Sean Merwin

Whereas what are some of the bad effects of you having this transformation? One of them is you cannot be considered an ally to anyone because of this horrendous mental and physical transformation that's taking place. So I love the idea of playing with it. You just need to look at the ramifications of all of this.

So it's fine to say that none of these effects that affect an ally or an enemy are going to affect you. But then you literally need to go through every single power, every single spell of the rest of your game and make it a thing still or get rid of it completely. And so you have to be very, very careful right there. And then in the storytelling of the game,

while you're dying not to like it almost seems like the cage comes down around you the way this is being described uh all duration of all effects spells and features that you control okay that i can see maybe um Okay. Again, you have to go back and you have to look at what that actually means with all the spells that you could cast, all the effects that you can take.

If you summon something that's supposed to be there for an hour, does that count as a duration? Right. It's it's you're starting to get into territory where you need to really, really think that through.

Right now, this is a game. So right now, the truly tactical gamer will see one of their party members go down and it will just become a decision tree, right? It will become a decision tree of one extra person down means one less person doing damage, one less person soaking up damage unless the game master is going to attack a fallen foe.

we know that they have three turns, generally at least, with which to go. So you start doing this cost-benefit analysis. And what I would love, and I don't know, I'd have to think very strongly about this, what I would love to see is something where that cost-benefit analysis becomes less black and white. Where it

you don't know what the best thing to do because it's a little more random, because there's a little more in there. So in essence, I would love to see an effect for each failed death save. The first effect being slight, the second effect being a little more, the third effect being maybe what's there.

Because that then adds just one more lever that it's harder for the tactician to say, well, it's clearly better right now to let the person stay down and for me to cast the spell.

Go for it. Yep. So recovery. As soon as you receive one or more hit points of healing, you are no longer dying and unconscious. However, you still suffer the effects of your failed death saves, if any. If you take enough damage to become dying again, you still count your prior failed death saves. So it's almost like a separate track that you're on and you stay on that track. Stabilize.

You can use an action to make a DC 10 intelligence medicine check to stabilize a dying creature. Stabilized creature automatically succeeds on death saves until they take any more damage. Then it starts dying once more. If it received any healing, it recovers as described above. So stabilizing a creature, let me think this through.

I think I know what Mike wants, but... Yeah, I assume you would make a death save at the start of your turn. That would have to be spelled out, but I assume that's when you would make it, not whenever you take damage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It needed to be said because otherwise you'd be asking, all right, I took a long rest. Do I remove that and then automatically get all my hit points back? And he's saying no. Yeah, and that's rough, right?

Right. That's interesting. If you're at three, that's three days of long rests. And now we would also want Mike to tell us what a long rest is, how many you could take. Because that plays into this. If you can take three long rests in a day, eight hours, eight hours, eight hours, then that's one thing.

Now what about things like starvation, drowning, or extreme temperatures?

I like it. If you're going to get rid of exhaustion but still want to have exhaustion-like effects, I like what Mike is thinking. I like the direction in which he's thinking. And that's another reason why I would add some small effect after one and two failed death saves. So you could

have a consequence for taking a failed death save when you are exhausted, when you are in need of hydration or in need of food or traveling through the desert and succumbing to the heat in some way.

Yeah, both of those points are well taken. You would need effects that don't do what exhaustion did or currently does, because you're right. Now, I think players would be more accepting of half hit points, right? Half your bloodied level is your maximum, because that's not something that is stopping them or affecting their play role by role. You're right.

So interesting all around there. We will continue to keep an eye on Mike's Patreon and see what else he discusses as he moves forward. We have news about a jail-compliant free role-playing game. If you've listened to the show before, you've heard us talk about a story that talked about

People in jail wanting to play role-playing games but not being allowed to, sometimes because of the mechanics being problematic, sometimes because of the content being problematic. Gambling is often not allowed, so things like dice aren't allowed. So, this new game from Bull Press has been offered to position themselves as a conversational game.

What did you learn about this, Teos, in this article?