Hungry space mechanic?

[jjordan]

Consider a basic domain of dread. I want to implement a mechanic to depict an absorption attack. If a character sleeps then the space attempts to absorb them. I don't want this to be an instadeath trap. So, where do I give the players a fair chance? Is it a perception save to detect and avoid the attack. Do they automatically detect the attack once it is underway and get a saving throw(s)? In my head the party can wake up and find a party member is simply gone. I think that rather than being dead the taken are slowly dying, giving the party an opportunity to find and rescue them with an uncertain countdown.

Your thoughts?

[JonBeowulf]

#1, start with a valued NPC. You'll certainly create stress and a sense of urgency if you start by throwing this at a PC, but you may also annoy/anger the player. This is a pretty nasty thing you're designing.

#2, take a look at how the Night Hag does her thing.

[Reynaert]

Give the player a dream (nightmare) that is abstractly linked to the notion of being absorbed somehow. Maybe one of the classics like being unable to move or falling through the ground or something.

Then if the player says they try to wake up, it's a con save or something, if they're completely oblivious to your obvious hints (like any normal player) maybe some kind of int or wis roll to give the character hints.

Or make it more elaborate with a bit of storytelling where the good resolution is waking up (and the bad one is never waking up again).

[Unoriginal]

Consider a basic domain of dread. I want to implement a mechanic to depict an absorption attack. If a character sleeps then the space attempts to absorb them. I don't want this to be an instadeath trap. So, where do I give the players a fair chance? Is it a perception save to detect and avoid the attack. Do they automatically detect the attack once it is underway and get a saving throw(s)? In my head the party can wake up and find a party member is simply gone. I think that rather than being dead the taken are slowly dying, giving the party an opportunity to find and rescue them with an uncertain countdown.

Your thoughts?

I would take a look at the Imprisonment spell and the Astral Dreadnought's Demiplanar Donjon, to see how the game handles that kind of things currently.

That way if you like it you don't have to change much and if you don't like it you have a starting point you can modify at leisure.

[EggKookoo]

So my first thought is that the situation as you're describing it focuses attention on one PC and player. What is the rest of the party doing?

Maybe you could come up with a way to externalize the dead space effect. It randomly selects a player, and the entire party is involved in "fighting it off" (including the victim). I don't recommend pitting the victim against the rest of the party, but more like the rest can see the struggle and apply actions to mitigate/overcome it.

You could treat it as a classic encounter, like the party is attacked by an avatar of the dead space, and one of the avatar's special actions is it can target a creature (PC) and apply a kind of curse. Then if the avatar isn't killed, banished, or otherwise defeated within a certain time, the curse becomes effectively permanent or at least permanent-until-special-macguffin-is-found-to-dispell-it.

If you don't want to get so literal with the encounter, make it less of a creature and more of an effect. You can come up with a number of ways the party has to "defeat" it. Old style skill challenges might be an inspiration here.

The other big issue is that if the victim is taken, what does the player do while the rest of the table gets to keep on playing? Maybe being "taken" doesn't mean taken away, but some vitality or essence has been taken by the curse. The player can still play and the PC is still there, but has some limitation (plus a lot of flavor, like they look ghostly). For example, maybe the PC is reduced to 1 HP, but gains a number of temp HP to be brought back up to maximum HP. Fully functional, but can't be healed. Or something along those lines. It shouldn't take much.

[NichG]

Give the player a dream (nightmare) that is abstractly linked to the notion of being absorbed somehow. Maybe one of the classics like being unable to move or falling through the ground or something.

Then if the player says they try to wake up, it's a con save or something, if they're completely oblivious to your obvious hints (like any normal player) maybe some kind of int or wis roll to give the character hints.

Or make it more elaborate with a bit of storytelling where the good resolution is waking up (and the bad one is never waking up again).

Starting with the nightmare idea, but taking a different tack...

The way the absorption happens is more like replacement than absorption, and it happens organically and continuously as people sleep in the plane. The first night someone sleeps, they dream of fragments of another life - the sort of life that a native denizen of the plane would lead, monstrous or tormented or whatever, but with structure - time and events and experiences. For each such dream someone has, they lose memories of similar importance and extent as the dream covers. The first night is just a taste, an irrelevant day lived in exchange for some day forgotten that the character probably will never notice or remember until someone brings it up and the DM narrates 'you don't remember that'. The dreams are lucid, and provide chances to either try to learn more about the entity whose dream is being shared, or try to avoid learning by e.g. steering the dream towards things that will tend to wake you up, steering the dream into a loop, detaching from the action, etc - this can be a Wisdom save with slowly escalating DC the longer someone spends in the plane.

On the other hand, if someone delves into the dream and tries to learn more, they start to get some advantages in the waking world. Maybe a skill proficiency they didn't have, even racial abilities of the creature they're dreaming of. Maybe the character begins to act as if gestalted with another class and build of their level, finding out that knowledge of spells or abilities has seemingly manifested from nowhere. These do not come at the cost of similar mechanical power, but instead come at much larger losses of memory and now even personality and perspective. Even those not delving would get here eventually, but its much slower. After doing this even once, the DM should mess with the character's perceptions, narrating things slightly differently: 'you see strangers milling around your camp, searching for things in the gear' when its just the other party members, 'your friend seems fine, just a few scratches like that is no big deal' when they're grievously wounded, etc. By the second 'delve', sometimes the character will have to make a Wisdom save to avoid acting in accordance to what the creature that is replacing them would do, and they might no longer recognize their name when spoken or even large sections of their past - the DM should make it very obvious by this point. By the third 'delve', hand the player a description of their new character to play, for the original one has been consumed by the plane.

