Is Losing your Turn The Worst That Can Happen

[GMMichael]

Yeah, if you still have options, you're still playing. And maybe the remaining options still allow you to contribute. If e.g., Stunned meant I can't attack and am at disadvantage on other rolls, but can move half speed, I could still move to flank an enemy, or dig out a potion and drink it or save a dying friend. Or activate a magic item. Or pull the lever to lower a portcullis and divide the enemy, etc.

Right? What if Stunned just means that your physical options are out, which doesn't affect your mental or magical ones? Or you still have your muscle memory (physical), but your mental options are restricted?

In most RPGs, these same options are eventually available to enemies. Mooks and monsters won't have them, but enemy NPCs generally do. The only way to never have a situation where the PCs lose a turn is to either remove all of these options from the PCs wheelhouse, or play a game where NPCs follow a completely different set of rules from the PCs.

"Never lose a turn" seems like a boring game to me. I don't want to see it in every other encounter, but how scary is the vampire, for example, when you know she's going to try to enthrall one of the heroes in a fight (or at dinner)?

Anyway, the effect could be much more interesting if, instead of losing a full turn, a PC just lost a portion of a turn, or some of its options. Like having one action on a turn instead of three. Then the PC would have to think harder about how to spend the turn, instead of not thinking at all.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Anyway, the effect could be much more interesting if, instead of losing a full turn, a PC just lost a portion of a turn,

Well, Dazed in 4e reduces you to a single action (of Standard / Move / minor) and was probably THE most frequent status condition imposed both by PC powers and by monsters moves.

And it sucked. It didn’t lead to any interesting decisions. It either didn’t affect you at all (the ranger still used twin strike, the wizard still cast a spell, the base-to-base fighter or rogue still used a melee attack power), it forced you to charge to get your movement + attack (which might not even be a penalty, given how OP charge was in 4e) — or it completely crippled you and may as well have been Stunned (you weren’t base to base and couldn’t ranged-attack nor charge effectively).

Action denial is usually boring. Action choice forcing is much more interesting. Like… I dunno, off the top of my head…

“While affected by [condition] you can still do stuff, but you take damage / grant CA / allow the enemies to tick a clock / some downside.”

 

[Evaniel]

It's not the worst thing in the world, but it isn't fun.

It happened to me once. My PC beating back the bad guys pretty effectively, so the DM altered the rules mid game so that a spell could reach my PC and knock him overboard. ..and of course there was no way for me to climb back up.

This echoes a sentiment stated somewhere up thread, and speaks to some rather disheartening experiences I've had around agency that, at a glance, don't seem related to the base topic of the thread but share some themes.

My Friday night game is a bit of a potpourri where everyone takes turns DMing and runs their pet thing. Lately, it had been a lot of D&D 5e (likely as it's a lingua franca and the one thing we could all agree on). The stars had aligned recently with two of the players with seemingly similar predilections running 5e modules: one wanted to run Vecna, and the other Frostmaiden.

One had exhibited some...capriciousness as a DM in the past, and the other hadn't, though both tend to be a bit "aggro" as players: doing stuff that veers the rest of the group off course. In both these instances, the DM v. player paradigm came out to the fore.

In Vecna, the DM lectured us for not being specific in our searches. I get that there's a backlog of old skool searching vs. player skill but the rub is this: when I searched a shield in a tomb (thinking it might have a clue), the DM immediately changed the curse rules to inflict it on me for merely interacting with it. So, on the one hand, he wants us to search granularly. On the other hand, it was clear that it was a way to make it seem like our choices were what inflicted the penalty. It took away agency and made the experience kind of...arbitrary...which is antithetical to why I play RPGs. Had the shield been merely trapped? I'd have been okay with it. If it had killed my character or put me out for a minute, that would have been okay, too. It was that stripping of agency mixed with the implication that it was my choice (agency) that had done it that bothered me.

Something similar happened the next week in the Frostmaiden game. That player who ran Vecna played a character that basically antagonized everything and everyone we came across, making it difficult to make meaningful choices or interact with the setting. Worse still, the DM clearly wanted the early bounty on the possessed murderer to become a scenario in which we were framed for the murder we were trying to prevent.

We staked out the merchant caravan (I later learned that in the module the PCs know who the suspect is straight away; in this version, we spent a lot of time observing and narrowing suspects). A group of us waited behind the rogue who would be best able to follow the suspect. We would follow the rogue from a slight distance. That's when things went south, quickly.

