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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 7932218" data-attributes="member: 72555">No I didn't miss that.But I'm saying that "petrified" should be a slow, preventable process in 5e, with an initial condition that develops into fully being stoned.  And that is actually part of what it means to be petrified in 5e.  The rules for the "petrified" condition don't reflect that, they just describe the mechanical bundle of what happens at the end of the process.The "story" of petrified -- that you have an initial save, then a process as you harden, then you are stone -- is as core to the petrified effect in 5e as the rules for the petrified condition.By splitting off that mechanical bundle of effects, you do harm to a core 5e design philosophy, and that harm is completely unneeded.If you look at what Esker did, he did it for the purpose of analysis.  But imagine if you actually started building new effects using those 12 elements instead of the conditions in 5e.By ranking effects and not effect stories you are going to encourage yourself to do that.I can give a concrete example.  An effect that makes you both invisible and stunned is qualitatively different than an effect that does either, and the rankings of either invisible or stunned tell you next to nothing about how you should rank the combination.  I mean, you can say "it is worse than self-invisbile" and "better than self-stunned" without analyzing how they interact with some reasonable chance of being right.A slow invisibility, that starts out by forcing disadvantage on attacks, then you gain advantage on attacks, then you go invisible, is another "effect story" that is very different than "pop, I am invisible".  An invisibilty that breaks when you take damage, or breaks when you attack, or doesn't, are again very different things than invisibility.I could even go further.  The fact that stunning blow is a melee-range ability that targets con makes it worse than it would otherwise be, because melee range is easiest to get on a melee foe, and melee foes often have higher con than non-melee foes.  The fact it is on a monk makes it not as bad as it could be, because the monk can disengage as a bonus action and move very fast to engage back line foes.A con-based ranged stun is a bigger upgrade than doing the same with an int-based melee stun to a ranged stun, because high-int foes often seek to avoid melee, while high con foes tend to want to force melee.  You'll more often want to use the int-based stun on a foe who is in melee than you'd want to use the con-based stun on a foe who is in melee.What I'm saying is you should build effect stories and rank those, instead of ranking mechanical conditions divorced from the surrounding machinery.  You can make these effect stories generic and not tied to specific spells.Then instead of invoking an effect, you can find an effect story that is similar to the story of the effect they are improvising, and use that to rank how powerful it is.</blockquote>

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