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<blockquote data-quote="Varianor Abroad" data-source="post: 4414794" data-attributes="member: 12425">This sounds mechanically like a melee fight between two opponents in D&amp;D that only those two can participate in. Think about it. Most D&amp;D fights involve multiple combatants attacking an enemy. Pare it down to two. One PC, one opponent. Replace the flavor of weapons with the effort of wills. You attack, you do damage. Easy to represent mechanically with hit points or some variation thereupon. (Psionics anyone?) Maybe you erode each others will temporarily until the fight is over?The issue is that you don't want to focus on this too often. Once in a while, it's a cool thing. If you let the PCs get stats for this sort of thing, they'll want to use them all the time.On the Countering Existing Magic topic, I love stuff like that. I ran an adventure once where an NPC was immune to all varieties of magic. She had a series of magic mirrors behind her, each one giving off a colored beam of light. The party figured out that each mirror they broke removed an immunity to one type of magic (like transformation). That's one way to handle it. Another variation is to give the parties a means (perhaps by putting a clue in an old text or something) of wearing down the magical barrier repeatedly. As noted, many RPGs do include variations on this. It's a cool thing. Making an evil artifact stop working by some means that makes the PCs squirm is always cool. I prefer to see it stop short of self-sacrifice a la the Taran Wanderer books, but incenting the PCs to shed their own blood is a good one.I think that a couple of the leading RPGs don't focus on these two options for some good reasons, many of which are outlined in this thread already. Even in Champions, dealing STUN was a lot more effective than doing a Drain on an enemy, really.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Varianor Abroad, post: 4414794, member: 12425"] This sounds mechanically like a melee fight between two opponents in D&D that only those two can participate in. Think about it. Most D&D fights involve multiple combatants attacking an enemy. Pare it down to two. One PC, one opponent. Replace the flavor of weapons with the effort of wills. You attack, you do damage. Easy to represent mechanically with hit points or some variation thereupon. (Psionics anyone?) Maybe you erode each others will temporarily until the fight is over? The issue is that you don't want to focus on this too often. Once in a while, it's a cool thing. If you let the PCs get stats for this sort of thing, they'll want to use them all the time. On the Countering Existing Magic topic, I love stuff like that. I ran an adventure once where an NPC was immune to all varieties of magic. She had a series of magic mirrors behind her, each one giving off a colored beam of light. The party figured out that each mirror they broke removed an immunity to one type of magic (like transformation). That's one way to handle it. Another variation is to give the parties a means (perhaps by putting a clue in an old text or something) of wearing down the magical barrier repeatedly. As noted, many RPGs do include variations on this. It's a cool thing. Making an evil artifact stop working by some means that makes the PCs squirm is always cool. I prefer to see it stop short of self-sacrifice a la the Taran Wanderer books, but incenting the PCs to shed their own blood is a good one. I think that a couple of the leading RPGs don't focus on these two options for some good reasons, many of which are outlined in this thread already. Even in Champions, dealing STUN was a lot more effective than doing a Drain on an enemy, really. [/QUOTE]

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