Sunday, March 24, 2024

Fixing (by Replacing) Vulnerability in 5E

 Having been playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for the past month or so (I've logged over a hundred hours in the game - which does include when you're paused, to be fair,) it strikes me that one of the core aspects of the Final Fantasy series is elemental vulnerability. Nearly every monster has a weakness to one element or another, and while there are also plenty of physical attacks to use, many of these enemies are best dealt with by applying the appropriate damage type.

Damage types are also somewhat more limited in Final Fantasy. Damage can be either physical or magical, and then magical damage can be either "non-elemental" or of one of the elements - in VII Remake and Rebirth, at least, there are four elements, which are Fire, Ice, Lightning, and Wind. Fire is often useful against humanoid enemies, Ice often best against beasts, lightning usually best against constructs and robots (given FFVII's modern/futuristic setting, robots are pretty common) and Wind is often best against flying enemies, though there are exceptions to all of these.

In the VII Reboot series, they also implement a system of "pressuring" and then "staggering" enemies. Pressuring an enemy usually requires doing something specific, like dodging or perfect-blocking certain attacks or, most often, hitting them enough with the element they're weakest to. Pressuring, I believe, also increases the rate at which you build up their stagger meter, at which point the enemy gets stunned and takes bonus damage.

While Pressuring and Staggering are cool, I think they'd be hard to implement in a TTRPG - Final Fantasy gets away with being able to have a lot more happen in a fight than in a TTRPG because each "turn" is more like a quick decision made by a single player in a fast-paced game, and the number of actions taken over the course of a fight would take hours to resolve at a table.

Now, damage vulnerabilities are certainly a thing in D&D 5E. But they're rare. And I think the reason is that vulnerability is too strong a mechanic.

I love using Skeletons as low-level monsters. For one, I'm always a fan of spooky vibes in my broader fantasy worlds, but also I like them because they're pretty straightforward but unquestionably magical.

Skeletons are, also, one of the few types of monsters that have a vulnerability - and not just any vulnerability, but one to a very common damage type: bludgeoning. A skeleton only has 13 hit points. That means that in most cases a normal hit from a first-level character will not be able to take one down (unless you're using a d10 or higher weapon) but most skeletons won't be able to survive two hits. But if you have a maul, a warhammer, the catapult spell, or you're a Monk that is punching and kicking, you'll be literally twice as effective at fighting these things.

Here's the thing: when a monster is designed to go down in two hits, it's not actually that big of a problem if they go down in one.

Where this becomes a bigger problem is boss monsters.

The Lich is already a somewhat flawed stat block - I'm sure that very good DMs who are very good at thinking things out ahead of time can make them deadly opponents, but as a creature that's basically designed to be a campaign end-boss, its rather pitiful 135 HP is fairly underwhelming. (I've seen at least a YouTube thumbnail that suggests having a literal thousand zombies between the Lich and the party, which I think could work, possibly, but boy would it be a pain to run). But given that a Lich is often a kind of skeletal wizard, you could imagine giving it the same vulnerability to bludgeoning damage. But this could effectively halve its already low HP.

The thing is, I like rewarding players for thinking to use a damage type that should work well on the type of monster (Mummies and Mummy Lords do, in fact, have vulnerability to fire damage, but as a result, I think a Mummy Lord would be even harder to make a real threat to a party, despite clearly being meant to act as a powerful boss monster).

I sort of wish that most monsters had a vulnerability, similar to how they work in Final Fantasy.

However, I think the problem lies in the doubling of damage.

D&D is a game of rocket-tag - especially at high levels, really the only way to keep a monster up for more than a couple rounds is to ensure that there are minions that require the party's attention before they can focus-fire the boss.

So, if the party happens to have the right damage type available to them (and surely the fun of having a vulnerability is for them to have it) you run the risk of trivializing a monster that's supposed to be a threat.

What to do?

Well, though I haven't sung its praises in a while, we can look to how MCDM's Flee, Mortals! introduces something akin to vulnerability with its Vampires. The book's Vampire and Vampire spawn (though not its named "villain" vampire) have something called "Radiant Aversion." This causes them to take an additional 10 damage whenever they are dealt radiant damage.

It's pretty simple, right? But I think it solves a lot of problems. FM!'s Vampires have 204 hit points. So, you're guaranteed to knock off an extra 5% (or so) of their HP if you can get any radiant damage in there. A crit Divine Smite that lands for 10d8 (about 45) damage is going to get boosted a little bit by this to be 55 (on top of the weapon damage,) so it definitely feels like a bigger impact but it won't one-shot your monster. But if you hit it with a Sacred Flame (doing 9 damage on average at tier 2) you'll more than double that.

There's a reward there for picking the correct damage type, but you're also not going to trivialize the encounter by using it.

Of course, in a game like Final Fantasy, access to different damage types is typically not hard to come by - in VII, I'll usually try to equip every character with Materia that allows them to cast the four main elements, and in Rebirth in particular your characters can unlock free abilities that deal those damage types, meaning every character will at least be able to provide three of the four, if not all four, on-demand even without the right Materia equipped.

But in D&D, your options are more limited or at least harder to swap out. A Wizard is usually going to have only one, maybe two damage cantrips. That does provide some recourse if your main damage type is something a monster is resistant or immune to, but it makes it far harder to target a particular type to take advantage of - in other words, your damage type is more often a liability than a boon.

Still, it looks like the new Sorcerous Burst cantrip will at least give Sorcerers some huge versatility in this regard.

I think in my homebrewing of monsters, I might implement more of this style of "damage aversion" to give players a fun tool in fighting monsters.

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