Though we had discussed the plan, the DM asked what we wanted to do after the rogue began following the suspect. He had the first character who responded that we were following to make a single Survival roll to see if we could keep up. A "14" failed. This is when my spidey-sense went off. Tracking someone in the wilderness is normally a 15 DC. We watched the person we were following (and who was helping us follow him) disappear. In a snow laden village. Several entrapping sort of questions followed--"Do you want to knock loud enough for others to hear?" culminating in a confrontation where the suspect revealed his ice blades and fought us. Apparently enough town folks saw us attacking him to make us suspects, but somehow no one saw his weird magic blades. Like the previous village, we had to flee into the country. Again: we were stripped of agency mixed with the implication that it was our choices (agency) that had done us in.

Several of us had become pretty sullen by this point, and both DMs have kind of cottoned to the fact that people weren't having fun. But neither of them copped to the idea that maybe--just maybe--the way they structured the experience was the reason rather than mere player petulance. I want to point out that this is in a group of 30-50 year olds (and working professionals).

I've had several characters die, go insane, and been maimed in games, and had a blast because it fit within the milieu and were either the result of my choices or just bad luck. I don't mind losing an occasional turn due to a spell, but I should hope it's part of an encounter that ends soon enough for me to participate in the game again and not a result of the DM trying to "win," whatever that might look like. What I've outlined above, and what I think other posters have gotten at, is when I'm not really participating but instead being implicitly told that my choices are why I'm not participating.

We're now playing video games together instead and maybe having another player run not-D&D, is that seems to be the excuse everyone is using for why it didn't work out. Both of the culprits are fun outside of those contexts, but sensitive and not terribly receptive in the past to constructive criticism.

That's all to say that while the question is ostensibly about mechanics--defining things in terms of a round--I think more deeply its about agency and the fact that at the end of the day an RPG is a social act. How we define that agency and come to some mutual agreement about what social rights participants have in relation to it is pretty crucial. And apparently some extraordinarily intelligent folks in my social sphere (myself included) are having some difficulty navigating that.

 

[Distracted DM]

I had not considered using fatigue and strife that way, but I like it. I could definitely see gaining a level in either or both to act while stunned, maybe if you fail a save. That's a cool idea!

Maybe I'll split this off into its own thread for a little brainstorm on the topic.
edit: Done!

 

[Joshua Randall]

@Evaniel the game rules cannot protect you from PLAYERS who are jerks or who have play style antithetical to yours.

 

[GMMichael]

Well, Dazed in 4e reduces you to a single action (of Standard / Move / minor) and was probably THE most frequent status condition imposed both by PC powers and by monsters moves. And it sucked. It didn’t lead to any interesting decisions. It either didn’t affect you at all (the ranger still used twin strike, the wizard still cast a spell, the base-to-base fighter or rogue still used a melee attack power), it forced you to charge to get your movement + attack (which might not even be a penalty, given how OP charge was in 4e) — or it completely crippled you and may as well have been Stunned (you weren’t base to base and couldn’t ranged-attack nor charge effectively).

Those actually sound like interesting options to me. So I'm hearing that the sucky part was just that it was the most frequent status condition.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Those actually sound like interesting options to me.

??? I’m genuinely wondering what is interesting about: “you used to have 3 actions per turn. Now you have one. Deal with it.”

So I'm hearing that the sucky part was just that it was the most frequent status condition.

That definitely didn’t help.

 

[Distracted DM]

??? I’m genuinely wondering what is interesting about: “you used to have 3 actions per turn. Now you have one. Deal with it.”

I mean, you have to choose what you're going to do with your one action. It's better than NO options and just missing your turn- it gives the player something to think about.

 

[Mannahnin]

I mean, you have to choose what you're going to do with your one action. It's better than NO options and just missing your turn- it gives the player something to think about.

Yup. I think Joshua's right that there are times when Dazed isn't that interesting because the choice is obvious, but even if you are still going to use the same Standard action (spell, Twin Strike, whatever), losing your Move and Minor actions is still a cost, and can prevent you from moving out of an AOE, moving into an ally's AOE or setting up a flank, etc. If the choice is obvious, at least that means you can still execute your turn quickly and combat is sped up.

Yeah, if you still have options, you're still playing. And maybe the remaining options still allow you to contribute. If e.g., Stunned meant I can't attack and am at disadvantage on other rolls, but can move half speed, I could still move to flank an enemy, or dig out a potion and drink it or save a dying friend. Or activate a magic item. Or pull the lever to lower a portcullis and divide the enemy, etc.

That seems like an extremely generous definition of "stunned", which I've always taken to mean you stand there like a defenseless idiot because your mind has temprarily stopped working.

