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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8980423" data-attributes="member: 6790260">My experience has not been one of "endlessly" getting Just One More Thing any more nor less than with other forms of stacking. That is, there's just as much "oh wait, I also have X!" or "shouldn't this have Y?" either way. Yes, there is somewhat less incentive, but I find that that compensates for (most) of the time gained by meaning people aren't as driven to remember.It's not that there's zero time savings. It's that the time savings is quite modest, but because the net effect is identical to 5e-style non-stacking, you make exactly the same sacrifice. Getting less time savings for the same cost is unsatisfying, and doesn't feel like a creative solution.I mean, that's fair, but I still feel like there's this severe tension going on here, the precise inverse of the aforementioned "looking endlessly for one more thing" problem. That is, as I said, it severely flattens the gameplay space: either you have a thing, or you don't. I fully admit that it's very easy to go overboard with situational stacking modifiers, but having things HARD stop at "well you have an effect, get on with it" can be very disempowering: if you don't hand out bonuses when the players do something clever or effective (likely, to preserve the utility of the one and only bonus they're allowed to pick up), then there's far less incentive to actually DO clever or effective things and much more to simply pursue satisficing; and if you do hand out bonuses to reward clever/effective play, well, now you run the risk of over-use. It sounds like you prefer to err on the side of not giving out bonuses even when it might feel warranted, in order to preserve the specialness. Since I don't like either of these outcomes, I'm not really keen on stuff that requires me to choose between them.Personally, I think this is a function of how you design the rest of the game around it, rather than the bonuses themselves or lack thereof. Really good design should always have this as its loftiest goal, a smooth-as-butter approach where things just naturally work. But sometimes, to hone a finer edge, you need a finer grit, as it were. A blunt instrument's simplicity can be its strength and also its weakness. Hammers are great for a lot of things, but the moment you have a screw, they're useless.Are they more likely to? I haven't personally seen that much of an impetus. I instead see, as I said above, "satisficing": doing just enough to get the one-and-only bonus, and then not engaging further. Why bother? It doesn't get you anything. Note, this isn't a matter of not roleplaying. It's a matter of disengagement. Do what you need to do and no more; any further effort is wasted, that could've been put toward anything else. Doing "crazy stuff" requires that the reward be well worth the risk, and with a one-and-only bonus, it frankly often isn't. Especially since Advantage doesn't actually let you succeed better, it just lets you succeed more often.In fairness, that thing is (like most stuff I share on here) completely spitballed. If I were actually doing a design rather than a mere conceptual proposal, I'd be more rigorous about it (and expect quite a bit more testing.)That....sounds like a lot of the bookkeeping you seem to want to avoid? I'm not really sure how this avoids having to check over things to determine which bonus applies...you're just looking over your list of "permanent" bonuses rather than temporary ones and arguing for the best possible one?It certainly could work. A small set of bonuses, with particular triggers, and exception-based design for allowing limited, controlled stepping outside the narrow definitions. Perhaps re-factor the bonus types thing: remove untyped bonuses (all bonuses must have some kind of type), and reduce the number of bonus types to a short list. E.g. Action, Item, Inherent, Situational, Other? Default bonus is +1, so normally you only get (at most) +5, but again exception-based design might increase these things further. And then borrow your "Permanent" bonus category, for things that are meant to basically never ever change and (generally) aren't particularly situational. So a +N Sword is a "permanent" bonus, but the "Ogreslaying" modifier gives a Situational bonus (+1) when, y'know, slaying ogres. And then you could have a Warlord daily power (or whatever we call such things) which increases your allies' Situational bonuses by some amount.There's not much difference between that and having five statuses, e.g. Driven (action bonus), Honed (item bonus), Powerful (inherent), Prepared (situational), Boosted (other), and, just as 4e actually does in a few cases, allowing these diversified Combat Advantage-like statuses to grow bigger than they usually would be IF you already have them. There's still room to search for a benefit you don't have up to a point, but the real meat of play is in leveraging what you have and parleying it into something greater.As said, this is mostly spitballing, as opposed to your long and considered thought on HOML.</blockquote>

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