On damage tracks and conditions...

[angelfromanotherpin]

Here's a few thoughts stirred up from reading the Spell Lists for Everybody thread, and work on my own non-d20 D&D Project.

There was an old proposal, from my years of high school D&D, that a character under an action-preventing condition should be allowed to essentially spend Hit Points to keep acting. That's pretty easy to visualize cinematically, even if the idea had a tendency to turn a lot of spells into what were essentially DOT evocations. I was attracted to it by the element of choice it offered the victim.

Now, what about trading conditions for damage? So, say you have a Fear condition track that's 20 boxes long, like Frank posited in his SAME posts. At 5 boxes, you have a persistent fear effect, and at 10 you're essentially out of the fight (at 20 you're dead of adrenaline shock or whatever, but that's not relevant here). What if, when hit with an effect that caused Fear damage, you could accept a temporary fear condition to negate the damage?

This temporary condition would have to be harsh enough to be a real choice, it would have to be more severe if your current status was further along the track; and if the incoming damage was enough to be incapacitating, you wouldn't have the choice at all (obviously).

So, say the effect of the fear track is:
0-4 boxes: No effect.
5-9 boxes: Must fight defensively. Movement halved if toward an enemy. Concentration check required to cast. Etc.
10+ boxes: Cowering, useless, incapacitated.

So if an unfeared being was about to take 3 boxes of Fear, they could instead take (for example) 3 rounds of being Shaken or something. If a being with 5 boxes of Fear was about to take 3 more, they could instead become Frightened for 3 rounds. However, if a being with 8 boxes of Fear was about to take 3 more, they'd have to take it, and collapse into fetal position, sucking their thumb.

Obviously, you could come up with similar effects for other tracks (paralyzation, polymorph, etc). It could even possibly be applied to the unified track being discussed in the Spell Lists for Everybody thread.

Thoughts?