Status Report (2018)

Just a short post to round out the month of May:

In TNP, there are effectively only a handful of debilities/status effects, which can potentially be used as riders for monster attacks:

• Push
• Prone
• Weakened
• Immobilized
• Grappled
• Incapacitated

My early intention is to class these based on how debilitating they are; the more debilitating, the less the damage of the attack would be, and vice-versa. I would categorize them as such:

• High damage: push, prone, weaken
• Medium damage: immobilize, grapple
• Low/no damage: incapacitate

So, using the established mechanics for stepping-down monster damage, (Advantage, Trained, Untrained, and Disadvantage) this should give us a framework for building status effects onto monster attacks, by using their baseline damage expression and reducing it down depending on the effect being added.

Since the default assumption for Standard Monsters is that they deal "Untrained" damage, this limits how far their damage can be stepped down; by extension, this means they should not have access to the strongest debilities, and that these effects should be limited to stronger monsters, exclusively.

Now, that being said, this is essentially all "theorycraft" since it is hard to give a firm numerical value for these effects, which could be directly equated to an amount of damage. Nevertheless, I feel this gives a solid base from which to conduct playtesting, and then begin to troubleshoot the design.

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Next post should be up on June 6th, so check back then!