TRPG General Chat

7:01 PM

@ThomasMarkov Well, in the before times, that was generally as good as quoting the SAC now, since they were Official Rulings™

Thomas Markov

@RevanantBacon Sure, in terms of getting an official ruling. But in a lot of cases, they still seemed like poor answers (in my estimation).

In particular, cases where we are looking at a complex rules interaction with lots of moving parts, and the tweet is just a sentence with a ruling.

Trish

@ThomasMarkov rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/184452/… maybe...

the megacorp book for SR6 should be out by now.

RevanantBacon

Well, to be fair, most of them weren't complex questions. The majority were really just simple [Can I Do The Thing?], [Yes, you can Do The Thing] QA's. Short answers were fine because the answers tended to be straightforward.

Thomas Markov

Yeah, it got us an "official" position on the particular interaction, but it gives no insight into how to use those rules, and Id bet a crisp $5 bill that most of crawford's rulings arent based on experience playing those things out.

RevanantBacon

Sure, there were some that were complex rules interactions, but I think that was a minority

Thomas Markov

7:06 PM

@RevanantBacon Yeah, and those are fine. There are lots of questions where I see a crawford tweet as an answer and think "Would I have answered it with more than JC did? Probably not."

But there are some answers where I ask myself, "Would I have said more than one sentence here?" and there is a lot to be said.

RevanantBacon

I mean, there are only so many ways you can answer "Can I use a longsword for my Kensai weapon?"

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: Yes, because it says you can in the book

Trish

@ThomasMarkov he had to redact his own stuff repeatedly.

Emrys Ternal

I have a question for D&D 3.5E which is best answered in chat, not a post, because I more want a GM's advice for handling the resulting situation more than I want rules advice.

It can kind-of be answered by D&D 5E GMs too but the rules difference does make it a bit different to handle.

Thomas Markov

@EmrysTernal I have no experience with 3.5, but Im might be able to tackle a social problem

Emrys Ternal

See, both editions have the "frightened" condition. The 5E version is pretty tame: Disadvantage while in line-of-sight, can't move closer to what frightened you.

3.5E's frightened is more involved and more socially-cumbersome

From the Rules Compendium: "Frightened creatures take penalties as if shaken, and they flee
from the source of their fear as quickly as they can. They can
choose the path of their flight. Frightened creatures can use
special abilities, including spells, to flee; indeed, a frightened
creature must use such means if they are the only way to escape.
Other than these stipulations, once frightened creatures can’t
sense the source of their fear, they can act as they want. However,
if the duration of their fear continues, creatures can be forced

Thomas Markov

7:15 PM

@EmrysTernal wow, you werent kidding.

Emrys Ternal

So, what I want to know, handling-wise, is how this would play out realistically and how a GM should handle the result. It sounds to me that on a practical level, what happens is 1. the PC leaves the room and gets far enough away to no longer perceive (hear) what made them frightened. 2. Stands around doing nothing until the frightened condition ends. 3. Rejoins the fight.

That thematically makes sense, but that can't be how it goes every single time.

Like, what's the frightened PC going to do while outside the room? What's the party going to do with essentially a man down?

How do the fight dynamics change when an effect can make someone just nope right out of there?

There's a level 1 cleric spell called "Remove Fear" that grants a bonus on resisting or suppresses fear effects for 10 minutes, which could be put in a potion, but I think assuming the party has that readily available is dodging the question.

How should a PC, a party, or GM respond to a situation where something can make a PC just ditch the fight for a while?

MikeQ

Maybe consider a houserule so that fear conditions don't force players to sit out during a potentially fun combat encounter

Upper_Case

I'd signpost the danger in advance to give the party an opportunity to plan for it, but leave it in as a consequence

It's not that different from a PC dropping to 0 HP. They can't continue the fight, but HP is a major constraint on activity and is a core gameplay element

MikeQ

It's more analogous to a save-or-die effect, regardless of HP. Normally a PC's HP doesn't instantly drop to zero after one failed save.

Upper_Case

But the combat doesn't end upon Frightened being inflicted

KorvinStarmast

7:28 PM

@EmrysTernal It would appear that without a cleric, the party is one PC down, and with a cleric it isn't.

Emrys Ternal

I think in the meta discussions they call it a "save or suck" effect.

KorvinStarmast

yes, that's also true. Do they get frightened in every battle?

Do they get a save at the end of each round/turn?

What 5e does is offer a save at the end of each turn to get a chance to get back into the fight.

