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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8870616" data-attributes="member: 6790260">While I admit I personally find a lot of the proposals for adding "teeth" to various components of D&D to be actively un-fun, I can recognize that this is something people might want. I think the big problem you're facing is cultural, and very specifically caused by 3rd edition.Because 3e massively expanded the kinds of DM dick moves you could pull, through its mechanics involving divine casters generally and Paladins very specifically. The descriptions for the Paladin's code are poorly-written and full of both significant assumptions and logical loopholes, which directly contributed to both the "Paladin Catch-22" problem (DMs forcing Paladins to fall by making them choose between Good and Law, and thus no matter what they choose, they fall because they didn't choose the other thing) and the "Lawful Stupid Paladin" problem (paladin players being jerk@$$ moral police and/or Tautological Templars to the other players or otherwise harming the overall game experience.) Further, the whole "your god can pull the plug literally at any time" mechanic wasn't so much giving the mechanics teeth as straight up handing every DM live ordinance with "don't use this incorrectly" as the only real instructions.That, I think, has led to a rather extensive and durable distaste for any mechanics which put significant veto power over the player's ability to keep playing as the character they want to play. Years (more than a decade, if you count PF) of DMs being crappy about that power has inserted a cultural perception that DMs, on the whole, do not use this power with the judicious caution it deserves, or at least not consistently enough to make the stuff involved worth playing. Much the same, for example, as the vehemently negative reaction from many DMs, and players, to anything that looks like a Prestige Class. It doesn't matter if you have a great idea and you intend to use it responsibly and you do in fact actually produce something balanced and effective and flavorful. The well is already poisoned; the bitten are already shy. It will take a long time--possibly a decade or more, though perhaps less due to the massive influx of genuinely brand-new players--before DMs are willing to even consider something PrC-like. I'm pretty sure the same applies to giving "teeth" to mechanics that "hitch your star to another being for power."So. With all that said. What would you do to give it teeth? As I said above, I'm a skeptic. I find a lot of mechanics of this nature are not only purely stick with zero carrot, but the stick usually takes the form of being annoying, cryptic to the point of actually insoluble, and/or nuclear in nature. Where this "hitching" is actually more like being shackled and players would rather play literally anything else because power gained through such inappropriate means absolutely has to be accompanied with filing one's taxes every few weeks. For the cryptic, making it so there "really is" a way to work through, but it's so convoluted it would offend Sierra adventure game puzzle designers. Or, in the nuclear case, one wrong move and poof, your whole character just got thrown in the trash, congratulations, you're now playing an NPC Sidekick as opposed to the actual character you wanted to play.I say this not because I am trying to be aggressive, but because I want to make it very clear where I'm coming from. I would actually really like to see mechanics that give "teeth" to this kind of thing that aren't tedious or disproportionate. In the ideal case, they'd actually be useful to me as DM for my Dungeon World game.</blockquote>

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