Homebrew Bane: Aggravated

#1

Aggravated

Duration: Resist (minor) ends (Fail x3 = 1 minute)
Power Level: 4/6
Attack Attributes: Might, Persuasion, Presence, Influence
Attack:
Might vs Resolve
Persuasion vs Resolve
Presence vs Resolve
Influence vs Resolve

Description: Whether by badmouthing their foes or a close relative, a show of strength, or through magical mind manipulation, you cause an opponent to hinder their ability to think tactically and simply go on the offensive.

Effect: An Aggravated character can only perform attack actions and other types of offensive actions during their turn provided it makes sense and the GM allows it, boon invocations and other types of actions, certain minor actions like opening doors or changing weapons or sustaining boons is not allowed while aggravated at the GM’s discretion, however they may always use their minor action to resist this bane.
PL 4 - An aggravated character has advantage 2 on all attack rolls they make, but all their defenses are reduced by 2
PL 6 - An aggravated character has advantage 2 on all attack rolls they make, but all their defenses are reduced by 2, in addition, the character is only allowed to use their minor actions to perform the sustain a boon action and resist this bane.
Special: Resisting this bane is a minor action, when inflicting this bane using Might you may determine range using the Non-Physical Attack Range table (see Chapter 7: Combat).

I have come to the conclusion that creating Banes, Boons, or Feats of any kind isn’t really something I’m good at and probably never will.
But regardless here I am with a single idea for a bane.

I recently started playing Persona (Persona 4 Golden to be exact)
And I got the idea for this bane when looking through that game’s various status ailments.
The status ailment I based this off of is the Rage status ailment.
A character with the Rage status ailment are forced into doing nothing but going on the offensive, increasing their attack power but lowering their defense and accuracy with it.

I found its concept of increasing something and reducing something to be a neat concept. When you think of ailments you’d think they only offer bad, Rage does indeed do more harm than good obviously… So I ported it over to OL.

I renamed it into something generic, I thought Aggravated would be a fitting name to go along with the rest of the Banes.
Rage in Persona increases attack while lowering accuracy, but since accuracy and attack are sort of tied together in OL that part of the status ailment was lost in translation but it doesn’t matter for me.

In terms of problems, wording is the first problem that I see with the bane.
It’s structured poorly and is all over the place…
I’m also unsure of the PL placement or if there’s a need for there to be tiered versions of the bane.
The thing about not being able to use minor actions also seems pretty powerful to me.
I added that part to hammer the fact that your character is indeed very angry, but maybe it might not even be necessary…

Anyway, write down your thoughts with much gusto!

#2

I think my biggest gripe with this idea is the flavour of it:

  • Let’s start with the name “Aggravated”. That sounds like someone is mildly annoyed by another person, while the effect suggests someone being enraged by another person.

  • Might seems to be slightly misplaced as an option because the description resembles too closely the one of the Provoked bane, since it essentially boils down to taunting.

  • Similarly, the description exceeds the general capabilities of the Persuasion and Presence attributes and resembles too closely the Provoked bane

I’m not sure about the mechanical aspects, as it seems a bit clunky and takes agency away from the affected character, but the flavour also seems to be stepping a lot on the Provoked bane’s toes, so the first step for me would be to establish a clearer distinction.

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#3

The idea behind Aggravated is that the character afflicted with the bane is Infuriated
(Uhh, whoops, that sounds like a better name for the bane actually.)

To represent the characters anger mechanically, I made their attacks stronger but all their defenses lower, representing their intense anger making them focus more on blindly attacking but not taking care of their own condition. Hence why I disabled their ability to make boon invocations and minor actions along with the reduced defense. The bane would somewhat encourage someone with the bane to play aggressively until they resist the bane which is what is supposed to happen.

I knew the bane was somewhat similar to Provoked but like I said, my wording sucks but I’ll get it changed to something equal to the things I learned from writing class soon. Maybe…
It’s different to Provoked in that Provoked makes a character focus their anger on 1 target but still allows them to ignore it anyway and just play defensively, casting boons and the like while Aggravated (or Infuriated) makes a character just simply angry in general.
Which actually makes it stronger than Provoked… It should be 5/7 instead of 4/6…

Hence why I made it use Might, Persuasion, Presence and Influence. But maybe this could actually only be achieved really by Influence and maybe Entropy…
I could add Agility, but Agility is too overrated at this point I just really don’t want to give players more reason to ignore Might as is. Petty I know…
Agility also doesn’t seem like a fitting attack attribute is Might, Persuasion, and Presence already don’t fit the bill.

#4

Oh I forgot!
7 hours later, another one of the things I wanted to accomplish with Aggravated was that I wanted to make it a bane people could potentially inflict on themselves to use on their advantage like the Knockdown bane. That’s it.

#5

Per the rules, this is actually not an option due to this part of the bane description:

Banes are negative conditions that you inflict upon your foes, such as by stunning them, demoralizing them, or setting them on fire.

Mechanically and narratively, it also doesn’t make that much sense honestly, trying to beat your own Resolve to trick or insult yourself into a rage.

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#6

I meant I wanted it to have some sort of benefit like knockdown so it’s not that bad when you get inflicted by it.

A limitation of sorts I guess so that it’s not something you’d want to inflict on foes all the time.

We don’t intentionally hit knockdown on ourselves. Unless that’s actually something you can do?

#7

But we are comparing apples to oranges here:

  • Knockdown can always be resisted reliably at the cost of half a move action and thus might be a small hindrance at best to some while having near to no impact on others.

  • Enrage (or however you want to name your bane) is resisted as a minor action (good choice) but with a chance failing, which can lead to some characters being taken out of combat completely (pacifists, boon-focused, and insubstantial characters)

So the difference in variance and the potential upside is massive, so I don’t think that comparison is all that helpful.

But you could easily throw yourself onto the ground to become a smaller target vs. ranged attacks, giving you the same effects as Knockdown. This can’t be done as easily with your infuriate, mechanically and narratively, as it would probably require a boon counterpart to emulate that effect.

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