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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5974663" data-attributes="member: 54877">One thing I haven't seen D&D do too much of, at least not systematically, is event-based durations that aren't all or nothing. There have been a handful of such effects in various editions. For example, there could be a mage armor spell where every time you got hit, you made a saving throw to avoid the damage. If you fail the save dramatically, you lose the mage armor entirely, as the attack overwhelms it. Maybe you have to roll a 1 for the first attack, but every time the mage armor succeeds in blocking an effect, this number rises. In general, this becomes instead of tracking a flat duration, you are tracking the difficulty or modifier of keeping the effect going. And this is precisely the kind of mechanic, especially in a bounded system, where I don't mind the ability stat having an effect. That is, an Int 20 wizard doesn't get any more direct blocking power out of mage armor spell than an Int 16 wizard, but he does tend to keep the spell up longer under attack. Dispel magic can then force such duration checks, possibly at a minus, instead of being a flat spell killer or more or less random. A spell that goes down with a predictable duration is one that becomes mostly permanent after awhile, especially when wands are involved. The wizard keeps the mage armor up all the time, and it loses its sense of being a spell. Mage armor that might die right when you need it is more interesting. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> For similar reasons, for spells that traditionally last 1 round/level, I'd like them to start with a "sustain number" or such, which degrades each round at the end of the caster's turn, and forces a check to keep going.  It's pretty easy to set the numbers so that most such spells will last 3-5 rounds, which is long enough to be useful, but short enough to be interesting.</blockquote>

Verification