Resistance Difficulty Paradigms
Posted: Wed Sep 16, 2009 12:57 am
It seems to me that both 3e and 4e of D&D pushed the game into an undesirable direction with regards to "status" effects. Specifically, anything that can be classed into the generic "disable" category, by which disability specifically means "stops you from playing your character." There's certainly room for inflicting penalties on your opposition, however, anything like charm person, sleep poisons, mind blasts... all of these stop you from playing your character.
But we want them in the game and that is the issue. Because if they are in the game the players can be affected by them too. And sometimes the players OUGHT to be affected by it. So what 3e did was make resistance proportionally more difficult as a caster's power increased using the same stats as one would resist with. Thus, hypothetically resistance would always be a challenge, and there would be no point at which you would just "shrug off" the monk's death touch or wizard's mindbending or whatever.
Then 4e came along and people realized that always facing a very real chance of being hyper-screwed was terrible, so they implemented the "save ends" effect, wherein odds are you can't be messed up for more than a couple of rounds. Then they added modifiers to those saves, thus ruining the concept entirely from the get go and returning to the 3e paradigm. One person I know of who played 4e a bit longer than me actually pretty much gave up on 4e because of one fight where he was basically dead (at negative HP) and stunned (save ends), so there's no way he was going to participate in the fight again. Ever. Even though he technically could recover from either condition individually. He went and played Grand Chase (which isn't quite Smash Brothers, but close).
I think instead something closer to Final Fantasy or 2nd edition AD&D would be better. Status effects are for low level people... or at least lower level than you. Especially the instant-kill ones. In Final Fantasy (and higher level 2e AD&D, where your saves are very good) you generally have a very low chance of being affected by any status effect ever. There are some exceptions... debuffs that DO NOT remove a player from the game have much higher success rates, as high as even-odds or better of working.
For a more general-RPG applicable thing, I was thinking of status effects having a fixed target number associated with the status effect itself. As characters improve, their rating against all those effects goes up. It is essentially impossible for them to go down. The difficulty of Charm Person will always be set at a certain number, for instance. Dominate Person would have its own number. And so on. There might be a scaling effect as well, where there are certain breakpoints of resistance.
Depending on what game you're making, these numbers can be fixed at a higher or lower point, but I think making it a bit easy is good for a lot of fantasy epic adventure type games.
But we want them in the game and that is the issue. Because if they are in the game the players can be affected by them too. And sometimes the players OUGHT to be affected by it. So what 3e did was make resistance proportionally more difficult as a caster's power increased using the same stats as one would resist with. Thus, hypothetically resistance would always be a challenge, and there would be no point at which you would just "shrug off" the monk's death touch or wizard's mindbending or whatever.
Then 4e came along and people realized that always facing a very real chance of being hyper-screwed was terrible, so they implemented the "save ends" effect, wherein odds are you can't be messed up for more than a couple of rounds. Then they added modifiers to those saves, thus ruining the concept entirely from the get go and returning to the 3e paradigm. One person I know of who played 4e a bit longer than me actually pretty much gave up on 4e because of one fight where he was basically dead (at negative HP) and stunned (save ends), so there's no way he was going to participate in the fight again. Ever. Even though he technically could recover from either condition individually. He went and played Grand Chase (which isn't quite Smash Brothers, but close).
I think instead something closer to Final Fantasy or 2nd edition AD&D would be better. Status effects are for low level people... or at least lower level than you. Especially the instant-kill ones. In Final Fantasy (and higher level 2e AD&D, where your saves are very good) you generally have a very low chance of being affected by any status effect ever. There are some exceptions... debuffs that DO NOT remove a player from the game have much higher success rates, as high as even-odds or better of working.
For a more general-RPG applicable thing, I was thinking of status effects having a fixed target number associated with the status effect itself. As characters improve, their rating against all those effects goes up. It is essentially impossible for them to go down. The difficulty of Charm Person will always be set at a certain number, for instance. Dominate Person would have its own number. And so on. There might be a scaling effect as well, where there are certain breakpoints of resistance.
Depending on what game you're making, these numbers can be fixed at a higher or lower point, but I think making it a bit easy is good for a lot of fantasy epic adventure type games.