Stun is Fun

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yeah, but in the second part, players of Leaders and Paladins, and such types (you know, players who take concepts around helping the team out) get to shine by doing something other than the healing word. They get to go 'Saving throw to you!' and you go 'Now I can move' and they go 'What a great use of a minor action!' and you go 'Bully!' and they go 'Yay!' and they feel like they've saved the day.

You -are- aware that there's other players in your team, and one or more of them is likely to have taken a class that revolves around saving -your- ass from peril. So... if you're not in peril, what do -they- do?

Chain stun bad. Stun once in a while is good.

And groups should be ready for it when it happens, in the same way that they're ready for dominated, and the ongoing damage, and the immobilized.....


PS:

Obviously, if your group can't handle conditions, you use conditions less. On the other hand... if your group can't handle conditions, then what monsters have you been using?

I can have that without stun. They are also happy if I remove dazed, immobilized, slowed, weakened, ongoing damage and similar conditions. It doesn't have to be stun.

Our Savage Tides party has gotten a lot of experience with conditions, and with ways to deal them. The Paladin allows rerolls if you end your turn adjacent to him. My Warlord has a few save-granting powers.

Stun still doesn't track as a fun condition. Especially not if multiple party members are affected by it _including_ the guy that could remove them. (But you said that in your post.)

15 ongoing necrotic and poison damage is still more fun than stun. Even if everyone suffers from it. It's exciting, because you might actually die from it. And there are multiple ways to deal with it - healing, granting resists, granting extra saves.

In a 21st level one-short, it also showed that save-granting isn't always enough. The Barbarian in the party had a lot of immediate action powers that he couldn't use since he was stunned, dazed or immobilized and thus out of reach. It was not just enough to give him a save at some point, he needed it at the point he was subject to the condition. And that's a lot harder to get.

 

[keterys]

Even in groups that can handle conditions, I'd rather use daze, blind, weaken, or whatever instead of stun, or make stun what happens after you fail a save rather than from the get go. That encourages people to use extra actions to trigger free saves (since Failed Save stuff only triggers on the save you fail at the end of the turn, not extra ones)

Anyhow, minor action to give someone a 55% (or better) chance to shake off an effect? Fantastic! A standard action that does damage and gives one or more people saves? Great!

Having to move, make a heal check (possibly failed or otherwise) to give someone a chance to make a save? Pretty bad. Worthwhile at the end of combat or if the save is going to stop them from dying, but if it's just stun, then it's really simple as was shown earlier. 1 > .55 - one way you get the combat closer to finished. The other you just make it last longer. If the other person is that much cooler than you, sure... but in a lot of cases you might be close to stunning both of you if that save fails, it might actually not even work if their turn was before you instead of after you (1 >>>> 0) and the stun attack can be repeated, and if the stunner instead tosses an area attack that restrains or something similar, now that you're standing next to each other? Yeah, it _really_ might not pay off.

But Shake It Off or whatever? Great stuff. Also great when used on dazed and weakened (save ends)

 

[DracoSuave]

Even in groups that can handle conditions, I'd rather use daze, blind, weaken, or whatever instead of stun, or make stun what happens after you fail a save rather than from the get go. That encourages people to use extra actions to trigger free saves (since Failed Save stuff only triggers on the save you fail at the end of the turn, not extra ones)

Anyhow, minor action to give someone a 55% (or better) chance to shake off an effect? Fantastic! A standard action that does damage and gives one or more people saves? Great!

Having to move, make a heal check (possibly failed or otherwise) to give someone a chance to make a save? Pretty bad. Worthwhile at the end of combat or if the save is going to stop them from dying, but if it's just stun, then it's really simple as was shown earlier. 1 > .55 - one way you get the combat closer to finished. The other you just make it last longer. If the other person is that much cooler than you, sure... but in a lot of cases you might be close to stunning both of you if that save fails, it might actually not even work if their turn was before you instead of after you (1 >>>> 0) and the stun attack can be repeated, and if the stunner instead tosses an area attack that restrains or something similar, now that you're standing next to each other? Yeah, it _really_ might not pay off.

Well, yeah, using a Heal check to do stuff is generally last-resort country. Using a Heal check to second wind is usually the sign that things have gone bad, saving throws are not different than that.

That said, not all combats involve enemies with Area/Close attacks, in those cases a tight formation is a great idea to avoid The Flanking Dance.

But Shake It Off or whatever? Great stuff. Also great when used on dazed and weakened (save ends)

Absolutely!

 

[Jhaelen]

Actually, being stunned (for a long time) can be worse than being dead. If you're dead you can at least create a new character while the action continues for the rest of the party.

Interestingly today's PHB3 preview shows a new feat that grants a +4 bonus to saves vs. daze/stun. That's nice. What would be even nicer is a feat granting an immediate save against daze/stun effects that aren't (save ends).

 

[Flipguarder]

ever been stunned, had the leader grant you a save, succeed then get stunned again before the start of your next turn?

THAT sucks.

 

[Badapple]

I ran a combat a while ago where the warlock got stunned and he missed three saves in a row. So he basically had to sit out the whole fight. Talking with him later, he was frustrated. But interestingly he wasn't frustrated with the stun mechanic, he was frustrated at sitting around while the rest of the party was taking forever to resolve their turns. He was new to 4e and used to all the save or die/save or suck of previous editions, so merely missing a turn seemed tame to him. Talking with him about his frustrations actually led to a dialog where I found out many players were more and more frustrated with the pace of combat.

Stun sucks when you're playing in a group that takes forever to take their turn. But if everyone takes their turn quickly, then missing a turn isn't a big deal. Also if everyone takes quicker turns there are *more* turns overall in the course of a gaming session, so having some bum turns is less noticable because they comprise a lower percentage of your performed actions that session.

