Chamomile wrote:Why were they able to inflict status effects on a boss so far above them in level? If level doesn't provide resistance to status effects the same way it does HP damage, that seems like a huge oversight, especially effects like poison or burn that just deal damage over time anyway.
If your tools are 'apply status affect', and your tools don't work, you don't have tools for the boss.
If we assume that the game is balanced around a 50% chance of action denial against a single opponent of equal level, and the chance of that same action working on a higher level opponent were 10% lower for each level, you'd still have a 10% chance of the action denial working. Depending on how well-coordinated the team is and how many times you can spam these attacks, that has a good chance of working. In a published adventure, it'll work for 1 in 10 groups the first time!
You are making many assumptions. I'm not sure how much I want to go into system-specific stuff in this thread, but I really joined this forum so I could do a review of this system and really pick it the fuck apart with you guys. It's what I play the most and I'm quite enthusiastic about it, but I'm eager to see what kind of holes we can poke in it, for I am sure there are many.
But, to get on-topic, status afflictions have explicit effects on a boss template, and they do have a lesser effect - you lose HP once per round, rather than at the start of every turn. Action denial also only affects one turn at a time, and being Frozen just fucks them up instead of denying them a whole bunch of turns until they thaw out. But this template is two motherfucking pages long, so it clearly has a lot of clunky shit going on. That being said, I still have fun throwing bosses at my party and do it often, I'd just like a better solution.
It sounds like that boss template is doing the start of the right thing: Want a monster that can handle a party of four PCs? List out every offensive option in the game and patch it to be a quarter as effective. Want to use level+4 monsters instead of monsters with a boss tag? Put every offensive option on a progression where it quadruples every four levels, give everyone a set of defenses that tracks the same curve. Want this process to not totally suck? Find ways to group offensive progressions into categories that can be handled by the same defenses.
Then that leaves the interesting design questions: What are the biggest groups of offenses we can group under a shared defensive mechanism? What defensive mechanisms are the most exciting and distinct?
One of my favorite mechanisms is reducing the effective radius of AOE abilities. I'm only applying it to battlefield control, but you could just as well use it for things like fireballs. Your Rogue has 20 feet worth of evasion, so a 25-foot radius fireball needs to be centered on her or it does no damage.
But that's just one mechanism, the solution is actually listing out the offensive options you want to support in the game and making sure each of them is properly covered by some mechanism or another.
Last edited by jt on Thu Oct 17, 2019 11:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
