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1 year ago ::
Apr 14, 2012 - 11:13PM
#41
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Date Joined:
Jun 29, 2010
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I really love the flavor of such attacks, and the creatures that have them. It's dangerous, fun, iconic, special, etc. In order to stay 'speacial' they should be used sparingly of course. I understand people not liking them, especially from 3rd on where so much of the game was numbers and mechanics. In pre-3rd it takes all of 30 seconds to adjust every number that could be affected by such things. I see no reason they wouldn't work perfectly well in 5th as modules...especially for those of us that don't use advanced skills, feats, etc.
DISCLAIMER - Everything said by anyone is absolute subjective opinion. There are no objective claims being made by me, or anyone else, unless they overtly state 'The following is an objective claim'. At this point if you choose to be offended by anything I (or anyone else) say the problem is ENTIRELY your own.
WotC won't let us give them money because they won't produce a game we want to play.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 14, 2012 - 11:40PM
#42
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I have never had any problem. Either you have a cleric in the party and everyone gets the benefit, or you don't have one, and everyone needs to seek out a temple. There's no class imbalance, and I've never seen anyone pick cleric class just to be able to cast restoration. Having different classes being effective against different opponents is usually fun though i.m.o. ... i.e. swarms, golems, undead etc.
It's not a question of effectiveness. Drain impacts adventure design. If you need certain spells to undo certain damage, then your adventure stops without those spells. If the fighter drops from 18 Str to 14 Str from fighting a shadow, he loses a key feat and any other feats or PrCs based on it, possibly turning him into a joke. If the DM likes to run a bunch of dungeon delves a short distance outside towns with clerics in them, no big deal - subtract some gold and move on. If the campaign has a different style and the PCs can't buy whatever services they went when they want, it's a much bigger deal.
To flip it around, it would be lame to say that some monster could only be killed by a fighter with weapon spec or a raging barbarian or a ranger whose favored enemy is that creature type. Maybe you could hire one if no one played one, but it would seem punishing and the more common it was, the more you'd push people toward specific classes and the more you'd push DMs to make sure mercenary fighters etc were available to help the party. It's not unworkable, and for some games there would be no difference (because your group has that guy who always wants to be a barbarian or whatever), but it certainly is restrictive in terms of party composition, adventure design, and world design.
I usually prefer that DMs allows PCs to be prepared for specal fights without reading the MM. Under some circumstances with experienced players it might be of interest to allow players to discover the strengths and weaknesses themselves, and in those circumstances it is usually pretty easy to trick even the most experienced player into forgetting about meta-gaming until it is too late.
Again, this is highly restrictive. Not everyone runs a campaign where PCs can prepare for fights. Sometimes a wight jumps out of the darkness, even though no one in town warned you that level-draining wights were in the abandoned temple and that it would be wise to buy the right potions from the convenient town cleric. I don't like to run a game in which I make sure the PCs have special gear or knowledge to handle significant challenges. Your first post mentions drain as something that keeps players on your toes, yet here you say that it's for special fights the PCs have prepared for. Either that means they just start buying certain potions around the right level (because they read the MM and know what level stuff should start showing up) or the DM lets them scry/gather info to find out what's in the dungeon. Neither of those styles appeals to me.
Ed_Warlord, on what it takes to make a thread work: I think for it to be really constructive, everyone would have to be honest with each other, and with themselves. Quotation of the moment
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Areleth: How does this help the problems we have with Fighters? Do you think that every time I thought I was playing D&D what I was actually doing was slamming my head in a car door and that if you just explain how to play without doing that then I'll finally enjoy the game?
Quotation of ALL moments
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TD: That's why they put me on the front of every book. This is the dungeon, and I am the dragon.
A word of warning though: I'm totally not a level appropriate encounter.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 12:11AM
#43
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Date Joined:
Mar 16, 2007
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Hmm...perhaps I used drain/damage wrong but I never let it remove a character's feats. There was enough cascading stuff to deal with as is. Including feats in that too just started getting annoying, so perhaps that's why it never really affected adventure design for me.
