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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Henry" data-source="post: 4005899" data-attributes="member: 158">I used to feel pretty strongly against the lessening of stun and paralysis effects; however, over time I've come to appreciate the argument that a player with no actions is a frequently bored or frustrated player. Hold person, stunning, etc. for a couple of rounds is one thing; however, having a player sit out an entire combat because of it is another matter completely. This also applies to situations where a given PC would not logically be a part of certain activities; in those cases, I'll often give the sitting-out players something to do, even if it's running NPCs in the opposition.In a recent Star Wars game, the party split up to perform a two-pronged effort; two of the players went to hostage negotiation talks, while the rest of the group went to secretly free said hostages while the first two ran interference. The two players were at first expecting to sit half of the game out, but instead I gave them the NPC stats, and the levels of forces they were allowed, and let THEM run the hostage-takers! It was IMO one of the best game sessions we ever had, as they tried their level best to kill the rescuers by tactics and strategy, and the other players had fun fighting hard to win the victory. Meanwhile, we switched back occasionally to the diplomacy proceedings, ran a couple minutes with that, and went back to the action.In a later session, (the final episode), one player character turned traitor on the group; another player character sacrificed his own life to kill the traitor; then I gave both of them the NPC thugs to run against the rest of the group in a climactic final battle. Again, the group really enjoyed it, because no one sat out, no one lost interest in the outcome, and regardless if it was a victory or a TPK, no one was left hanging.The worst sin I ever committed as a DM years ago, was forcing a player to actually sit out the entire game session, because his character was physically in another location, and I couldn't realistically figure out how to get him back together with the group. He pretty much drove for two hours to a game he never played in, and I learned a valuable lesson about listening to ALL the player's needs, not just for what made a better story or was more realistic.If a game mechanic forces a player to sit out doing nothing for an hour of real time, then it needs to be changed a bit, for that game session if nothing else. I wouldn't mind it if it was 5 or 10 minutes, maybe (heck, snack and restroom breaks take that long!) but when the effect in question takes longer than that, it really should be altered in some fashion to get them back in the game quicker -- or hand them an NPC and get that dice-hand rolling! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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