Divine Challenge (and all marks) question

[keterys]

For reference:
"If a zone’s creator is slain, the zone immediately ends."
"If a conjuration’s creator is slain, the conjuration immediately ends."

If bard powers were intended to be songs that required continued effort, they should be sustained I suspect.

 

[DracoSuave]

Then in that case, if they'd intended marks to require effort, they'd have said something as well.

Not a big deal, only a handful of powers and a monster are corner cases, and that's what a DM is for... corner cases.

 

[eamon]

It depends on what the mark reflects narratively. If the mark reflects, say, a cutting wound that angers you against the giver, then yeah, actually, it'd still work after they're dead.

But even then, it's -only a turn-. And the player is dead. Throw a bone here.

Sometimes its more than just a turn. The problem is smallest when the duration is shortest - no doubt. But the rules are the same for all durations - and even one round can be really nasty with coup de grace and whatnot. Hitting a dropped creature isn't hard, tends to be and automatic critical, and is a very quick way of dispatching PC's.

Less than a turn of this situation is -hardly- an indication the rules are broken. It works -fine- as is. The monster gets a penalty for a tiny bit. Big deal.

The problem isn't a minor imprecision in to-hit, the problem is in the incentives it creates. Those are a big deal.

And as I said, that's a problem with effects' durations and death. Marking is hardly the only case of this.

Perhaps, but marking is certainly one of the most egregarious precisely because it's an effect designed to hand out incentives to other combatants. Most other possibly problematic effects don't.

Off the top of my head? A lot of Bard dailies have persistant effects that are supposed to be representing a song sung. Most of those last just fine.

That's not clear to me at all; they perhaps represent music at the time of casting, but the music need not last. These effects don't seem directly tied to the bard at all - if they required sustaining, they could use the sustain mechanic.

Stances.

Off the top of my head, most stances are suppressed (or largely irrelevant) while you're dying. Should you regain consciousness, and resume acting normally, and don't see the flavor problem with resuming the stance as well. Stances also tend not to create perverse incentives; i.e. an "active" stance on a dropped creature has virtually no impact on gameplay, unlike marks.

Mental domination effects.

These too fail reasonably - if you can't choose your own actions, and no action is chosen for you, you may perform the "drool" action. No problem there. Again, this doesn't have much of an impact on the game; it could even be a roleplaying aide.

Certain types of immobilizes and restrains...

I could well imagine that these too should end if they represent the dead creature grappling with you. On the other hand, some creatures may not release their grip on death; and since your defense become terrible when dying or dead, escaping a grab becomes easy - i.e., it's a reasonable approximation of an easy escape that does require some action on the escapees part. Where these effects make no sense after death, they should end, just like marks - but if these situations happen to be very rare (likely) and thus not worth rules attention, this does not mean the same holds for marks.

The fundamental issue is that the marks, unlike most other such effects, retain a (perverse) tactical function after death often without reasonable in-game explanation. Marks are also very common. So, while there may be other effects which should end upon death, most have much less impact on game-play and are also much less common. Marks are the low-hanging fruit here.