Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ravenheart" data-source="post: 5446459" data-attributes="member: 72088">The problem I see with Helpless is that I can picture every other condition in a multitude of ways (ex. Blinded could be blood in your eyes, a flash of light, magical blindfold etc.) and can easily come up with practical and theoretical uses of them in conjunction with powers, feats, items, monsters etc. But I can't do this with Helpless. It's a condition that only exists for a single purpose, to act as an indicator of when a coup de grace is available. I guess you could say that any untrained peasants or a litter of kittens are Helpless against your greataxe or fireball, but what's the point in that? We already have minions or DM fiat for that (and psychiatrist if you obsess about killing kittens, you evildoer!). The few cases (notably powers) where this condition could be viably used on its own, it can easily be translated to "the target grants combat advantage and can be the subject of a coup de grace", as is the case when an effect is beyond the use of regular conditions. As a separate condition, it is simply redundant.------------------------------------------------The real core of these changes are two-fold: mechanical and cinematic.Mechanically it means you are aware of your surroundings when you're dropped to 0 hp (so for instance, effects that require you to see or hear an ally would work) and that you can both be incapacitated and unconscious (giving you a whooping -10 to defenses).As I said i thought about allowing free actions while incapacitated, but now I'm willing to extend that to a minor action (but no attacks etc.), and a limit on free actions (1/turn). The idea is to not to make downed characters harder to kill, but rather keep them in the fight (by keeping them as viable targets). Nothings more frustrating than rolling death saves round after round. The weird thing is that you could possibly be unconscious without being incapacitated, which is rather hard to imagine. So there is still an implied dependency there, so I might aswell make it a de facto dependency (changing Unconscious to refer to Incapacitated). So I give you that...----------------------------------------------Cinematically it adds drama to combat, making it more dangerous and engages all players at all times. A downed player is not useless, but he or she isn't automatically ignored either. With a minor action, he or she could possibly pull out a potion, try to disable a trap or flick a ditant switch with Mage Hand. Teamwork becomes even more crucial to the game, and sound tactics are required lest you are to burn out on healing surges. It incorporates the fighting spirit of the characters in a D&D campaign, and IMHO that's reason enough for warranting this change.-------------------------------------------As for my proposed boost to the Deafened condition, glad you liked it! I'm a bit partial to the -2 attack penalty myself, since it makes it more useful in concert with other conditions that grant combat advantage (ex. Blinded). But I can see it granting combat advantage as well.One option is to really explore design space and come up with an all new approach to this condition:- it could be a mutable condition that randomly imposes either an attack penalty or combat advantage (choosen on acquisition, 1-3 -2 atk, 4-6 CA)-it becomes a conscious round-by-round choice of the player (do I want a attack penalty, or do I want to grant combat advantage?). That only works for (save ends) conditions and require some unnecessary tracking though...- or it could be action dependant (If you are damaged by an attack while deafened, you take a -2 penalty to attack rolls until the end of your next turn. If you move more than 2 squares on your turn while deafened, you grant combat advantage until the start of your next turn).On the other hand, that might be taking it to the extreme... but I like taking things to the extreme! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

Verification