No spit. Yes, I think most of us are well aware of how Stun is treated in1E, despite that edition hilariously not defining the condition anywhere (the closest it comes is in the Power Word: Stun spell description; the DMG only tells you the bonuses to attack which people get against you, and you have to look under the Symbol spell description to find out that stunning also causes the person to drop held items).

We're talking about prospective alternate rules. Hence the words "if" and "meant" in my post which you're replying to.

If you spend your entire life locked into the context of only viewing rules or proposed rules through the lens of your (personal, house-ruled) version of 1E, it's going to continually hinder you from having productive dialogue with other people about the rules of OTHER versions of D&D or even other RPGs.

An interesting variant Skerples has proposed (and I'm using in my current game) is ghouls causing agony. Each round the player can choose to have his character roll on the ground/self-soothe, or act normally but take another d6 of non-lethal damage. 50% chance to end at the end of each of the victim's turns.

Is this cumulative, i.e. d6 per round for each time the ghoul has hit you? If yes, it's OK. If no, it's trivial; a d6 per round is trivial to a character with 50 h.p., never mind the odds of this effect lasting more than a few rounds are quite low.

Also, this too is very generous in another way: a paralyzed character can be coup-de-graced by any passing opponent with half a brain (which is what makes classic ghouls so damn dangerous when they are working with an intelligent master), where even a character rolling on the ground can still defend itself.

This seems like another example of you being trapped in the assumption that the way things have been in the past and the way things are in your game is an inevitable baseline reality of the universe rather than... not the way things are in other people's games or the way things have to be.

1. Why would you assume that everyone's games have characters with 50 hit points? Why would you think you have to point out that with a 50% chance of it ending each round the odds of it continuing for a long time are low? Given how simple the math is, you should be able to infer that this is an intentional feature, not a bug.

2. Why do you assume that ghouls should always be as devastatingly lethal and notoriously overpowered as Ghouls have classically been in AD&D? So that, e.g., they're still a terrifying threat even to higher level characters with 50 hp? Everyone who's experienced with old school D&D is familiar with how ghouls break the routine power curve of the encounter charts, and tons of people in OSR spaces have discussed (for well over a decade now) variants to make them less busted. (Or advocated for keeping them busted and scary, of course. They do have their supporters.) My usual house rule for Ghouls in old school is simply that they can't force more than one save against paralysis per round. If they hit you at all you have to make the save, but they can't force 2 or 3 saves on someone in the same round with their three attacks. That still keeps them super scary and nasty, but in my current game I'm trying something different and downgrading them a bit more. It's not like "Hey, maybe ghouls should be toned down a little" is a novel or controversial concept.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I don't think dying or dropping to 0 is inherently more interesting than a failed save. Getting bonked by an orc is boring, too.

I think* there's some missing sub-text. I think people get upset about getting Held or Stun-locked "again," perhaps for despite their best efforts (that to, likely "again"). When a game mechanic is implemented in a way that doesn't seem satisfying, especially if it feels punitive or unavoidable or poorly meshing with the rest of the play experience, it can seem subjectively worse than something that quasi-objectively is worse.
*so, preemptively, this is supposition and opinion

So yes, having your PC die obviously means more time not getting a turn, and should seem worse. However, generally game rules (or play patterns) level out to where rate (and avoidability) of PC death matches a level that players find acceptable -- and when they don't, PC death gets the same discussion treatment as being held (re: any thread akin to 'is the DCC funnel fun or just frustrating?', 'is _______ {meat grinder RPG} challenging or just random death,' etc.). Likewise, games* where getting out of being held is commensurate with other combat challenges and/or stunning happens but continuous stun-lock is unlikely** don't seem to generate this kind of discussion.
*I'm thinking GURPS stun rules and Hero System entangle powers, although it's been a while for both (and I'm sure there are other examples). **perhaps unless you are in a general death-spiral, in which case that becomes the subject of conversation.

That's what henchmen are for, IMO. Makes sure the player always has something to do.

I think that's the crux. There are some things in D&D that still harken back to the era where it was a reasonable assumption that there would be another character to play while yours was out of commission. That playstyle has been rendered non-universal, but some effects that were reasonable under that assumption (and less so under others) are still in place.

"Never lose a turn" seems like a boring game to me. I don't want to see it in every other encounter, but how scary is the vampire, for example, when you know she's going to try to enthrall one of the heroes in a fight (or at dinner)?

I mean, that's the issue -- people do want varying effects*, you just have to design them in a way that compliments the rest of the play pattern of the game. *certainly a game where the only combat effect out there is hp/damage is pretty uninspiring.