and end of it.

I don't think the six stats are worth saving. You want something like Strength and Intelligence. You probably want something like Charisma and Dexterity, you definitely don't want Wisdom or Constitution. I could see adding a stat or two that's less ambiguous and bullshit like Perception or Anal Circumference, but I see no special reason to fetishize six stats specifically. You could have five or seven, or four, or eight. But honestly, I don't think there's a lot of room for there to be a lot of stats, because Strength is a pretty big deal at low levels. Characters spend a lot of time breaking things and people with hammers, and it's difficult for an attribute like Shoe Size or Verbosity to be as influential in-game whether it's objectively measurable or not.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

A couple of times now I started to post about replacing the casting stats, but I never felt I did a good enough job. Let me see if I can boil it down a bit.

1) I think Intelligence is a bad stat to have, because a character's actual intelligence is supplied by the player, and the Int stat seems to represent memory more than anything else, and even then a specific kind of memory. Also, a lot of your mythic wizards aren't particularly smart, just educated. Wisdom is of course worse.

2) I want to reference Bloodborne, where they went from their spiritual predecessors' trite Intelligence and Faith to the much weirder Arcane and Bloodtinge. Arcane is an almost completely abstract quantity - it mostly represents a kind of intuitive understanding of the casting tools, with a little luck (and fire damage, which could be the result of luck) thrown in. Bloodtinge measures some factor in your blood that makes it more dangerous when exposed to alchemical mercury, which matters because the guns all use quicksilver bullets and some of the melee weapons include alchemical mercury. The point is that casting stats can be basically anything as long as you have a paradigm that supports them. Also, there's a lot of room for casting stats to contribute in non-casting ways.

[Omegonthesane]

I had it in my head that at least one roguelike I'd played straight up replaced Intelligence with Magic or some shit since it's the casty stat, but turns out that was actually ADOM and all it did was split out "Mana" from "Learning".

As I recall though Sages aren't actually supported by a paradigm in which Intelligence is a stat that materially adds to your Obscure And Suddenly Plot Relevant Trivia rolls.