Talk:Revised Fear Effects (3.5e Variant Rule)

Spell/Power Resistance Tie-In

Since spellcasters have to deal with spell resistance, wouldn't it be easier to add the spell-failure chance to the SR roll? That way if something has a really high SR, they could effectively be immune to your spells while you are scared. --Havvy 08:50, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

As a replacement for the straight up spell failure, this brings back the issue of fear not bothering spell casters when they go against creatures without SR. So that's out. As an addition to the spell failure it does increase ability failure substantially, but it looks to me like too much. This is intended to reduce your odds of success so much that the incentive is to choose to run away, not to leave you with no other alternative. I'm open to arguments otherwise, but this doesn't look like a promising change. - Tarkisflux 17:27, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, by adding to the SR roll, you know that you are probably too scared to go after a creature with SR, so you focus on other creatures, such as yourself. If I was scared, I probably wouldn't be able to cast a spell with enough focus to bypass a lot of spell resistance. Also, if you aren't playing by the magic-psionics transparency rules, these rules don't affect psionics. --Havvy 18:01, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

F#^&$ng psionics (how do they work?). Right, that's an oversight because I don't use that subsystem. Will resolve, and probably just make it every typed ability (ex, su, sla, pla, etc) while I'm at it to catch those sublime classes and anything else I'm forgetting. Nobody gets nice things while they're feared.

The think that I think we're stuck on with SR seems to be this: "If I was scared, I probably wouldn't be able to cast a spell with enough focus to bypass a lot of spell resistance." I don't disagree with that in general, but I don't really see a need to take the sentence much past "If I was scared, I probably wouldn't be able to cast a spell." If you get the spell off, I don't see a reason to make it non-level appropriate against SR on top of that. For panicked casters, against anything with a level appropriate SR (~CR+12ish), this already reduces your chances from 50% to about 20% (frightened casters go from 50% to 35%). Making the SR numbers worse makes the final chances go down, but why do they need to go down any further? Those are already really bad odds. How much worse do you think they need to be for a fear condition to matter?