Just wanted to clear something up quickly - Bane Focus allows you to inflict banes when your damaging attack exceeds a target’s defence by 5 instead of the usual 10.
Bane Resistance increases your defence against a certain bane by 5.
So does Bane Resistance basically negate Bane Focus and revert the required damage excess back to 10+? Or does it only work on dedicated Bane invocation rolls?
Also, side question, I think I’ve been letting my players stack Persistent Damage, slight oversight on my part. I know you aren’t supposed to stack banes but one of them is a necromancer and the other is a swordsman so their particular flavours of persistent damage are completely different from one another.
One is entropic decay, the other is a bleed so I’ve been allowing them to inflict the same target without a second thought - it honestly just didn’t cross my mind that they were stacking a bane because the flavour was so different.
How would you guys handle this? Does wildly different flavours make it ok to stack this or shall I explain to my players that I messed up, overlooked a rule and things will be different going forward?
Default RAW, banes don’t stack, even if from different sources or what have you. Fatigue is the exception.
HOWEVER, as the GM you are free to allow it. As long as it is different types, I don’t see too big of a problem with it. Though it could clearly get abused, and the question would be, how do your players feel about being able to have several versions of Persistent Damage on them?
So, for example, if you have a source from Fire, a source for Entropic decay, a source from Bleeding, it could make sense that they could all exist.
The way I handle things with my players is, “Alright, we can do it this way, and that means going forward it will work. however, this means that NPCs can do the exact same thing to you. If you are ok with that, then we’ll do it, otherwise, we’ll just do no stacking.”
Ah, you mean for NPCs, not for players. I was wondering where you were getting bane resistance from.
So:
If you are attacked by a Bane, you have +5 defense against it to all your scores.
Bane Focus applies to Damaging attacks on the 5+. However, even with this interaction, it wouldn’t change anything.
NPC has 20 Guard
Player A hits them for 25, auto inflicts Persistent Damage with agility
NPC has 25 Guard vs Persistent Damage
25 is still success if looking at it from the bane perspective, so still persistent damage as well as the 5 damage
To further explain what I typed above, this clause is what I’m referring to:
In order to apply a bane, your attack roll must equal or exceed the appropriate defense for that bane. If your attack targeted multiple foes, you may apply the bane to each qualifying target.
in the case your bane is targeting the same defense as the damaging attack, it shouldn’t ever matter, but if, for example, you were doing something like provoke, that targets resolve.
So the original attack roll of:
20 vs 15 Guard = Bane Focus triggered and you can Provoke (which targets Resolve Defense)
However, the target’s Resolve is 21, this means you don’t get to apply the Provoked bane.