Fixes for "niggling bonuses/penalties"?

[Siberys]

Ongoing has dozens of variations, taking into account damage amount and type, which is what I find hard - or at least annoying - to track.

A single creature dealing one type of ongoing in an encounter isn't difficult. Some creatures, though, have multiple ongoing damage types, such as the Black Blood Hydra. One might want to run several monsters that, thematically, make sense together, but which have differing ongoing damage amounts and types. Most of the time, too, it won't be a PC that imposed the condition - it'll be me, the DM, through some monster. I want to be able to use ongoing damage, but I don't want to keep track of it all of that - I've got a bunch of other things to keep straight as-is.

Looking at Ongoing, there are four things to remember;

How Much?
What Type?
Take the Damage
Make the Saves

Saves isn't a big deal for me - it's become a standard part of the turn to check for saves.

With regards to moving damage to just before saves - I think I may do that. It is a good suggestion - I can't believe I just skimmed past it.

'Bleeding' would, I think, fix the 'how much' and 'what type' questions by making them fixed, instead of 2, 5, 10, 15, or 20 acid, fire, cold, thunder, lightning, necrotic, poison, radiant, psychic, force, or untyped damage, or any combination thereof.

So, Bleeding would now be;

Bleeding
You take 5 damage per tier at the end of your turn, before rolling saving throws.

This would fix every memory issue save for saves - which is really a non-issue.

 

[eamon]

So, Bleeding would now be;

Bleeding
You take 5 damage per tier at the end of your turn, before rolling saving throws.

This would fix every memory issue save for saves - which is really a non-issue.

So, let's say a monster does ongoing 5 necrotic damage to a deva - who's resistance means that amount is irrelevant. Are you going to impose the bleeding condition or not?

How bout the following variant:

• If a creature gains ongoing X damage, subtract resistances(or immunities) and add vulnerabilties to X immediately; call this modified number Y. If Y is 0 or less, stop.
• If the creature not bleeding or bleeding by less than Y damage a round, the creature now bleeds by Y damage a round.
• Add a bleeding token to the creature (there may be several at a time).
• At the end of the creature's turn, it takes it's bleeding value in untyped damage and saves against all bleeding tokens it currently has - for each successful save, remove a token; when no more tokens remain, the creature stops bleeding.

The idea behind this variant would be that (A) all damage happens together with saves at the end of the turn, and (B) despite losing the fine-grained control that ongoing damage has, you can still stack a little bit. Since you save vs. all tokens at the end of the turn, each extra token becomes less and less useful - but not entirely useless, so you avoid corner-cases whereby it's entirely risk-free to gain more ongoing damage since you already have some. Finally (C), this variant respects resistances and vulnerabilities somewhat.

You could get rid of tracking quantities too, but that's really tricky - particularly later on the amount of ongoing damage differs wildly. Lolth can do 50 ongoing damage; the also epic-level nycademon does 5 ongoing - converting both to bleeding 15 represents quite a change.

 

[Siberys]

So, let's say a monster does ongoing 5 necrotic damage to a deva - who's resistance means that amount is irrelevant. Are you going to impose the bleeding condition or not?

Yes, I would apply it. Like I said, it loses quite a bit of flavor in exchange for a solid, constant, easy-to-remember effect.

How bout the following variant:

• If a creature gains ongoing X damage, subtract resistances(or immunities) and add vulnerabilties to X immediately; call this modified number Y. If Y is 0 or less, stop.
• If the creature not bleeding or bleeding by less than Y damage a round, the creature now bleeds by Y damage a round.
• Add a bleeding token to the creature (there may be several at a time).
• At the end of the creature's turn, it takes it's bleeding value in untyped damage and saves against all bleeding tokens it currently has - for each successful save, remove a token; when no more tokens remain, the creature stops bleeding.

The idea behind this variant would be that (A) all damage happens together with saves at the end of the turn, and (B) despite losing the fine-grained control that ongoing damage has, you can still stack a little bit. Since you save vs. all tokens at the end of the turn, each extra token becomes less and less useful - but not entirely useless, so you avoid corner-cases whereby it's entirely risk-free to gain more ongoing damage since you already have some. Finally (C), this variant respects resistances and vulnerabilities somewhat.

This does get rid of the damage type problem, but then there's still quantity to deal with. Although, potentially, since I use red tokens only for PCs who are bloodied, I could use all those extras I have for bloodied amounts... I'll be thinking about co-opting this in some way, but I REALLY like how bleeding is a one-and-done type deal.

You could get rid of tracking quantities too, but that's really tricky - particularly later on the amount of ongoing damage differs wildly. Lolth can do 50 ongoing damage; the also epic-level nycademon does 5 ongoing - converting both to bleeding 15 represents quite a change.

That is one thing I was concerned about. Hrm... One thing to consider is that this probably shouldn't be a 'blanket rule', even if I am presenting it as such. For Lolth, frex, I might up the initial damage of the attack to compensate, or have the Bleeding condition require multiple saves, and so on.