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Message: <blockquote data-quote="OchreJelly" data-source="post: 5205472" data-attributes="member: 62056">My take on this:THE GOOD:I think the conditions are an excellent evolution in the game mechanics.  In the past everything was codified individually in a given spell or ability which lead to redundancies.  Moreover conditional effects are short-lived which does away with a lot of the pre-combat bookkeeping.  Everyone remembers the old buff spreadsheets, but this is largely gone.  The short-lived nature does, however, present new bookkeeping challenges (see below).  But overall, to use programmer-speak: normalizing your data is a good thing.  THE LESS GOOD:Most of the problems I see with conditions is in the tracking and timing.  Short-lived conditions mean you either have to remember to do a save-ends or end-of-turn type of effect.  For me, this is mostly a problem that resides in the DM's chair.  It's hard enough to run a bunch of monsters all with cool abilities, and to remember what conditions are imposed on them, AND to remember when / how those conditions end.  IN ACTUAL PLAY: Long ago I created my own condition 3x5 cards that I hand out to players when they are hit with a condition.  Now in late-paragon play, I can't imagine how we'd play without them.  Some have suggested using less condition-monsters, but the reality is by paragon level almost every type of monster is throwing out a condition or two -- at least this is my experience with published encounters.  We use tokens to track things like quarry, mark, curse and bloodied.  Again, I don't know how we would function without these tools.  For our group, if a conditional can't be handled by one of those two methods above, it's often forgotten.  I'm speaking of things like monster-marking, auras, etc.  Lastly there are quasi-conditions which are fire-and-forget.  I'm speaking of forced movement and prone.  For prone, we just put the mini on its side which is pretty easy to track.SOLUTIONS? I really only have problems with the timing.  All this beginning-of-turn, end-of-turn, save-ends etc.  I just wish it was as normalized a system as the conditions themselves, but I don't really have anything to offer.  I would only recommend DMs to use cards and tokens.  They help us a ton.</blockquote>

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