Upper_Case

The point I'm trying to make is that the fear effect is intended to be part of the challenge of an opponent, not so dissimilar from a massive damage attack. If you can't win the fight with the fear effect, you can't beat the monster

KorvinStarmast

^^^^ Another valid way of seeing this.

@MikeQ we had a warlock go down the other day to a lich's power word kill. But as you say, that's a bit of an outlier.

Emrys Ternal

Almost nothing in 3.5E offers a save ends every round

They generally have a short duration though

KorvinStarmast

7:32 PM

@EmrysTernal Well there ya go: you've called it. "save or suck" it is.

Emrys Ternal

hmmmm

KorvinStarmast

Not sure, but do some 3.5 classes have "boost ally saves" as a feature? Bard? Paladin?

In 5e bless does that for some of the allies

Emrys Ternal

Yeah there are plenty of those

See, thing is, fear effects are pretty rarely used in 3.5E because they're so debilitating. At this point my question is answered, but now I have a continuation of a related but much larger problem.

This problem is much more specific to 3.5E and there's not much that only-5E experience can help with it other than general GM advice

KorvinStarmast

@EmrysTernal fair enough

Thomas Markov

Is this question within the scope of our site?

Emrys Ternal

7:37 PM

Maybe?

Thomas Markov

I learned exactly nothing from the website since I know only English

But my take on the question is basically, "This convention does mostly this one kind of trpg, do they also do other types", or something like that.

Emrys Ternal

I've been homebrewing essentially a campaign setting into its own system which plays very different from 3.5E but is also almost all of the rules from 3.5E and is compatible with all 3.5E content. It shouldn't really be treated as 3.5E anymore but as its own system, which makes it much harder to answer fairness questions because it's incredibly fuzzy to make calls about something once you start building your own system.

G. Moylan

@ThomasMarkov The later comment linking a Q was actually helpful

Emrys Ternal

So technically it's within the scope of this site because it's TTRPGs

G. Moylan

@ThomasMarkov It seems almost like a shopping Q or a "read the book for me" question, but idk

KorvinStarmast

7:41 PM

@ThomasMarkov close enough to say yes

Emrys Ternal

Oh!

I misinterpreted what @ThomasMarkov said, I didn't realize it was a link.

nvm

Thomas Markov

@EmrysTernal I bet that was confusing.

Emrys Ternal

Anyway, so I guess at this point I can just chat about that larger problem in a general sense and get feedback.

KorvinStarmast

@EmrysTernal if you explain the discrete difference between what you do and what 3.5 does (and keep it tightly scoped) ... I think it could work.

Upper_Case

Dang. I thought I had a good question, but in writing it out I discovered the answer and there is no wiggle room left to post about

Emrys Ternal

7:53 PM

D&D 3.5E has "fear effects", it has "lethal damage" (damage to HP), and it has "nonlethal damage" (counts up from 0, makes you unconscious when it reaches or exceeds your HP).

I interpret "fear effects" to be supernatural reasons for why you've become fearful that ignore your body's normal stress response and just force it. I interpret "lethal damage" to be like expending a kind of "luck" you have which turns blows that might take you out of a fight into small cuts and bruises, where when HP gets low you're essentially "running out of luck".

I interpret "nonlethal damage" to be physical strain on your body where once you're body is strained too much you can't handle it anymore and you just drop unconscious.

Glazius

IIRC the main problem with lower-level fear effects in 3.5E was not that somebody became frightened, but that there was shaken, the penalty condition, which would stack with itself to frightened, the "I'm not in this fight anymore" condition.

So if you put two enemies that cause shaken into a fight, somebody has bad luck and now you've effectively instakilled them from the point of helping their allies win.

Emrys Ternal

Shaken doesn't stack with another source of shaken except to escalate it to Frightened, and Shaken and Frightened don't stack with eachother because they are different stages of fear

Glazius

"Fear effects are cumulative. A shaken character who is made shaken again becomes frightened, and a shaken character who is made frightened becomes panicked instead. A frightened character who is made shaken or frightened becomes panicked instead."

Emrys Ternal

Yeah exactly

And further, as said earlier, a "save or die" that isn't really a "die" isn't much of a problem apparently

Yeah it removes them from that fight, but not for long.

The durations are usually very short

1d4 rounds in the case of Cause Fear, 1/casterlevel in the case of Scare, and both have a HD limit of no higher than 5HD per creature (and limit how many creatures are affected).

