Fun in the Stun: Alternatives to Paralysis Mechanics

I have a confession to make. As someone who cut his teeth on Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, it’s a difficult confession. However, I hope that my bravery in this matter inspires others to come forward and share their own dark secrets. 

I hate the stunned condition. 

I hate paralysis, restraint, and incapacitation. I hate immobilisation, petrification, and unconsciousness. I’m not especially hot on being knocked prone, but becoming stunned? Forget about it.

Now, to the untrained eye it might look like I just listed a tonne of synonyms for “can’t move” and called it a day. However, as any player of D&D or PF2E will know, each of the effects listed are, in fact, ostensibly different conditions taken directly from those games’ respective rulebooks. In theory, each of these effects functions differently on the battlefield, forcing players to change their strategies or face terrible consequences. 

That, however, isn’t true. 

They all have one effect. 

Player Stops Playing. 

Sure, each of these status effects may have a couple additional effects. Maybe the player will also take a penalty to AC, or lose the ability to communicate in addition to taking actions. Maybe the effect is flavoured as “the target has turned to stone”, or “the target has been lulled into sleep”, or “the target has been grabbed by a big meaty tentacle.” But mechanically speaking, these conditions all function in exactly the same way - they force disengagement from your players, giving them an indeterminate amount of time to check their phones, chat amongst themselves, or go for a wee. They cannot take actions while the effect is active, and while they cannot take actions they stop playing the game. 

You could chalk this up to a discipline issue, of course. The phone-checking player should be just as engaged on another player’s turn as they are on their own. You could argue that players chatting over the table are building the bonds that inform their in-character interactions. Hell, even popping for a wee is a perfectly normal - nay, encouraged - event in any social setting. 

Thing is, I am of the opinion that your game should not have an in-built mechanic that incentivises players to stop playing your game. 

Does All This Actually Matter?

Yes. Shut up. 

Okay, sorry. Got a bit defensive for a second there. 

I bring all this up because these stun-centred mechanics are mainstays of TTRPG design - especially those that favour “crunch” over narrative - and it drives me nuts. Lancer has three different status effects that prevent the players from taking any movement or actions. PF2E has four. D&D 5e has five, and 4e has a whopping eight! One condition in 4e is literally called “Out of Play”, which is as explicit an invitation to nip out for a cigarette as I’ve ever heard. 

These status effects are all born of an honest observation of the mechanics at play: If a player’s primary method of interacting with a game is via set actions, then logically a suitable obstacle would be to take those actions away. This is not necessarily a bad assumption, and it does occasionally work (we’ll get to that later). The issue with these status effects is that they take away too much, and offer nothing in return. 

See, it’s not just that a stunned player is temporarily unable to take actions. It’s that the time it takes for players to regain their agency takes too long. I’ve recently gotten heavily into the French JRPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which has a stun mechanic. If a character does not dodge or parry a stunning attack, that character loses its entire next turn. However, there are a couple differences between this and, say, PF2E’s stunning system: 

1. It’s rare that all of your characters will be stunned at once, so even if one character is stunned, you - the player - will still be able to interact with the game’s mechanics; and 

2. Even if all your characters are stunned, turns are so short that any time spent without agency is negligible at best. 

In a TTRPG, each turn takes as long as it takes any given player and their GM to look up the rules, decide on their actions, and resolve any conflicts. This means that when a player loses agency through a paralysing effect, they cannot do anything until each other player and the GM have resolved their own turns. In your average party, this could take anywhere up to 20 minutes, depending on player familiarity, confidence, skills, and build. 

So What Should We Do Instead, Smart-Arse?

Alright, no need to get personal. 

A perfect status effect should force players to reconsider their tactics and assess their available options. It should highlight weaknesses in their build, holes in their battle plan. It should encourage engagement, giving players an opportunity to think outside the boxes. It should not lock them out of gameplay. 

With this in mind, here are my personal recommendations for alternative stun-based status mechanics, as well as a possible fix. 

Get Rid of Some - But Not All - Actions

My favourite PF2E condition is the Sickened condition, which reads as follows: 

“You feel ill. Sickened always includes a value. You take a status penalty equal to this value on all your checks and DCs. You can't willingly ingest anything—including elixirs and potions—while sickened.” 

