Myself and Thomas have two big problems with status effects used in combat.
- They’re boring
- They often don’t (or shouldn’t) stack
We fixed them with this:
https://rexiconjesse.itch.io/big-book-of-status-effects
Making a player miss a turn isn’t fun, and it’s even less fun if you’re the player missing their turn. Having a stack of generic penalties isn’t fun, and neither is capping penalties because they can’t stack.
However, giving someone a penalty to specific actions inspires creativity without removing their agency. Having multiple types of penalties can ratchet tension without giving a character so many penalties they’ll fail unless they critically succeed.
Solving both of those problems is what we decided to do with this book.
This allows GMs to use re-imagined classic penalties (blinded, charmed, grappled, prone, sickened, and so on) and get a whole new host of status effects (dulled nerves, divine intervention, martyr complex, prosopagnosia, time displacement, and so on).
They are divided into four categories:
- Physical – Affects your body
- Behavioral – Affects your behavior
- Mental – Affects your mind
- Other – Affects you in unexplainable ways
The effects can stack, allowing for increasingly difficult situations
There’re so many great RPGs, so we wrote this to be system agnostic. The word “penalty” means you can apply the appropriate mechanic (- to a die roll, remove a die from a pool, take the lowest, can’t use a specific perk, or whatever the boss-ass system you’re using requires).
Enjoy! Spread the goodness! Enjoy your games!
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Related posts:
RexiconJesse - Jesse Galena 
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