There are other fear effects out there, but they seem to follow the same power level

You can be shaken, or frightened, or panicked, or cowering, but no two at the same time.

Here's my dilemma

So, fear effects making you flee a fight are relatively rare and are pretty limited and weak, especially since you'll have big boosts to will saves against fear and even immunity to fear later, provided you know that fear effects are coming and can prepare

My problem is that I don't think fear effects adequately represent a PC's "mental strain".

I feel that a PC should have a representation of mental strain and stress which over time results in the character being worn down mentally just like they can get worn down physically. Either way, once you're worn down too much you'll need to return to town to rest.

I also feel like the Heal skill is extremely weak both thematically and mechanically, for similar reasons, but I only mention that as context. I want a game which is a bit more gritty in terms of recognizing the bodily limitations of a character.

Am I allowed to link a youtube link in chat?

to like, a short clip

Anyway, without digging to much into the details, I wrote up a form of mental strain where every time something happens which is significantly stressful you check whether your stress is at a breaking point.

Essentially similar to having an anxiety attack.

If you become too stressed, you take on either the shaken, frightened, or panicked condition (although it's not as a "fear effect"), and if needed you flee the current situation. Bringing your stress back down is pretty easy, but it can be slow if you didn't prepare for it, and once you've run out of your reserves of ways to bring your stress down you'll want to return to town to rest and recover.

My bigger problem is, how will it affect the party dynamic when anyone could get so stressed that they take penalties and even flee.

Let's assume that "this change is fun" because it's part of the appeal of the game to be more gritty. The question of whether it's fun being answered, how would the players change their behavior? Would it become just another thing the players prepare for? How would in-fight behavior change?

Would players change their tactics so that the PCs approaching a breaking point move off and switch to ranged weapons?

As I have it now, You get little bit more stressed every time you: fail a save, lose hit points, take nonlethal damage, fail an important skill check, gain a fear effect, an opponent successfully intimidates you, or you interact with your character's predetermined stressors (if any).

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KorvinStarmast

@EmrysTernal Does 3.5e has an exhaustion mechanic?

Emrys Ternal

Yes, but in D&D 3.5E that represents things like a forced march

or sunstroke

your muscles are literally giving out

KorvinStarmast

@EmrysTernal Are you looking for a mental version of that?

FWIW, the mechanic for 5e is kinda simple, but it's also potentially lethal. Not sure if you want to borrow anything from that

Emrys Ternal

I wrote one up, yes. I don't think the specifics of how it works matter much, I'm more interested in how players will react to having to manage their character's mental strain (stress), both in party dynamics and roleplaying.

An important distinction is that stress and mental strain do not on their own ever cause permanent mental conditions like insanity. I don't want to play Call of Cthulhu, but I want it to be a little bit more like Darkest Dungeon.

Upper_Case

What's the threshold for serious consequences like? Potentially having a breakdown, or materially getting closer to a breakdown, every time you fail a saving throw (no matter its effect) seems harsh

KorvinStarmast

8:46 PM

@EmrysTernal Indeed: what are the consequences of this mental strain?

Emrys Ternal

Every time something stressful happens, you check your stress against your HP. If your stress meets or exceeds your HP, your stress is enough to be "shaken", you take a -2 penalty on most rolls.

If your stress meets or exceeds your maximum HP, you're "frightened", and in addition to the penalty you must flee the situation (until you no longer perceive the situation at which point you can act as you wish), although you can fight if you cannot flee. If your stress reaches double your HP, you're "panicked" and cannot fight at all, you must flee, and if you cannot flee you cower.

Stress generally ticks up a tiny bit at a time, 3 every time you lose HP or take nonlethal damage or fail an important skill check, 1+ if someone intimidates you. However, failing a save does a bit more (half the DC of the save).

Gaining an actual fear effect supernaturally however can be very stressful.

Upper_Case

I, as a player, would be ambivalent about this mechanic at best and would invest a great deal of in-game resources to avoid having to deal with it. This is an effective limit on adventuring, since it can only be resolved by staying in a town

Emrys Ternal

Point is, that's the full extent of it. Once you bring your stress back down, you don't have any lasting effects other than having used up those resources.

