Natural 7

The Best Status Condition

Lots of games incorporate various status conditions into their systems. Most games have some form of poison or fear, and tactical games usually include things like stun or dazed or paralyzed, but which is the best condition?

This post will explore the utility of inflicting status conditions in games.

Video Games vs. Roleplaying Games

There isn't a difference between video games and roleplaying games when it comes to inflicting status conditions. Players want to cause conditions to weaken and subdue their opponents in both cases. Likewise, monsters often apply status conditions as a secondary effect.

In video games, it's a little bit easier to play around status conditions. Game designers will often create resources that can prevent or nullify the condition once gained, and you're likely to have collected some of those resources by the time you fight that kind of enemy. It's likely that the game will warn you about poison if you are going into a swamp with giant poisonous spiders. Some games let you "inspect" enemies and look at their abilities. You could learn that a spider is immune to being poisoned this way, or that a ghost is immune to paralysis. That helps inform your decisions so that you don't waste resources.

I haven't had the same experience with roleplaying games. Sure, I think foreshadowing ought to be used to help inform player choices, but in practice it doesn't always happen. Also, no matter how many times you (re)play a roleplaying game, you'll still face new enemies which you've never seen before. Without learning any secrets about the enemies, you can't prepare any resources beforehand to prevent the status conditions they'll inflict. Likewise, it's hard to know if you have the time (in real life and in the game) to collect those resources.

In a similar vein, you won't know which status conditions that those monsters are immune to. It's often a guessing game. Sometimes the GM will clue you in with a hint dropped earlier in the session, or maybe they'll just tell you right away: "It looks like the poison dripping from the ceiling has no effect on the spider's body." or "The big floating eye doesn't look like something you can knock prone."

If we assume that you always know the abilities of the enemies you are facing, perhaps with ample preparation time or very good scouting on your part, then roleplaying games will feel about the same as video games when it comes to inflicting and receiving status conditions.

The Worst Condition

They'll feel the same, that is, until you receive the stunned condition (or paralyzed, or held, or frozen, or petrified, or no-movement frightened, etc). In a video game, maybe six seconds passes before you get to act with the same character or a new one. There is a delay, but not a very long one. Sometimes you might even get to physically do something with your controller (shake it, press all the buttons, etc.) in order to break out of the stun. This generally isn't the case in the roleplaying games I've played.

Your friends have to cast a spell to break the condition (often using their own precious action to do so). Your turn is generally skipped because you can't do anything. Six seconds passes in the game, but how long does it take in real life for every other player at the table to take an action?

Stun and its counterparts is the worst condition. It completely shuts down a single opponent on either side of the field, preventing them from acting. Players stunning enemies is all fine until there is only one enemy for them to target. Then the GM has to sit there and watch their monster get wailed on when they didn't get to do anything cool yet.

The same goes for players. They hate getting stunned because it means skipping your turn and watching all the players (who you sort of care about, but let's be real you were hoping to get the final hit with your vorpal sword). You don't get to make any decisions while stunned, and that basically means you're out of the game. A lot of the time you aren't even allowed to talk, which means no cool one-liners.

A small game design critique here is that most roleplaying games don't have a built-in resource that lets players resist or nullify the stunned condition other than a high level spell that most play groups won't have access to when they need it. Maybe a potion of un-stunning could make things more bearable? Or, as Sly Flourish sometimes suggests, taking damage to end a negative condition.

Maybe your game has a way to forcefully break out of conditions like stun. Let's suppose both monsters and players have that luxury. Then when one side stuns the other, using their resources to do so, the other side is necessarily forced to use resources to break the stun and act on their turn. Now both sides have used resources, but the intended effect never took place. No one is actually stunned. The exchange was my resources for yours. Why didn't we just attack those resources directly? The only monsters that GMs should ever want to be stunned are the ones that are inconsequential to the situation. Given the choice to break out, GMs are almost always motivated to escape the stun. Maybe we should just skip the middle man and think of more creative abilities that don't prevent people from playing the game, but could still drain those resources we care about.

The Argument for Legendary Resistance

I think there is an OK argument for Legendary Resistance in 5e D&D games. Here it is:

It is cool to watch a powerful boss monster shatter the frozen shackles that your wizard attached to all their limbs, and roar in defiance as it attacks everybody.

Shattering the shackles requires a usage of Legendary Resistance to release a harmful effect (the shackles) caused by the wizard. Everybody goes ooh and ahh because the boss monster is living up to its name as Korovax the Unstoppable. It couldn't be stopped in this instance. What about when the Legendary Resistance wears off? Then we get to see Korovax the Unstoppable and Tired get shackled by the wizard's last spell slot, then the rest of the party can freely unleash a universe of pain upon the dying beast. I think that's an OK way to end the gaming session, and seems pretty cinematic for a boss fight.

