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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 4975147" data-attributes="member: 51942">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.  The problem isn't a minor imprecision in to-hit, the problem is in the incentives it creates.  Those are a big deal.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.  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. 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. 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.  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.</blockquote>

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