I love this, because while it does take away some actions - namely the ability to consume potions, a core mechanic - it doesn’t take away all of them. It’s made even better by how flavourful it feels: It’s not just that you can’t maneuver your arms into your backpack to grab a potion, but that you are physically too sick to drink it. Your stomach churns at the thought of that delicious cherry-red healing potion: Any attempts to down it would surely be met with you throwing the whole lot back up again. 

That’s brilliant! Players must reconsider their inventories and skillsets, and are invited to do so in a flavour-rich and roleplay-informing way. They can retch and sway, describe how their character staggers and pitches and turns an unseemly green colour. Do you know what they’re not doing? Checking their bloody phone. 

Force Them To Spend

Most TTRPGs have an action economy tied to some kind of resource. In D&D, the key “spendable” resources are movement and spell slots; in PF2E, players may take a set amount of actions equal to a specific cost; this is also true of Lancer, but players may also take extra actions at the cost of gaining “Heat”, which risks damaging their build permanently. In order to engage with a game’s mechanics, players must engage with some method of counting and gatekeeping their place within the action economy. 

Rather than outright saying “no” to a player’s agency, a status effect should say “yes… but.” Yes, you can make an attack roll on your turn… But first, you must spend some of your movement to stand. Yes, you can remove all your Heat, but you must willingly take yourself out of combat while your mech resets to do so. This forces your players to consider their priorities: Is this action worth the potential risk? Is my movement worth the amount of attacks I can do? These are the questions a status effect should force players to ask. 

Target The Player’s Strengths 

In most TTRPGs, actions are tied to skill and ability scores. This results in player characters who mechanically excel in some things and suck at others. There are countless ways that a status ailment could interact with these mechanics, forcing players to reconsider their strengths and weaknesses in the middle of battle. 

A go-to would be to give a penalty to common actions like attacks, movement, or magic, but honestly I think we could be more interesting here. A status that damages a player’s armour, for instance, would force them to play more conservatively, engaging in cover or stealth mechanics. Alternatively, a mechanic that randomises a player’s actions - such as the direction they move in, who they attack, or when - will force them to double and triple check their strategies before taking an action. It disrupts the tried and true: It knocks them out of complacency, giving them fresh eyes with which to review their character sheets. It gets them back into the game. 

Listen to Pikachu 

Like most millennial dorks, I played Pokémon religiously growing up. Right from the beginning, Pokémon had the Paralysis status effect, which reduces a Pokémon’s speed and prevents it from attacking. 

“Hypocrite!” you cry, but hold on just a moment: You see, the Paralysis effect isn’t instantaneous in most instances. Many attacks that trigger the Paralysis actually only increase the chance that a Pokémon cannot attack on its turn. Sometimes this chance is incremental, starting low and building to a near-certainty, while sometimes it’s completely random. This, combined with the fact that not all the player’s actions are blocked, makes this a more interesting mechanic than a flat inability to act across the board. 

This would be easy enough to implement in a game with percentile dice, too. Simply have a small table like so: 

Turn 1	Turn 2	Turn 3	Turn 4	Turn 5
20% chance that target cannot take action	40% chance that target cannot take action	60% chance that target cannot take action	80% chance that target cannot take action	100% chance that target cannot take action

This gives players the opportunity to find a cure for the status before it negatively impacts gameplay, creating a sense of tension as the clock ticks ever closer towards full paralysis. 

Just Kill ‘Em 

Players that can’t act are disengaged players. You know what does keep players engaged? 

The threat of death. 

A lot of the time a GM might resort to paralysing actions as a way to even out the action economy and put players on the back foot, but wiping the players out altogether does the same thing whilst also providing real, tangible consequences for failure. This is especially true in systems with a death save mechanic: In such a system, being knocked out has all the same effects as being paralysed, but with the added threat that if things go wrong it could mean the end of your character.

For a lot of GMs, the thought of a total party kill is anathema to fun. However, the threat of failure should be a presence in every game, and this could be a legitimate approach to keep players on their toes. It’s not my favourite method, but in a high-stakes situation it certainly gets results. 

Conclusion

I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t a comprehensive guide to building status effects: In all honesty, this is just me addressing a longstanding gripe of mine and attempting to brainstorm alternatives that feel more engaging and - more importantly - more fun. And hell, maybe you disagree with me outright, and believe that paralysing or stunning mechanics have their place in game design. I’d certainly disagree, but ours is an industry born out of variety and choice. I entirely respect your choice to sit down with your friends, roll some dice, and check your phone whenever you mess up.