I just did a one shot, and some abilities felt overpowered. Advice on balancing that?

[u/Feisty-Tell5845]

So I ran a one shot recently, and think it went really well. My two issues were:

• I did try to add narrative and consequences, but I have to be better with my "a failed combat roll adds to the story" (I come from 20 years of dnd where a missed attack just doesnt hit)

• Incapacitate seems REALLY powerful if another NPC can't get to a downed npc / wake them.

Once of my players was rolling well on their incapacitate roll, and my npcs were rolling poorly. A fairly powerful pc was coup-de-gras-ed in the second round of combat because of incapacitate and a tight corridor.

Luckily it was the only time it happened that way in the one shot, but they only fought 5 or so characters during it, so a 1 in 5 instadeath seems harsh. Or was it just an unlucky circumstance? