Extended Conditions

Curse you Mouse Guard. I haven’t even read you yet, and already I am inspired.

So, in 4e, The disease and poison rules do a great job of handling very specific sorts of situations that can be dramatically appropriate to the dungeon. Poison and disease are extra elements of danger that can spice up encounter-driven danger, but their specific (and slightly complex) nature makes them tools of a very specific nature.

Conditions, on the other hand, have been a joy in their simplicity and effectiveness – they do one thing and do them well, and they are easy to keep track of.

Now, the reason these two points resonate with each other in my mind was really inspired by the discussion of the new Mouse Guard rpg and its handling of status, and dovetailed with one of the frustrations with skill challenges in 4e. Basically, there are only so many ways to mechanically support an interesting failure in a skill challenge. The idea of having a failure cost skill challenges is a useful one, but it can only go so far. Mouse Guard supports the idea of characters ending up hungry or thirsty or tired, and it really seemed like there’s no reason that 4e couldn’t do the same thing.

So with that in mind I suggest the idea of extended conditions. An extended condition is just like any other condition – it has rules that indicate what sort of mechanical impact the condition imposes. The sole difference comes from how they end. Extended conditions usually go away after you’ve taken an extended rest, but some of them require some additional criteria, noted as “End:” in the description.

Extended Conditions

I suspect this really just scratches the surface of possibilities, and I encourage people to think of other extended conditions. Once you have a few of these in pocket, then suddenly you have slightly more interesting currency to tie to a skill challenge than just taking away healing surges. Characters who fail their skill check crossing the desert stumble out thirsty. Guards who spend the night watching a house might end up tired.

It’s a pretty lightweight little rule, but give it a try next time you bust out a skill challenge, and you may find it gives it a little more *oomph*.

1. Cam, December 4, 2008:

   It’s perhaps worth noting that Mouse Guard treats “hungry and thirsty” as a single condition. Makes it a little easier to keep track, and comes up a lot when the conflict in question is mice vs. nature.

2. Linnaeus, December 4, 2008:

   Blimey. It’s obvious once someone points it out, innit?

   Brilliant. Thanks. You rock. This will see use almost immediately.

3. Charles Tan, December 5, 2008:

   If I’m not mistaken, I think it was Mearls who suggested that the disease/poison rules could also be used to simulate other, more “realistic” effects. For example, a limb could be infected by a wound and you get everything from penalties to eventually losing the arm if you reach the end of the condition track.

4. rob, December 5, 2008:

   As ever, Mearls speaks wisdom. It actually goes even farther than that – the disease condition tracks could really be used to track almost anythignin th egame that can go from better to worse, from diseases to the health of nations. It’s a good mechanic and if anythign, it suffers from being a subsystem of the main game. When I think about reasons I wish 4e was truly open, this is really one of them.

   I spent a little more time thinking about this idea and contrasted with the disease and poison rules and a few things crystallized. The disease rules, notably, are fantastically well designed to simulate a particular effect, and that is an approaching threat. You have the disease and all the ways it can get worse are visible to you and mechanically supported, so it is now a sword hanging above your head which will (hopefully) drive you to take action. That’s fantastic, and it makes disease a driver of story, which is a lot more interesting than it has been in past iterations of D&D, but like any good tool, it’s best suited for its purpose.

   That is to say, if I want to introduce a disease into my game that is an issue now but does not really have a “Get much worse” component (say, I give the party a cold) then the disease rules are overkill. By the same token I could probably introduce a hunger track, akin to a disease track, but that is also more complicated than I need. Which is to say that while there are time’s I will use extended conditions to handle things like disease and posion, I consider them complimentary to the existing rules rather than a substitution. The choice of which tool to use depends upon what purpose the disease, poison or other problem serves in the fiction. The closer it is to front and center, the more likely I am to use the subsytem, but if it’s just an adjunct onto the main plot, I want something simple.

   That said, there’s a fruitful middle between these as well, but that’s somethign I need to think about a little more first.

   -Rob D.

5. justin, December 5, 2008:

   Great minds think alike. I was already working on something similar for the 4e Poisoncraft material I am working on. Specifically, I am toying with a way to add the secondary damage concept back in from 3e as a way to give poisons a little more robustness. The core concept is really quite simple and fairly close to what you’ve got there. In lieu of creating new conditions, I just worked with “durable” versions of the existing conditions by introducing “extended effects”. An extended effect: (a) allows a save at the beginning of a short rest, (b) is in effect at the beginning of the next encounter after a failed save, and (c) goes away upon expending a healing surge at the start of an extended rest.

   Example: Blue Deception, +10 vs. Fortitude; dazed (save ends). Extended Effect: dazed (save ends).

   Short and sweet. I like how it creates complications for the resource management aspect of the game, pulling on the PCs to decide between short rests and extended rests.

6. matthew, December 5, 2008:

   These are nice.

   I created some alternate conditions as a part of a group of alternative Skill Challenge stakes ( I am using Stalker0s Obsidian Skill Challenge variant 1.2) because I also thought removing a healing surge or having a party start with 3/4s their hitpoints, etc. were rather bland penalties. I also have some positive rewards (or conditions) for Skill Challenge victory like “Inspired” or “Driven” that produce positive bonuses to things like initiative or move values. “Driven,” for example, allows a character to use more a second Action Point in the upcoming Encounter (though they are then Weakened after they use the second AP – makes for some cool comebacks since they don’t want to push things until the end of the Encounter)