Remove alignment restrictions from beneficial cleric turn undead effects

Started by Anthee, January 21, 2024, 07:53:56 AM

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Anthee

This might be a little controversial, but the thing is that it's often impossible to know your party members' alignments for sure. Coupled with the fact that the effects do not show visually, using such turn undead effects is often like "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't", and you don't really want to use the limited number of turns per rest on something so uncertain. Not to mention that a full-round action is a time investment too in the middle of combat.

You could of course ask people "hey did you feel anything when I did this", but at least to me, that would feel a little gamey. And depending on the situation, some PCs might not even want to answer honestly.

So although I understand the reasoning behind this kind of mechanics, in practice it's usually just too uncertain. Not only that, but with turn undead now being limited to your own pantheon only, the pool of PCs standing to benefit from such effects is really really small. My PC, for instance, almost never uses the effect specific to good alignment because... good-aligned Dome PCs... yeah, how often do you have such a party? Or even one such party member? Of course Dome clerics should have it harder in Ephia's Well, but it's not that much better for Wheel clerics in this regard. They need to be guessing all the time too if it's worth using an effect like this or not.

This situation needlessly punishes alignment domains while empowering others, as well as those domains with more offensive turn undead capability. You can always be sure when offensive effects or, say, race-specific effects work. Because you see it.
Zina Zizzo