And most levels where that was a big problem (the drain being permanent) were, to my recollection, higher. So in my experiance they leveled out. By that point the characters might have a cleric who owes them a favor, or just as likely have found something to help them recover from the drain. Everything under that was damage and a couple days of rest could fix it.
Granted all this, like you said, depends on damage and requires a certain amount of balancing in the DM's hands. Which can be time consuming, but I generally considered it fun. (the balance. Not the damage creating this annoying cascade of real life accounting checks. Sure we can do them, but it could take 5-10 minutes just for that.)
Different strokes I guess. =P
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 12:44AM
#44
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I like them. I think they add pleasing variety to the threats. When everything is just 'mark off some hitpoints', I get bored.
A caveat: It used to be that ability damage or a level loss was simple to record, had few 'cascading' effects, and, in relative terms, wasn't as harsh a penalty. A Basic or Original D&D, and to a lesser extent an AD&D character who gets hit with strength damage is less crippled than a 3rd edition character, because the ability scores have less absolute effect on the character's viability. Also, an Original or Basic character had to change only a couple numbers on the sheet.
So - if drain attacks are to be included, either the characters need to be less complicated so we don't spend half an hour re-doing them each time they occur, or the effect needs to emulate the original effect, without causing us to re-do the accountancy on a character sheet that looks like a tax form.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 2:40AM
#45
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Date Joined:
Jun 29, 2008
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If the DM likes to run a bunch of dungeon delves a short distance outside towns with clerics in them, no big deal - subtract some gold and move on. If the campaign has a different style and the PCs can't buy whatever services they went when they want, it's a much bigger deal.
I agree that one should not add drainers far down in a deep dungeon miles from the closest temple if the party does not have the means to restore the drains themselves.
On the other hand, I would never use a band of mimics to raid a village either. Different monsters have different places. There are hundreds if not thousands of monsters in the D&D world, if I can't use all the monsters all the time it is not an issue. Different monsters are suitable for different places.
A draining monster could be an excellent hook for driving the party to a temple, or head to the nearest town to move the story to another stage.
The more tools I have at my disposal as a DM, the better. Tools used correctly are great, just as tools used poorly are horrible. A drainer should not be used to have a PC suffer through the adventure at half effectiveness, it should be used to create atmosphere, drive the storyline and spice up battles.
If you add a drainer, one should not not be overly explicit about it from the start in my opinion. Leave hints and let the players dig. If they are wise enough to figure it out in town, kudos to them, it'll make their lives easier. If they don't figure it out, make the hints easier and easier as they approach the monster. If the party wants to play it safe, they could turn around to the village to improve their gear. If they feel like braving it unprepared, then allow them to make their plans. If they handle it well enough they might not even have to return to town.
Either way, a draining monster is another way to make encounters.
Every chance one has a DM to keep players thinking is an opportunity. When I notice that a player has fallen into a rhytm and starts playing battles in the same way because he has found the ultimate chain, that chain needs to be rendered unoptimized every now and then so battles don't become a tedious recipe.
The Character Initiative
Show
Every time you abuse the system you enforce limitations.
Every time the system is limited we lose options.
Breaking an RPG is like cheating in a computer game.
As a DM you are the punkbuster of your table.
Dare to say no to abusers.
Make players build characters, not characters out of builds.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 2:43AM
#46
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Hmm...perhaps I used drain/damage wrong but I never let it remove a character's feats.
Yes, you were doing it wrong (or, alternately, you were houseruling). If at any time you lost the prerequisite for a feat, or anything else, you lost access to it. Which, of course, meant if your STR dropped so low you didn't have Power Attack, and you needed Power Attack for a prestige class, you lost all those abilities ... or if your INT dropped low enough you couldn't cast the 3rd level spells you needed for a prestige class, you lost all that, too.
Another day, another three or four entries to my Ignore List.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 2:49AM
#47
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So - is the problem that ability drain sucks, or is the problem that we have character sheets that take 4 pages and all the numbers and abilities are dependent on each other?
