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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8602839" data-attributes="member: 7028554">Stun effects seem like a great way to get at the immediate impact of taking a spill. And you're right, a lot of systems definitely shy away from stun effects.I think one of the reasons so many games skimp out on stunning is because most combat in trad games is incredibly slow to resolve, and the action is often so zoomed in and precise. When I'm a player in something like 5e I absolutely dread losing my action, and would almost always rather take more damage, since now I don't get to play the game for a surprisingly long amount of time, and also the enemy can instantly press their advantage. And it doesn't "feel" like I've been sent reeling, just like I don't exist for the next 10 or 20 minutes.The only trad game I've played where getting stunned isn't like that is the new edition of Twilight 2000. There, both PCs and NPCs are getting stunned (not the term used in the game, but that's ok) constantly--you have to roll every time you take a hit or near-hit (a bullet hits cover you're behind, or automatic fire rips past). And if you fail that roll, you drop prone, take a point of Stress (which you don't have many of, maybe 5 points total) and lose your next action.There are a lot of great things about that mechanic, including the fact that it's the only time I've ever seen suppression fire play and feel right in an RPG. But getting stunned like that in T2K doesn't feel overly punishing or boring because:-Combat is resolved very quickly. It's an elegant, focused system.-You're often stunning the enemy, too, including suppressing ones you have no real chance to hit, to keep their heads down as you reposition or retreat.-When you lose your action this way, you also take some damage from it (that point of Stress), so it feels like you took a hit, not just like you've been sent to the penalty box for a while with birds spinning around your head.So enemies and friendlies are losing actions left and right, accumulating damage as it goes, and not just getting stunned as some occasional special case. But maybe more importantly, play will swing back around to you fast, because it's not a game where you're constantly checking feats and spell effects and whether area effect cones touch three enemies. That game cooks.I'm yapping about all this because I think it's an example of how some systems accidentally create their own problems without realizing it, especially by just being slow at combat. If it takes a long time to resolve a single action of combat, stuff like stunning is worse, but also players are more likely to always attack, since who wants to do some terribly crucial-to-the-fiction but non-combat activity if it means it'll take four actions, and now you're watching your friends do stuff for an hour while you quietly mutter that it's extremely important that someone open this locked door you can all escape through.</blockquote>

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