Up until the third delve-equivalent replacement, the effects fade with time spent outside of the plane. Individual memories may not come back perfectly, but things like the extra proficiencies and gestalt classes and so on go away after a week or so, and if the person returns to the hungry space then their 'counter' starts from zero. More difficult would be to stop the phenomenon while remaining on the plane - the way this is set up suggests that there should be some particular creature who is replacing the character; finding and killing that creature (whose location and activities should be knowable from the dreams, of course at the risk of accelerating the process) should basically end things.

As far as saving a fully consumed character? It should be pretty difficult. This isn't even a 'death' from a mechanical standpoint, but a gradual continual brainwashing and replacement of the things that make up a person. There's not some intact soul that has not experienced any of these changes to call back from its afterlife. One would have to capture the creature who has feasted on the character's memories and develop some kind of custom shenanigans to basically twist the properties of the plane and force it to work in reverse somehow, letting the former party member 'consume' those memories back again. But even doing that is likely to leave the character with a mixed perspective, as while they 'have' those memories they may or may not identify with the person in them anymore (but at that point its up to the player to RP how they like).

[Brookshw]

I'd probably just treat it as Hades's planar effects, sucking your life force until you're fully absorbed.

[jjordan]

Thank you all for the really excellent suggestions.

[tKUUNK]

Starting with the nightmare idea, but taking a different tack...

The way the absorption happens is more like replacement than absorption, and it happens organically and continuously as people sleep in the plane. The first night someone sleeps, they dream of fragments of another life - the sort of life that a native denizen of the plane would lead, monstrous or tormented or whatever, but with structure - time and events and experiences. For each such dream someone has, they lose memories of similar importance and extent as the dream covers. The first night is just a taste, an irrelevant day lived in exchange for some day forgotten that the character probably will never notice or remember until someone brings it up and the DM narrates 'you don't remember that'. The dreams are lucid, and provide chances to either try to learn more about the entity whose dream is being shared, or try to avoid learning by e.g. steering the dream towards things that will tend to wake you up, steering the dream into a loop, detaching from the action, etc - this can be a Wisdom save with slowly escalating DC the longer someone spends in the plane.

On the other hand, if someone delves into the dream and tries to learn more, they start to get some advantages in the waking world. Maybe a skill proficiency they didn't have, even racial abilities of the creature they're dreaming of. Maybe the character begins to act as if gestalted with another class and build of their level, finding out that knowledge of spells or abilities has seemingly manifested from nowhere. These do not come at the cost of similar mechanical power, but instead come at much larger losses of memory and now even personality and perspective. Even those not delving would get here eventually, but its much slower. After doing this even once, the DM should mess with the character's perceptions, narrating things slightly differently: 'you see strangers milling around your camp, searching for things in the gear' when its just the other party members, 'your friend seems fine, just a few scratches like that is no big deal' when they're grievously wounded, etc. By the second 'delve', sometimes the character will have to make a Wisdom save to avoid acting in accordance to what the creature that is replacing them would do, and they might no longer recognize their name when spoken or even large sections of their past - the DM should make it very obvious by this point. By the third 'delve', hand the player a description of their new character to play, for the original one has been consumed by the plane.

Up until the third delve-equivalent replacement, the effects fade with time spent outside of the plane. Individual memories may not come back perfectly, but things like the extra proficiencies and gestalt classes and so on go away after a week or so, and if the person returns to the hungry space then their 'counter' starts from zero. More difficult would be to stop the phenomenon while remaining on the plane - the way this is set up suggests that there should be some particular creature who is replacing the character; finding and killing that creature (whose location and activities should be knowable from the dreams, of course at the risk of accelerating the process) should basically end things.

As far as saving a fully consumed character? It should be pretty difficult. This isn't even a 'death' from a mechanical standpoint, but a gradual continual brainwashing and replacement of the things that make up a person. There's not some intact soul that has not experienced any of these changes to call back from its afterlife. One would have to capture the creature who has feasted on the character's memories and develop some kind of custom shenanigans to basically twist the properties of the plane and force it to work in reverse somehow, letting the former party member 'consume' those memories back again. But even doing that is likely to leave the character with a mixed perspective, as while they 'have' those memories they may or may not identify with the person in them anymore (but at that point its up to the player to RP how they like).

okay now THIS was pure genius. and well written. wow....

There's so much more you could do, working from this. If for example it was a two-way swap, then if you have been fully consumed by the other entity, your party members could suddenly be working WITH an entity from another dimension who has also lost their own body, and who works with the party in order to return to their own world / body / life.

and if that were the case, this could provide a bridge to allow a multi-planar puzzle to be solved for the benefit of everyone involved.