MGuy wrote: ↑Wed Oct 12, 2022 7:56 am
Trading defense for greater attack is fine I think. The glass cannon archetype is very common in games of all kinds. Trading effectiveness for a greater chance to lose your character is still a very different thing.
It's not, really.
'Immunity to Death' is a defense, similar to a high Armor Class. Lowering your defense for an increase in offensive power (like Reckless Strike) makes you more likely to die - you're more likely to hit/take damage and if you miscalculate how many people will target you, you're more likely to die. The difference, such as it is, is that immunity to death is a strict immunity - lowering your AC by 5 points doesn't guarantee that you'll take even a single additional hit and/or that you'll take any more damage - if your opponents had no trouble hitting you to begin with, the 'lower AC' is probably not much of a disadvantage. But becoming vulnerable to death also doesn't guarantee that you'll be at any additional risk - just that the possibility exists.
From a genre emulation standpoint,
Wheel of Time appears to have something like this: Rand uses a sword technique that leaves him defenseless against a serious attack but allows him to be certain to succeed against his opponent. While it is a book and still has 'plot immunity' (we know Rand
didn't die) and we can't derive a specific game mechanic, we could potentially say that creating scenes of that type are something we want to encourage in game and we can start considering options to create it.
Immunity to Death is a valuable ability that may be prized by a large number of people, but alternatively, it may feel like 'training wheels'. Does it make sense for characters to risk jumping over a pit of bubbling lava? If a character knows they CANNOT DIE, they may feel justified in taking a risk with a low-probability of success. They may literally jump from flying airplanes and crash into the ground face-first to save casting a minor spell. That's not behavior that most games want to encourage. Explaining away 'certain death' may cause issues with maintaining verisimilitude, which is critically important for the success of a long-running game. Adding it to the game should not be taken lightly, and the implications should be addressed.
But if you do add it into the game, offering players an incentive to 'turn it off' is the only way that it will be turned off. If your goal is to create situations where players consider 'turning off' the ability in order to increase their likelihood of achieving success,
and they do, you've succeeded. At the end of the day, that's what design is about. If you want to encourage something
and it doesn't happen, you've failed. Now, specific implementations run risks of failing for one reason or another. Lowering your immunity and then immediately raising it again before anyone can take advantage would be one possible failure - clearly if you're going to lower it, it would have to be for a period long enough to make it meaningful. Similarly, the 'benefit' would have to be tailored; a single +1 to an attack (or even a single +20) is unlikely to meaningfully change the nature of an encounter - using this ability has to be
meaningful because of the narrative stakes it represents.
Phonelobster & Kaelik seem to believe
it can't work. I believe it can. Based on PL's original objection, it seems that lowering your flag should provide a powerful short-turn benefit (one scene) but raising your flag should require a significant investment (like a long rest). This would prevent one player from always running their character with the flag-down (and thus always gaining the benefit). Such an interpretation is not contrary to Tussock's original suggestion (which was a 'here's an idea with no specific implementation') - it's just refining and clarifying how it could/would work in practice.
I still fail to see how giving everyone a power that they can choose to use if/when they sit fit is automatically a problem when some people will use it effectively and some people won't. Games give people choices; designers should build character choices to ensure that characters have similar power options - but they can't also MAKE characters use the powers. Some wizards don't ever cast spells. That's stupid and lame, but if Gandalf is having fun waving around Glamdring, it's okay that the designer didn't think about 'how to make wizards EVEN MORE POWERFUL in the event that they CHOOSE not to cast their spells'.
When everyone has the same power, and some people choose to use it and some don't,
that's balanced. They all have the same freakin' power! That's so much easier than giving people DIFFERENT powers that are GENERALLY equally effective, but NEVER EXACTLY as effective.