Hey traditional TTRPG game designers. Hey, you. Yeah you. Look at me.
Stop including mechanics that remove player engagement.
What do I mean by this? I mean shit like stunning effects that prevent a character from taking actions and therefore remove a player's ability to continue to participate, abilities that knock out a player character and therefore remove the player from participating in a fight, effects that instantly kill a character (therefore removing a player from participating), and literally any other effect you can think of that ends in the player no longer playing.
Trad designers, our artform is dependent on player participation. People enjoy maximalist, crunchy, tactical games because they're fun to engage with. What's the point of having all these rules if you're going to include things that stop your players from using them??
You're gonna say "oh, but only D&D does this" - no it fucking does not. These rules are everywhere. They're even in Blades in the Dark. Stop it.
Here are some cool alternatives. I'm trying to present these as open ended as possible:
Force a choice between two actions
You can't attack this enemy, but you can attack another, make a movement action, or any other non-attack action
Present a hard bargain
Attacking this enemy means you choose between taking a certain amount of damage or accepting emotional attachment to them, causing issues later.
Present high risk and high reward
Attacking this enemy means incurring extra damage against you if you hit, but if you succeed, you gain a stat boost for the rest of the fight.
Consider stakes other than character death
In many instances this will require rules reconfiguring, but that's a topic for another post. Besides that, remember that if someone's character gets instantly killed in the first round, that player must then sit on their hands for the rest of the session.
Yeah I know "let them play an NPC" is often a "solution" to this problem, but why do that when you could just implement a rule that lets other PCs get the downed character back to the fight - like in Borderlands or Left4Dead (or Gears of War or Vermintide, or...)
Consider how much more exciting that is, and how much energy won't be lost by someone having to literally sit out while all their friends have fun. Furthermore, players make much more interesting and risky decisions when they aren't at risk of losing their blorbo.
The point is to play. Nothing else. Stop shooting yourself in the foot with your own rules.
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skyblings!! (i firmly believe jimmy belongs in the skyblings)
closeup & no color ver vv
the inspiration ^^
also please pretend that 1) grian is just hanging onto the side of the cart with his bird feet or whatever and 2) that jimmys wings DO EXIST and that they like show up whenever he needs them or something bc i couldn't draw these without losing readability or my mind :)
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They're just bad boys doing what bad boys do!
Can you believe I've been here since 3rd life and I've never drawn fanart! Well since I'm finally being slowly pulled into hermitblr I thought I'd change that :) Hopefully I manage to actually finish this before the new episode as I have a sneaking suspicion that the bad boys aren't lasting much longer..
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Oh, well hi , again! Wow.. I really have time to draw in this week :D and well let's talk , why i decided to redesign Lucifer's home clothes... because I am really bored of them, a draw and many Times so I decided that I need to try make them better! I don't think I do this but love hot he look like old granny wampire xD . Oh and I need to say , i love this chibi anime style that I draw some characters. Byeeee!
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