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The stunned condition has always been a little problematic when it comes to being stunned on your own turn, such as from a Stunning Fist, and from the looks of it, this isn't a problem that went away with the remaster. Because you can't act while stunned, a likely interpretation of RAW is that getting stunned on your turn effectively ends your turn prematurely, which is generally rare but makes the effect disproportionately effective in certain edge cases. In my opinion, this ambiguity needn't exist, and I feel the stunned condition could be cleaned up significantly if it were decremented with an action similarly to the sickened condition. Here's my take on what that could look like:
You've become senseless. You can't act while stunned except to try to regain your senses as a single action. Stunned usually includes a value, and each time you spend an action to attempt to regain your senses, you reduce your stunned value by 1. Stunned might also have a duration instead of a value, such as “stunned for 1 minute.” In this case, you can't act for the listed duration, no matter how much you try to recover.
If we want to keep the interaction with the slowed condition: Any actions you lose from being slowed count towards attempting to recover from the stunned condition. So, if you were slowed 1 and stunned 2 at the beginning of your turn, you would lose 1 action from slowed, and would then become stunned 1.
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Would this work? In most cases, this wouldn't functionally change how the stunned condition works, but on the rare occasion where someone gets stunned on their own turn, the main appeal is that this would let them immediately try to recover by losing actions on that turn, instead of being stunned for the rest of their turn for "free" and then having to lose actions on their next turn.
In most cases, this wouldn't functionally change how the stunned condition works, but on the rare occasion where someone gets stunned on their own turn, the main appeal is that this would let them immediately try to recover by losing actions on that turn, instead of being stunned for the rest of their turn for "free" and then having to lose actions on their next turn.
Yeah. I consider that to be the intent of Stunned (at least regarding getting Stunned with a value during your turn) and that is how I run it in my non-PFS games.
Stunned with a value should cause you to lose the next <value> actions whenever you get or already have them. Wording the rules to make it behave that way in all edge cases is more challenging.
I like this. Reads very well and very clearly to me at least, and removes the rules hiccup from the normal stunned rules. Having to spend several dedicated actions getting out of stunned reminds me a little of fighting games (and other games) where button mashing after you get stunned breaks you out of it.
I'm not seeing any unintended consequences at first glance, but they could be there.
I think a potential intent could be that once stunned, you should lose any current reaction you may have and can not 'react' (either reaction or free action) to events until the start of your next turn and you regain actions, as well as you have spent down the number of actions per the value of stunned.
Idea being that if stunned, during your turn, you should lose an action, but it should also impact your ability to preform reactions until your next turn. But I agree it shouldn't need to eliminate the rest of your current turns actions with no recourse.
Or another option if you made stunned end your turn, any remaining actions should pre decrement the stunned condition. Such that a single action if interrupted gaining the stunned 1 condition, might make them lose the rest of their turn, and 2 actions, but as 2 is greater than 1, at the start of their next turn they would recover from stunned without any expenditure of new actions for that turn.
I think simply having it cost actions from current turn, and impacting reactions/free action triggers is a more reasonable option that maintains effect and flavor.
Would this change how Stunned interacts with haste and other sources of conditional Quickened conditions? With this revision, because Quickened from haste only lets you Step, Stride, or Strike, it wouldn't let you use that action to reduce your Stunned condition. As I understand it in the existing rules, being Quickened would let you recover from Stunned faster because it doesn't matter what you could do with the extra actions from Quickened, Stunned just takes them away and reduces the Stunned value accordingly.
Would this change how Stunned interacts with haste and other sources of conditional Quickened conditions? With this revision, because Quickened from haste only lets you Step, Stride, or Strike, it wouldn't let you use that action to reduce your Stunned condition. As I understand it in the existing rules, being Quickened would let you recover from Stunned faster because it doesn't matter what you could do with the extra actions from Quickened, Stunned just takes them away and reduces the Stunned value accordingly.
Good question! As written it would, as you wouldn't be able to use your extra action to recover, but if the intent is to be able to just lose the quickened action to reduce the stunned condition, that wouldn't be too difficult to implement either (e.g. "if you're quickened, you can always use the extra action to try to recover"). In practice, this is unlikely to come up very often, as most stuns don't tax enough actions to eat into your quickened action on top of that.