Using a Will roll to maintain concentration?
I’m so stupid, why didn’t I think of that!?
I was coming up with all sorts of ways on the limits and such that I forgot you can certainly just decide stuff like that with a roll…
I’m definitely using the idea of a Will roll.
The Fortitude and Will attribute is something my table tend to simply ignore and brush off as they are kinda useless. At least until they realize they’re still only at like 12 Hit Points at Level 5 and all their enemies already have twice as much. And then suddenly me and my party go “Oh yeah… Fortitude and Will are kind of important huh???”
I’ve already come up of plenty of ways to use Fortitude to do skill rolls.
But Will is still for a long time just a way to get defenses and hit points.
I’d say though rather than make a Will roll every certain amount of in game hour though, I’d make them only roll when it actually matters.
It’s kinda lame when you go
“You are going to travel to another town? Okay, that will take 8 hours so I guess you gotta make X amount of Will rolls!!!”
When it’s absolutely certain nothing will happen anyway during that travel time and it won’t matter whether they succeed or not. Every roll matters or something like that.
So instead I’d argue the better way to do it is like this:
Yeah, you can keep concentration all day, but when something that could potentially disrupt concentration (as makes sense in the narrative) is about to happen, THEN you make a Will roll.
The CR is the Boon’s Power Level * 2 + 10 + 5 per repeats beyond the first attempt of the day.
The player can choose to make their skill roll or what have you but with disadvantage or make the Will roll before the skill roll.
Things like needing to do a disruptive skill roll like jumping a gap, climbing, anything that needs some kind of focus.
Or outside forces like when a boat suddenly becomes all wavey wavey, and after combat ends and the adrenaline wears off and you have to actually take effort to concentrate again.
The exceptions for these would be when the boon being sustained is important for the current action at hand.
If you have bolster on persuasion to someone so they can persuade better then no need to make a Will roll.
Or maybe you have invoked Haste so you can chase after something or other, no need to make a Will roll either.
Oh and yeah, if you fail your invocation then you’re unable to retry for some amount of time or until a fight breaks out. In the latter case the boon immediately ends as soon as combat ends as well.
I wish I had players who cared more about narrative rather than the munchkins I tend to get.
If it’s up to the players to limit themselves, they usually don’t and won’t and never will.
Already mentioned on a previous post (I think it was on my homebrew banes/boons thing) but my players usually min max to ensure they can deal the most damage, cast the most boons, and what have you.
They aren’t interested in playing rogues, or wizards, or fighters, or spies, or psychics.
Why can their character invoke Death along with the other banes and boons they can? Is it because they are a master of the art of death and destruction? No, it’s because they have an attribute score of 9 in Entropy. So I can cast all banes and boons on Entropy.
I’d ask for advice but that’s an entirely different topic. The answer would be to talk to the players anyway which I already did, and they refuse because psychology. What do you call it again? Loss aversion. And unlike me, they really are just more interested in the game aspects than they are with story. So it’s up to me to place limits usually. As long as they’re okay with it of course which they usually are thankfully.
This will prevent players from just keeping a boon for unreasonably long amounts of time and for unreasonably large amounts of distances (distance will still just be done in a case by case basis and of course, Will rolls will be made if they go over the distance limit made with increasing disadvantage the further they are to instant failure once they are 4 times away from the distance.)
It will be a reasonable nerf I think.
The nerf doesn’t just make you lose something but instead allows my players to make and do more game decisions. Which I think they’ll like.
If they really want to have a boon at them at all times, they need Heightened Invocation III or Boon Focus III to do that.