Mr. Z wrote:
You aren't reading the key part, and all this is literally gibberish.
The key part you cut out is:
Myself wrote:I do see some potential pitfalls with escalating conditions as a replacement for ability damage:
Yeah, no, I got that. I just kind of assumed you were smart enough to make the connection that replacing ability damage with conditions means
actually doing that and not making new conditions that are literally the exact same thing as ability damage. We aren't discussing making new conditions to serve the exact same purpose as ability damage. We're discussing scrapping ability damage completely because conditions cover pretty much the exact same territory.
Yeah, but they're also more likely to make their saves, so you still don't want to target the tough guy's fortitude or the fast guy's reflexes.
This is also a complete non sequitur. The things that deal ability damage do not, and usually
don't use the related stat in the save.
Are you
really so stupid that you can't make the connection that, seeing as how we are in fact discussing an entirely new game in this thread, we have no incentive to port in the exact mechanics from 3.5? Do I really have to explain to you that when I say "higher saves can make people resistant to attacks targeting their strong stats even if it takes the same number of failed saves to disable them" that this implies that attacks should actually behave this way?
Like, I asked you "why would we wanna do it that way" in my last post, and your entire response here is based entirely on the assumption that we definitely want to do it that way. You seemed to have missed the crux of the disagreement, here: Your insistence that conditions to replace ability damage should produce outputs almost identical to ability damage is dumb. The entire point of getting rid of ability damage is that it's just a second, stupider way of doing what conditions already do. The goal is not to make conditions that function the same way that ability damage does. The goal is to get rid of ability damage because it is stupid.
Because the existing ability damage do very different things? Your example of STR and Con is actually literally the worst example, because a STR of 0 means you're still alive, and a CON of 0 means you're fucking dead. The actual counterpoint would be STR and DEX, because both of those leave you paralysed on the ground at 0.
Firstly, you're an idiot, because being reduced to 0 STR and DEX is not the only potential outcome of STR or DEX ability damage in 3.5. Someone reduced to
one STR is facing considerably different penalties than someone reduced to one DEX.
But secondly: Have you forgotten what thread you're in? Why, in a thread about totally redesigning the entire Monster Manual and then writing new classes to fit those redesigned monsters, is it so hard for you to grasp that our goal is not to port 3.5 as-written with slightly different math for no reason? No, there does
not need to be something that emulates literally everything that ability damage does in 3.5, because a lot of that bullshit is stupid. Your own example reinforces my point: There is
no goddamn reason why the exhausted condition can't start by giving debuffs to attacks
and dodging and then progress to flat-out killing you. What the Hell does a poison that makes you slowly waste away until you die but
not weaken your attacks at all even look like? How could a poison that makes you too weak to hit things properly
possibly avoid making you too sluggish to dodge things properly?
Because if every source of Strength damage was replaced with Paralyse for example, then a lot of monsters have Save or Sucks that take a PC out in one hit.
It's really weird that you picked specifically the one condition track that I actually wrote out in its entirety. I mean, this would've been stupid no matter what you picked, because my post very unambiguously declared that everything except blindness/deafness and petrification should be condition
tracks with three steps each, but it's especially stupid that you picked the one specific condition track that I actually wrote out prototype rules for each individual condition. What actually happens when you fail your save to a paralyzing monster is you get
dazed, and then that can stack to stunned or full-on paralyzed. Because that is the entire point of having a condition track, and while you
can make monsters that skip straight to paralysis, you obviously need to balance them around the fact that they can accomplish with one save what takes most monsters three (petrification, for example, should probably work that way, but that also means monsters with petrification need to be designed with that in mind, and should probably have lower save DCs and be more fragile and so on).
In order for four monsters with standard condition-inflicting abilities to incapacitate a party of four adventurers, they 1) all need to survive for three full rounds to make it happen and 2) every party member needs to fail every save three times in a row for a total of twelve failed saves straight between them. And odds are at least one party member is having a high save targeted. It's far more likely that what's going to happen is the monsters are either going to spread out their milder debuff conditions or focus fire on one party member to incapacitate them.
The really weird thing is that after decrying my post about condition tracks leading to one-round TPKs for no goddamn reason at all, you then go on to propose a solution
which is identical to the thing you just said would lead to one-round TPKs. I don't know what you
thought my post said, but condition tracks are
tracks, as in things that you progress along. Again: I prototyped the entire paralysis condition track and it was more than one condition. How did you miss this? Why are you so terrible at reading comprehension?