Personally, I think if we're looking at avoiding having interesting stuff happen in the game because it's too cumbersome to make changes to the character sheet - the problem is with the character sheet.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 3:51AM
#48
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I'd rather have simpler conditions and (reasonably) complex characters than remove most of the options of 3E and 4E to preserve drain. By "simpler" I don't mean "only hit point damage" which seems to be the assumption of a few posters. But maybe the options in DDN will keep everyone happy, so that's cool.
@Butcha: I get your point that monsters should have a variety of abilities. I'm not sure why you feel level and ability drain are ideal penalties, while something like dealing 1/2 damage, taking skill penalties, healing slowly, and so on are not viable. I'm pretty sure I'd still be afraid of a shadow if its attack caused me to deal 1/2 damage, and the penalty is much simpler to apply than Str damage. There could even be some kind of save or check at the end of the encounter to see if the effect continues, though there also needs to be a reasonable way for parties to remove long term effects without an obligatory temple to Pelor in every hamlet.
I just don't understand why it's *better* for certain healing resources to be tied up in clerics specifically. If I want to run a game or a series of adventures in which the party is far from civilization, I should be able to do so without culling a big chunk of the MM. I don't see why being able to have a party stumble upon a deserted temple in the middle of nowhere that turns out to be filled with undead is asking too much of D&D. And again, please don't think I mean monsters should not be able to inflict lasting harm. The drain model just isn't one that I see any benefit too.
Ed_Warlord, on what it takes to make a thread work: I think for it to be really constructive, everyone would have to be honest with each other, and with themselves. Quotation of the moment
Show
Areleth: How does this help the problems we have with Fighters? Do you think that every time I thought I was playing D&D what I was actually doing was slamming my head in a car door and that if you just explain how to play without doing that then I'll finally enjoy the game?
Quotation of ALL moments
Show
TD: That's why they put me on the front of every book. This is the dungeon, and I am the dragon.
A word of warning though: I'm totally not a level appropriate encounter.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 4:12AM
#49
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Date Joined:
Jun 29, 2008
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I'm not sure why you feel level and ability drain are ideal penalties, while something like dealing 1/2 damage, taking skill penalties, healing slowly, and so on are not viable.
Actually I like having other penalties at my disposal as well. If you thought otherwise there must have been some misunderstanding. I am pro-stuff that makes monsters feel unique.
Healing slowly is an excellent penalty that I could imagine being used on some swamp-slug-thingy that infects your wounds.
Skill penalties to i.e. concentration when attacked by a creature of madness could be really great.
Half-damage I am not so sure about... It feels weird in many cases when this is the only place the penalty is applied. I'd rather see strength drain, int drain or level drain since they make more sense to me. Half-damage usually fails a bluff check against my logic, causing my immersion to falter.
The Character Initiative
Show
Every time you abuse the system you enforce limitations.
Every time the system is limited we lose options.
Breaking an RPG is like cheating in a computer game.
As a DM you are the punkbuster of your table.
Dare to say no to abusers.
Make players build characters, not characters out of builds.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 4:19AM
#50
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Date Joined:
May 12, 2009
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I am in favor of Stats Drain as a additioinal form of threat and think it should be in the game without a doubt. I am in favor of temporary effect, fading over time for exemple, perhaps linked to a number of rests or milestones.
About bookeeping, D&D is a game of bookeeping. You bookeep everytime you take a hit and reduce hit points, get healed and add back hit points, level up and change hit points, attacks and skills modifiers, record feats powers etc...add equipment to your sheet and recalculate encumbrance and so forth.
Temporarly reducing stats related modifiers due to an effect isn't rocket science and is similar to a penalty. When you have a penalty to attack or AC, when this game element come into play you ask yourself, do i make an attack, ok substract 2. Same for Stats drain, do i use an ability that use said stats ? Yes, then substract accordingly. This goes on for skills, saving throws, attacks etc...
Buffs are also temporary modifiers and funnily we don't hear those criticisms about it when getting a +4 STR for 1 hour after drinking a Potion. Bizzare huh ? :P
Yan
Montréal, Canada
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