Originally published at: New Beta Status Effects Revisions — Errata — Advanced Old School Revival — OSR+
OSR+ has a number of status effects that are conferred by various perils and abilities. Outside of spells or spell-like effects, status effects tend to end after the victim’s next turn. There were a couple narrative reasons why the effects have this limited duration:
- Before this revision, some effects forced you to take specific action (e.g., if you were entangled, you were forced to break free; if you were stunned, your actions were limited to defensive action). Limiting the duration of these statuses kept players from being effectively taken out of the game for no longer than one turn.
- We didn't want the system to force you to track multiple status effects over time, as it's not in the spirit of the game to hamper players or the GM with too many numbers.
After years of testing, however, it's become clear that status effects that take you completely out of the game just aren't fun. Nobody wants to sit and twiddle their thumbs as the rest of the table gets to continue to play, just because they're stunned. After all, why would a game include in its mechanics the rule that you can't play (for any length of time?). Add to this, as a GM, I tend to avoid inflicting PCs with status effects for this exact reason, and the result is that I'm deliberately ignoring a large part of the tactics available in the game.
That being said, some of these statuses must exist in order to simulate the fiction immersively. PCs will go unconscious. You have to be able to knock someone out. These are things you can do in real life, and it would stretch credulity to avoid simulating what those effects do.
Therefore in this status effect revision, we've made it such that no effect forces you to take any particular action; effects just describe what you can't do. For example, if you have the held status effect (say as a result of being subject to a time spell), you could still potentially cast Dispel Magic on yourself (as a psychic), because psychics don't have somatic or semantic components to their spells. Similarly, the revised stunned status effect rules allow PCs to continue to act as normal, they just suffer a d6 malus as long as they're stunned on every roll. The revisions keep players in the game, forcing them to consider alternate approaches to success when the effects rule out the most clear cut ones.
Concerning Legendary Resistance
Mechanically, legendary resistance exists mainly to prevent NPC foes from being "stun-locked," to borrow a term from video games. As originally formulated, legendary resistance was basically the GM's get-out-of-jail-free card against spells like Sleep or tactics like Knockout, that take an NPC out of the game with a single failed roll. D&D approaches this by giving special enemies a number of chances to succeed on a roll even after they fail (or by pairing a long list of invulnerabilities or resistances with a long list of other status effects), but this still allows for the possibility that they may be caught without such bennies available and fall victim to stun-locking anyway. OSR+ corrects for this by having legendary resistance belong only to very special monsters or BBEGs, and having it apply unlimited protection.
This revision, however, restricts the benefits legendary resistance provides by describing it mainly as immunity to having one's action be directed or restricted. This allows the GM more latitude to A) rule out stun-locking abilities on a case-by-case basis, and B) fictionalize the resistance in a cinematic way that best suits the fiction.