The Best Condition

The best condition to inflict upon your foes is actually built-in to every game about fighting monsters. It's called the dead condition, where the enemy is reduced to 0 hit points and doesn't get back up after being knocked down. The reason dead is so good is because it means the enemy does no damage to you for the rest of the encounter, and it usually means you get to move on to the next scene soon after. Also, no enemies are immune to it (Liches may take additional stacks of dead until they are overloaded and fall apart)!

This condition gets better and better with how much damage you can dish out as a single player, because it means you can inflict dead more often and reliably. If your entire party can reliably inflict dead on a single enemy in the first round of a fight, that makes you nigh unstoppable (take that Korovax!).

Lots of games let you make decisions about whether to do additional damage or inflict a status condition (other than dead). You'll see this in video games and roleplaying games.

One example is choosing to hit the enemy with a damaging magic missile or create an illusion that distracts an enemy for a turn. These are surprisingly fun decisions to make because you can think about the damage you are nullifying the enemy from doing by distracting it, versus the chance that your magic missile just kills the monster outright.

Another example is deciding if you want to reduce the damage you deal with an attack in order to inflict a status condition like poison or impair. You could try to kill the enemy as fast as possible, or you could try to reduce their threat over time. It's an interesting computation if you like to do math, and it's a generically difficult decision if you just want to do what feels the safest.

Mythic Bastionland Example

Since all I do is talk about Mythic Bastionland, here is an example of how I look at damage in that game.

Mythic Bastionland has a cool combat system. Here's the simple summary:

When we have a group of four to six players attacking a big Ogre guy in Mythic Bastionland, we roll something like two or three dice per person into a single pool. This comes out to maybe an 8 on our highest die, and maybe six gambits.

We could choose to deal maximum damage: 14, and hope that it is enough to knock out the Ogre. If he gets knocked out, then we win and we won't take any damage ourselves.

However, we could also spend some of those six gambits to try and reduce the damage the Ogre would deal to us on our turn. It isn't guaranteed, but if we spent 3 gambits on it we could probably assume it works. After that we would be dealing 11 damage.

Or, what if that isn't enough to knock this guy out, and although his damage is reduced maybe he decides to just run away. We don't want that, so what if we spent the last 3 gambits to try and stop his movement? But now we are only dealing 8 damage and he has armor which could reduce it so that it's not even a significant amount...

And so on.

You can see how this becomes an interesting conversation for players at the table when they want to decide how much damage to do. None of us want to take damage, so we always would wonder if it's worth impairing the enemy's next attack (therefore reducing their damage). Because the impair status condition wasn't always guaranteed (if you rolled an 8+ on your damage die, then it actually was guaranteed), we would have to question if the damage was worth it.

In my opinion, the damage is almost always worth it. Dead is the best condition, and we want to cause it as often as possible. However, because you can estimate when you yourself might be causing it, it can be best to sandbag your opponent so that the fight takes a few extra rounds but you don't leave yourself open to massive damage.

When our Mythic Bastionland game reached the point where we were essentially playing at domain-level with armies and the best equipment available, the amount of dice we could roll on our targets was enormous. This made us very reliable at inflicting dead on normal enemies. When abnormal enemies our GMs created fought us, we would almost always need to maximize damage in order to kill the thing before it killed us. The only time it was worth reducing damage to inflict a status condition was when it was guaranteed (using those 8+ damage dice), or if we knew that only a handful of luck would save us (getting a natural 20 on a d20, for example).

I'm probably going to make a separate post about domain-level play vs. knave-level play (high-level vs. low-level, there are various names for these things) and how the combat in Mythic Bastionland works out over the long term. For a taste of how powerful it was to inflict the dead condition in our game, the most damage you realistically need to do in a fight in the base game to assure your victory is about 24 in a single hit. Our record by the end of the game was 58 damage in a single hit. And that wasn't even a mortal wound. Dealing as much damage as possible was very, very important when you have to contend with numbers that high. Otherwise you won't be able to keep up.

Final Thoughts

The best condition in any game is dead. The rate at which you can inflict dead determines the threat of your character. If you cannot determine how quickly you will be inflicting dead, then applying other status conditions becomes more valuable long term. If you are fighting weaker opponents, dead is easier to inflict, but probably less necessary to do quickly. If you are fighting stronger opponents, dead can ensure that your character will survive through to the next scene. In games where opponents can resist or ignore your other status conditions, dead is always the best because it cannot be resisted and it means the enemy cannot inflict harm upon you.

There is a slight asterisk here for Liches and enemies that explode on death, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

We didn't talk about multi-phase boss fights, nor about the specifics of any given system other than Mythic Bastionland. I may dig deeper into those specifics another time, especially concerning domain-level play when characters are supposed to be much more capable than ones who've just come out of character creation.

I encourage game designers to find ways to make conditions like stunned actually fun for people at the table. Right now, I don't think they are fun, even if you can break out of them. I have sworn off using those conditions at my tables, and I do not miss them at all.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone! Stay warm and drive safe.

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