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Message: <blockquote data-quote="unan oranis" data-source="post: 5092497" data-attributes="member: 65462">A lot of people seem to be bothered about the stun effect.From what I can tell, the logic goes something like this:"Being stunned = skipping a turn, which = not very fun, ergo stun is not very fun.The whole point of playing is to have fun, so stun needs to be adjusted"If you agree with that statement, please consider the following...Death is a lot more penalizing than stun, should it be adjusted because it's not very fun to get killed?  There can't be enjoyable rewards for success if there aren't painful concessions for failure.It is true that stun gets handed out a lot more often than death, but think of the benefits...#1. A fun and interesting turn for you.It is *critical* to un-stun your ally, because he will have an empty, crappy turn if you don't.The most basic process of saving your ally requires a move (possibly through dangerous territory), a standard action (heal check), and a significant risk (saving throw may fail).  This is not a crappy, empty turn.  This is a turn the stunned character would love to have instead of being skipped.  This is a potentially dangerous and exciting turn. #2. The focused fire tactic poses a significant threat of reducing the strategic element to a paint-by-numbers amount of thought process.  With a stunned ally nearby, it may very well be worth breaking from focus fire to help your pal.  Movement and chaos in the battlefield also serves to bust up the focus fire - and every time someone gets stunned, a mini-objective is essentially thrown into the fray that encourages movement.#3. Saving your ally is almost always a 100% effective use of your time and energy regardless of what round it is.  Having your at-will, encounter and daily cards "dialed in" also poses a threat of becoming dull. Your routine/style can effectively be bumped a round, without a loss in effectiveness, by rescuing an ally.  A stunned character provides an option to the other pc's, to go ahead with what they would normally do or to stall their technique for a benefit that is rarely sub-optimal.#4. Instant death is largely muted in 4e.  The cons are generally accepted to outweigh the pros (in 4e anyway), but there were a few good points about instant death; extreme danger can cause extreme tension and thrills.  Stun can fulfill that roll while having decidedly less extreme consequences.  My argument is that those consequences are not only palatable, but beneficial. #5. Dishing out damage is fun for many players.  There are classes that are better at it than others, and some players better at it than others.  Some classes have a lot more powers that grant saving throws or shake effects, and some players get a bigger thrill out of helping/boosting their allies.  Reducing stuns effectiveness reduces these classes and play styles ability to contribute as essentially as the ones that are stoked on damage.  Stun is the power play, killing the power play can be just as fun as killing the monsters.So if your group is finding stun to be a problem, I'd recommend running an encounter with a bunch of good-guy minions hanging back, holding their actions until they can run in and grant an ally a saving throw (a nice surprise, some ewok popping out of the bushes and racing over to help Blimblam the wizard).There exists an opportunity to steal the fun back from stun, is what I'm saying. If your players style routinely ignores the plight of their allies then perhaps it's time to use stun less often or swap in daze, but I think it would do your game no service to adjust this effect.</blockquote>

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