One of the interesting features about RPGs (well Dungeons & Dragons, but others as well), is that there are actions that sound fun, but quickly become extremely unfun when applied to the player characters. Things like stun, disarm, paralysis, and so on. Abilities that boil down to the player skipping one or more turns.
I find this particularly interesting because it’s something mostly invisible to the DM, because the DM always has things to do. If the DM loses a monster’s turn, well there are four more monsters that still have to act.
Meanwhile, going back to a player for the first time in ten minutes and saying “You can’t do anything” affects them a lot more.
How acceptable it is to skip a turn depends a lot on the dynamics of a game: how fast does it run? If you have a turn every minute, then skipping a turn is a lot less impactful than if you have a turn every ten minutes.
There are other ways around it, such as having players control two or more characters. Such as men-at-arms or henchmen, prominent in early D&D. The 5E version is sidekicks. In my games with smaller player counts, we often have players controlling two characters.
But whether skipping a turn is acceptable is absolutely a design consideration.
This isn’t to say that these effects are always bad. Indeed, having a spell called Hold Person in the game can add a lot to how it plays.
But part of it then becomes “How hard is it for the players to mitigate the effect?”
I was recently running a combat (from the Shattered Obelisk) where three monsters had the ability to stagger everyone in a 30-foot-radius sphere. The ability recharged on a roll of 5-6 on a d6.
Think about that. It was quite possible they’d be able to keep it up every round of the combat.
The first time something like that happens, the players can have a moment of shock and surprise. “This is tougher than we thought!” It can really add to the experience. But that’s only the first time. After that, the novelty wears off quickly.
The more repeatable a “skip a turn” mechanic is, the more unbearable it becomes. And you can really see this in 3E with the disarm rules. Which let specialised characters do it with few chances of failure.
You could design 3E monsters to be disarm fiends as well. Most DMs didn’t bother. The rules already had far, far more annoying mechanics in them.
I refer to, of course, the 3E Grapple rules. If the monsters were bigger than you… you probably couldn’t escape. (Incredibly, the rules not only increased the monster’s strength if it was a bigger size, but it also added a +4 bonus to grappling for each additional size category).
In reaction to a couple of these stunning creature fights, I designed a new spell. This was very, very unusual for me. I don’t create new spells. I’ve included it in my Greyhawk campaign, and the players found it last session. I pushed it quite a bit, to make it worth taking, but we’ll see if anyone prepares it.
The spell:
Blessing of Alacrity
Level 2 (Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Sorcerer, Wizard).
Casting Time: 1 bonus action
Range/Area: 60 ft
Components: V
Duration: Instantaneous
School: Conjuration
A burst of energy runs through a creature of your choice within range, granting it a 10 ft bonus to speed until the end of its next turn. It also gains 5 temporary hit points. In addition, if the creature is conscious, end the Stunned, Paralysed, and Incapacitated conditions on that creature.
At Higher Level. When you cast this spell using a spell using a spell slot of 3rd level or higher, you may target an additional creature for each slot level above 2nd.
So, is that a good solution? It does at least provide a way of mitigating stun effects. The drawback is that it’s a very high opportunity cost – spell casters don’t have many slots to prepare spells, so why would you take this one? I guess that if I throw more creatures that stun against the party, they’ll have reason to use it!
Going back to the speed of play, there has recently been a thread on EN World about the length of combat. You may have seen in my recent session reports that I’ve been noting how long each combat took. Typically, we seem to be around each combatant taking under a minute of time to do their action, but this still means a 4 round combat can last 20 minutes. This is for relatively low-level characters, however. On average, a player gets an action every 4 or 5 minutes, it seems.
It has long been noted that I run combats quickly. At the other end of the spectrum, I can see a report from a DM running a level 15 group that took 6 rounds and 180 minutes to complete a combat! That’s 30 minutes between player actions. (A second report was 3 rounds for 55 minutes, or about 18 minutes between player actions – still not great, but faster!).
And one of the reasons combats go by quicker for us is that we concentrate on the numbers. We’re not doing a whole heap of special actions or narrating the effects of each blow. No, “A spray of red blood covers the nearby furniture and the orc blinks at you, holding back the pain and he raises his axe to smite you.” Yes, that form of combat is not one I participate in, but I know many people love giving more colour and flavour to the game. And so, getting to your turn and saying “we skip your turn” – and doing it multiple times? – becomes much less acceptable.
And this is likely also true of the early D&D games. Mechanically, they were much simpler – especially in character options – than today. I know that I’ve run large (8+) people through Original Dungeons & Dragons games where I have every player rolling attacks and damage simultaneously, and then just going around the room collecting how much (if any) damage they did. Big melees where the characters are just swinging swords are much faster to resolve than fights where the characters are casting lots of intricate spells and swinging on chandeliers. (I’m still sure that some groups found ways of making them slower).
But within the context of the original game, stun and paralyse are much more acceptable than in the 5E game. But there’s also a part of me that would hate to see those effects go. They have their place, but it is in moderation. If you have a session where one player’s character is constantly unable to act, then I don’t think that player will want to come back. It’s not like we don’t want the possibility of bad things to happen, but not to the extent where a player wonders why they turned up at all.