D&D 5E What if some attacks went off at the start of your next turn?

[RangerWickett]

I was watching my friends play Team Fortress 2, and an idea hit me. Medics have to charge an ally up with healing, and then he becomes Uber (i.e., invincible) for a few seconds.

When a sniper zooms in with his scope, his attack charges up for a few seconds, so you can one-shot someone if you aim long enough, even if it's not a head shot.

You can see a rocket coming, and if you're a Pyro, you can fire a puff of compressed air to deflect the missile.

So what if for some attacks you use them on your turn as a standard action, but they don't actually resolve until the start of your next turn? Make the effects very powerful, but give people an opportunity to dodge, interrupt you, or ready an action to reflect your spell?

Admittedly it would be a major rewrite of the game to implement this satisfactorily, but I'm thinking hypothetically, should I ever get off my butt and make my own '5th edition.' What do you think?

 

[OnlineDM]

It sounds reminiscent of spells from earlier editions with multi-round casting times, necessitating things like concentration checks.

I'd suggest trying it on some monsters in 4e first, which should be easy enough to do. If it plays well, then try it on PCs.

At first blush, it sounds to me like a fun mechanic on a monster and an unfun mechanic on a PC. It would be cool to see the monster charging up and you just know that shot is going to HURT, so you get the chance to disrupt it or flee or just kill the monster before the attack goes off. For a PC, the same would be true in reverse if the opponents were intelligent - they would try to nullify the attack, which would be a big bummer for the player.

 

[FireLance]

I think that 4E already has some similar effects, in the form of damaging zones and spells like the revised flaming sphere. Of course, the main problem with these is that they share the same avoidance mechanism: moving out of a specific area. I'm sure it is possible to develop others. One idea that comes to mind is a glyph that explodes unless it is neutralized with a skill check or by dealing enough damage. Ideally, there should be some way to narrate the effect so that it is obviously dangerous, and the way to avoid it is also clear.

 

[the Jester]

Moar tracking and bookkeeping yay.

 

[willows]

Well, basically I think it's a bad idea, for all the reasons the guys above said, as well as this:

Because of how much mitigation you can do in a turn, such powers would have to be very strong to be worth taking, and be very swingy in practice; either you get one to go off and you're overpowered for that encounter, or you fail and you've blown a daily on a whiff.

That's a design space that 4e has been visibly moving away from, because extremely swingy one-shot abilities aren't fun. They make the game harder to run and they invariably make encounters unsatisfactory for at least one person.

 

[the Jester]

At first blush, it sounds to me like a fun mechanic on a monster and an unfun mechanic on a PC. It would be cool to see the monster charging up and you just know that shot is going to HURT, so you get the chance to disrupt it or flee or just kill the monster before the attack goes off.

Sounds pretty much exactly like a lurker to me.

 

[keterys]

I think it'd be good for a brute, too.

Like a creature that draws in a deep breath, its horns beginning to glow with trapped energy, and it rotates its maw towards the PCs, ready to unleash its attack... then does like a big blast (5-10) so spreading out is rewarded, or really booking it away, but it doesn't have to do insanely high damage to still have a decent payoff.

Aside: There's a bard paragon path "Voice of Thunder" that does an echoing power that bursts once as a standard action, then again at the start of their next turn, and it's also pretty interesting design space... like you do a two hit combo, where a monster sweeps a target as a standard on its turn, then swings upward like it's going to smash down... and that followup attack is a free action at the start of its next turn, if the target it hit is still within reach.

 

[MortalPlague]

I did something like this with an artillery monster... a tiefling mage who could use her standard 'arcane blast' attack for some damage and push 1, or who could burn a minor action to 'Channel The Void' to recharge a superior version, which would do much more damage, push 4 squares and knock prone. That way dazing her would be a serious mechanical setback for her. I toyed with the idea of making it a standard action to charge-up, but in the end, for the fight, I needed her to be blasting away every round.

If I were throwing multiple artillery into a fight though, giving them a charge-up standard action and a big damage standard attack would be very cool.