Some sort of modification regarding saves makes sense...
There is surely a difference in effect between someone who is caught in the middle of a fireball vs someone on the fringes but still inside its radius??
You see how this is a nightmare for GMs, right? Having to determine distance from the spell origin for six mooks? And then rolling six different saves with different bonuses?
There is surely a difference in effect between someone who is caught in the middle of a fireball vs someone on the fringes but still inside its radius??
There never has been before. It would be easy enough to house-rule in a bonus to the reflex save or something.
You guys have figured it out. I will admit: Figuring out a way to handle save or lose effects that was more fun to play with than "Your monster/PC either wastes the turn or instantly wins" is what initially led me to formulate the design doc for the four degrees of success in the first place. That way, you can do something that's still somewhat useful even if they make the save (though not if they critically succeed) and then something powerful but not instawin if they fail and something more extreme on a critical fail. This also has the added benefit of dealing double damage from spells like fireball when the enemies get a critical failure!
"four degrees of success"
Another hint given to us.
Everything's save or die eventually. Once your HP drop to that last hit's worth or you slipped off a cliff and are grabbing for the edge to avoid a lava bath, your fate's up to the cold, uncaring physics of a tumbling plastic icosahedron. That's half the fun. How you get there is the other half.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I feel like Save or Die/Save or Lose effects should affect regular enemies differently than PCs or boss enemies. It makes sense to just take out regular jobbers, but to instantly kill a PC or Boss just feels really anticlimatic and frustrating, doesn't it?
Not really. Treating creatures differently based on whether they're "mooks" or not bothers me way more.
I would much rather these spells depart a debuff on special characters, or at the very least, have the effects take place over a couple rounds as opposed to instantly, so you can do something about it.
Bosses worthy of the name already have defenses against many such effects. Heroes who find their weaknesses through research or dumb luck deserve their moment of glory. If my party manages to vorpal blade the Big Bad on round one right after his pompous monologue, that sounds like a Crowning Moment of Awesome to me. If the demon lord pulls off a finger of death on the cocky PC wizard, well, things just got real, didn't they? Both inspire the kinds of expressions GMs dream of seeing on their players' faces.
It's been mentioned in another thread (I think it was Mark but could have been another dev) that crit failures on attack rolls don't have any effect by default but may trigger an enemy's abilities (theoretical example, maybe monks have a reaction where they get a free trip attempt on you if you critically fail your attack). So we don't have to worry about the worst possible iteration of critical failures being the case.
I can't tell you how much of a relief that post was. Crit fails on attacks in the core rules was something I was really afraid of as a possibility.
Alright, I like everything read so far. Minor questions, what about another effects like Vorpal Swords and Slaying Arrows? And 'soul trap/bind' spells?