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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteelDraco" data-source="post: 1059573" data-attributes="member: 359">I'm growing dissatisfied with the existing turning rules. It just seems to me that they're too all-or-nothing. The cleric either ends the fight with one roll, or has little impact on the way things go. This mostly stems from a recent adventure in which the party's cleric destroyed the party's main foe for that adventure with one turning roll. This was a creature that they had been after for some time, and it just seemed... wrong somehow that there wasn't a big, climactic fight. Just one PC waving his holy symbol and getting a lucky roll, and *poof*! Fight's over. The rest of the group - including the guy playing the cleric - agreed with me. It wasn't as fun as a big fight would have been.It's possible the problem's with Greater Turning (which was used), but I don't think so. A turned creature is just as useless if it's reduced to cowering as far away from the priest as it can get. It's out of the combat.There are solutions, of course. Every powerful creature could have Turn Resistance, so the cleric's ability is usually useless. Throw hordes of creatures at the party to whittle away the priest's turning ability. And so on. But really, I don't like those as solutions. I'd prefer something that made the ability less all-or-nothing, more something that could turn the tide of a fight, but wouldn't win it outright all the time.I've been considering how to do this. The most promising of my ideas is to cause penalties on a turned creature, without actually causing it to flee or explode. The two ways to do this I've been toying with are negative levels or ability damage. I know, neither are supposed to work on undead, but the mechanics are solid.Negative levels would reduce the combat effectiveness of turned creatures based on how well the turning cleric rolled. Roll well enough, or keep it up for enough rounds, and the affected creatures can be destroyed. Minor creatures would be more susceptible, while big tough critters would just have penalties to their actions. This seems to me to be a pretty good solution to all my problems.The other option is ability damage, probably to Charisma. This is the stat that creatures like undead use for their powers, and they all have a Cha score. Charisma damage would reduce the effectiveness of their special abilities, and eventually cause them to become incapacitated. Unfortunately, it also doesn't discriminate very well between the power level of the undead - the Cha score of, say, a lich might not be all that much higher than a skeleton or wight. So, those are my thoughts. Anyone have any comments? Alternate solutions to the turning problem? Or am I the only one who thinks it's a problem?</blockquote>

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