I like stun tactically because it throws a monkey wrench into the battle. The healer got stunned?! oh crap, suddenly strikers think about second wind or maybe people use dailies during an "easy" fight. Or the party suddenly tries to take out the stunner instead of their original focus fire target. It shakes things up.

But yeah, I agree with some of the earlier posters about stun, as one of the kings of the status conditions, that it shouldn't be overused... but still used occasionally and feared when it is.

Interestingly, I see many of the same arguments regarding the miss. That missing isn't fun, that you waste your whole turn if you miss... etc.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

ever been stunned, had the leader grant you a save, succeed then get stunned again before the start of your next turn?

THAT sucks.

I remember a Barbarian being stuck in an immobilizing zone.
Anyone starting his turn in the zone is immobilized (save ends).

Unless someone has Knight Moves or something like that... Difficult to get out. The Barbarian could as well have been Stunned in that situation ...

 

[Turtlejay]

You know what else sucks? Being stabilized at the beginning of the fight. You can't even make death saves. It is worse than being stunned because you have no light at the end of your tunnel, and worse than death because you *know* you are gonna make it, so you can't start in on making another character.

Jay

 

[Amaroq]

The "1 > 0.55" argument is a straw man, guys. It has two problems. First, it fails to consider the second and subsequent rounds. Second, it considers only standard actions.

To the first point, if I continue not-helping, my partner has only a 0.55 chance of acting in round two; if I'm willing to help him twice, then he has a 0.909 chance of acting in round two.

It turns out that if you run the math, there's no long-term difference: if player A always acts, and player B relies on making a save at the end of his turn, then when you add everything up, over seven rounds, they take 12.188 standard actions between them.

If player A always sacrifices his entire turn simply to grant B a saving throw, then when you add everything up. It turns out that when you add these up, over seven rounds, you get 12.182 standard actions between the two players.

The math gets even closer if the player saves more often than 0.55, but it takes reaching 1.00 for the number of standard actions generated to be exactly equal.

However, that still. completely discounts things that the "saving" player might be doing with his Move and Minor actions. If you count total actions, "saving your partner" actually comes out ahead. Counting the "saving" player as having 1 action on the "rush to your friend" turn (from his minor action), and 2 on any turn that he grants his partner a saving throw (the unused Move and Minors), then if you simply count total actions, the "help your partner" path earns 2.65 actions in round 1 compared to 3.00 for the "do your own thing", and beats "do your own thing" 5.52 to 4.65 in round 2.

After 7 rounds, "helping" nets 38.05 actions between the two players, while going it alone nets 36.57.

 

[keterys]

You really need to show your math if you want to get exact like that.

Let's say we have an elite creature with 200hp with an at-will single target stunned (save ends) attack with a 80% chance of hitting (curse you vulnerable NADs!). We'll assume it does negligible damage for whatever reason (PCs have enough hp or healing to counteract it for the first 20 rounds, whatever). Against him are two PCs that do 20hp when they hit, with a 50% chance to hit, so I can simplify it to 10 per attack. For Heal checks they have a +12, say, giving them a 10% chance to fail the heal check. They've already exhausted all of their actually cool and useful save-granting abilities. One has a 55% chance to succeed at a save, the second one has a 60% chance to succeed at a save. The order of the PCs is a very big deal, of course, since granting a save before the creature gets to go again can suck... so the creature should always focus on the one who goes first, so they can't pop each other out easily.

Init:
PC1 (starts stunned)
PC2
M

PCs always attack, Mob spreads stun to PC2 when PC1 is stunned:
End of Round
1: Avg Mob HP 190, 55% PC1 made his save (44% restunned, 11% neither stunned), 45% PC1 failed save (36% both stunned, 9% just PC1 stunned)
2: Avg Mob HP 174.5, 40% chance PC1 was stunned and failed a save, 14.4% chance PC2 was stunned and failed a save, 48% chance PC1 got stunned by M (either wasn't stunned or made his save, then it attacked and hit), 32% chance PC2 ended stunned, 6.4% chance neither is stunned...

Things actually quickly hover at around 39.56% PC1 was stunned and failed a save, 48.35% that he wasn't stunned on M's turn and got stunned, 21.1% PC2 was stunned and failed a save, 31.6% that he and PC2 were both not stunned on M's turn and got stunned

Avg M HP
3: 159.9
4: 145.8
5: 131.7
...
14: 6.257
15: -7.68

Okay, now if instead they're always handing out saves when possible, how soon does the monster die...
1: Avg Mob HP 200, 77.3% PC1 made his save (61.8% restunned, 15.5% neither stunned), 22.7% PC1 failed save (18.2% both stunned, 4.5% just PC1 stunned)
2: Avg Mob HP 196.9, 22.6% PC1 was stunned and failed a save, 61.9% chance he wasn't stunned and is now, 6.7% PC2 was stunned and failed a save, 18.1% chance he wasn't stunned and is now, 15.5% neither was stunned and both made attacks

The monster only takes damage in two cases: Either neither is stunned at the beginning of the round (which rapidly slides to a 3.07% chance) or PC1 is not stunned and PC2 is stunned and PC1 makes his Heal and PC2 makes his save, which rapidly rises to a .95% chance. For an average of .71 damage per round (cause very, very, very few actions are actually taken attacking). Or an average of 185hp in round 15, when the other group killed it.

You can't count move actions as equivalent to standard actions. You can't count standard actions used to maybe give someone a save as equivalent to standard actions that will win you a fight.

What matters is winning the fight, however that ends up working. And stunning like crazy is one way to make it take longer and suck more.

Now, it is possible that after a few rounds PC1's available attacks are at least twice as good as PC2's... so maybe PC2 should do the Heal check thing until PC1 has exhausted their cool attacks. That's all fine and good.