Upper_Case

It's largely the same as managing HP except it is harder to restore

Unless you have some ways to restore it without having to return to a town

Emrys Ternal

You do

several actually. Any magical healing also heals doubly-as-much stress

Upper_Case

8:57 PM

In that case the players have two HP tracks, and I would put about as much effort into managing stress as I would into managing HP. Maybe a little bit less

For me (not necessarily all players) this would immediately become just another thing I always prepare for

Emrys Ternal

Oh oops, made an error earlier and I can't edit it to fix it, you only get panicked if your stress reaches double your max HP, not double your HP

Would you want high stress to have permanent or semi-permanent long-term effects?

Upper_Case

@EmrysTernal No. The game already has enough ways to lose, and there is only so much you can do to mitigate those. Having semi-random penalties, permanent or semi-permanent, alone is not intriguing enough to me to be worth dealing with and so I would stay as highly prepared to fix it as I could possibly manage

If you want a bit more depth to sanity and mental state I might be more interested if the mechanic added depth to something. If the stress penalties were more limited to social interactions, for example, it might be something I would see more depth in

Emrys Ternal

Yeah I figured as much

Social ramifications are interesting.

Upper_Case

But for now it's a pretty substantial penalty which is easy to mitigate. Therefore, I would always mitigate

What would excite me the most is if it were woven into the narrative (though this would require a more curated set of stress effects). But the in-game balance I would expect would involve stress being a bit slower to accumulate, a bit harder to wipe away, and with interesting-but-not-crippling effects to play around

But on that note, I really, really like the idea of mental condition being tied into broad narrative sweeps. Like, the high-stakes council meeting is in three days but there is adventuring I simply must do first. And if that adventuring leaves me off my game, leading to the council meeting going sideways and shifting me onto a different narrative track, I'm all in

Emrys Ternal

9:18 PM

It isn't quite trivially easy to wipe away. Yes magical healing can be doubly-effective at removing stress, but depending on your circumstances it might only be as effective as healing lethal damage. I can get into the specifics on why, but that's the upshot.

You have other ways to remove it other than going back to town, but they're even slower.

Waiting an hour to each hour remove as much as your level

or giving yourself a moment to expend your level worth of a reserve of healing you have to heal that much stress

a reserve you would normally be spending on out-of-combat slow healing of both lethal damage and stress

Upper_Case

My broader issue is that mechanics don't exist in a vacuum. The consequences of stress, as currently described, are bad enough and affect enough mechanics critical to survival in the game that I would do whatever it took to keep the levels low enough that I would never suffer the effects

Emrys Ternal

hmmmm

Upper_Case

Unless forced to there is no reason to interact with the mechanic beyond mitigating it. It's a bit of extra bookkeeping, and an extra resource to track while adventuring and that's it. It's always numbers on the character sheet

Emrys Ternal

Honestly I'm fine with that.

Upper_Case

That's fine. But for players (at least players like me) it's a nonissue. The game becomes a bit more irritating to play and easier to lose, in exchange for nothing (for me, the player, or for my PC). It adds no new roleplaying, no new exploitable mechanics, no more interesting possible scenarios; it's only a timer that makes adventuring expeditions shorter and slightly more difficult

If it accomplishes what you want with those features, then I'm not sure there is much else to talk about

Emrys Ternal

9:31 PM

I disagree that it doesn't add anything to roleplaying or possible scenarios.

Upper_Case

In general, or in light of my observations above? It's a generic number to track until it hits some threshold, at which point you have a generic penalty

I'm sure you have other things in mind for it, but the mechanics don't appear to offer many decision points or choices

Emrys Ternal

One of the, and possibly the full-stop, most important balancing factors you have to force as a GM in D&D (especially in D&D 3.5E) is a tight timer.

The players always have to feel like they're always in a rush to get things done (even if there's no real time limit), they have to always feel the pull of different needs in the narrative and not have enough time to handle them all. If you don't force a tight timer (at least in D&D 3.5E) otherwise the game devolves into numbers and optimization alone, which is very bad.

Because D&D 3.5E is in in no remote sense balanced or fair in any way.

Upper_Case

I'm very familiar with D&D, including (somewhat less so than 5e) 3.5e

Emrys Ternal

You balance it through very tight control of the in-game timer.

Upper_Case

Does this count as tight control of the timer? It's pretty stochastic (though the probabilities are predictable), and unless you can fix stress once you hit the threshold adventuring is over. As above, I would always fix the stress if possible; it's not a decision. Running out of mitigation options is very similar to running out of rations, torches, HP, and so on. Players will have very limited control of whether or not their stress increases, so the only behavioral effect I would expect

is constant mitigation. Hence, "Would it become just another thing the players prepare for?" -> Yes

Emrys Ternal

9:40 PM

Players have to feel like they don't have enough time to both "kill the vampire spawn in the abandoned castle" to save the mayor's daughter and also "deal with this complex intrigue in the local lord's court", and thus don't have time to rest for several days at a time (which is a fade-to-black out-of-game).

Upper_Case

"How would in-fight behavior change?" -> It wouldn't, save to mitigate stress at every opportunity and secure resources to do so as much as possible

@EmrysTernal But stress doesn't do anything unique here... you could just move the deadlines closer together and get the same urgency but in a more precise, predictable way

That's not to say that there isn't any room for a stress mechanic

For the mechanic to be anything beyond a resource sink (for me), I'd need more depth. As described above. But if you don't need or want anything beyond the mechanic as you've described it, then you already have what you want

Emrys Ternal

Yeah I'm not necessarily looking to make changes to it, that was never the point. I expected that it would become another number on the sheet. I just disagree that it wouldn't have roleplaying or scenario changes. If you spending resources on mitigating stress, you aren't spending them on healing lethal damage as effectively, meaning a higher risk of dropping to 0 HP.

This also means that you'll prioritize not dying, which means leaving stress not quite as mitigated as you'd like, which can result in a penalty when you don't want it (such as out of combat)

but

I don't necessarily think that stress should be something which might affect a social encounter when there's no danger, which is the purview of roleplaying

Upper_Case

Maybe I'm just not getting it, neither what you want for the mechanic nor how you envision it playing out. But "it's just a number on the sheet" is the opposite of "it has roleplaying and scenario effects". I'm trying to stay inside the lines drawn far above, with the two questions and my two answers to them:

Emrys Ternal

a social encounter in a dangerous situation? Sure

Upper_Case

"Would it become just another thing the players prepare for?" -> Yes
"How would in-fight behavior change?" -> It wouldn't, save to mitigate stress at every opportunity and secure resources to do so as much as possible

Emrys Ternal

9:48 PM

That said, I think that when you are stressed enough to be shaken, etc., you can absolutely roleplay that.

Am I allowed to link a short youtube video on here?

like, not even a whole minute worth of one

Upper_Case

You can roleplay anything you want, including being dead. I'm not seeing the grist this mechanic provides to do so, though players can certainly vary greatly

@EmrysTernal I think so, I'm sure I've seen other people do it (whether or not they were allowed to, I can't say)

In any event, good luck with the stress mechanic and I hope it adds to your games in the ways that you are hoping and that your players will enjoy

Emrys Ternal

While it didn't start with this scenario in mind, I want stress to result in exchanges like this one between the male lead and the barkeep, particularly the male lead's utter desperation and broken spirit seen on his face when the beer hits the ground.

Trevor and Sypha (Beer Scene) | Castlevania Season 3

►

Upper_Case

And that's kind of the point I was trying to express. This system doesn't inspire those sorts of feelings in me, nor would it at the table in-scenario for a standard dungeon dive. If your players are the sort that always roleplay low HP, you might get very different results

There's something to it, and even more so to the idea, but I (personally) would be managing stress the same way I manage encumbrance

Emrys Ternal

hmmmm

Upper_Case

10:10 PM

Reading back up the chat log I think I'm coming off more negatively than I intended. Please don't think I don't like the idea, I'm only trying to think through what would bridge the gap between mechanic and desired play effects for myself, and myself only

And I definitely support adding psychological tension to the game as well, that is a facet I think is valuable

Emrys Ternal

10:28 PM

I think part of the answer may be to have the GM roleplay the effects when someone has a break, to give it more fluff. Having the GM describe your stress rising to the point of being shaken as something specific to what made them shaken, etc.

I don't want it to have long term mechanical effects, but I do want the players to roleplay their characters getting stressed to a breaking point.

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10:57 PM

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KorvinStarmast

11:48 PM

@EmrysTernal but do your players want to do that? roleplay their characters getting stressed to a breaking point If they do, great, if they don't you need to know this.

There was a neat little quip about mechanics and that is "Mechanics that only make doing something be annoying" are often bad mechanics. I'll get the full quote. @Upper_Case has brought that up in a less sound byte way, so it's worth thinking about.

Hmm, sorry, that's not quite right: Grod's Law: You cannot and should not balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use

@EmrysTernal I'll ask this a different way: by adding this level of crunch or complexity, what are you trying to add in terms of value? Complexity is a kind of currency, and sometimes adding complexity doesn't add value.

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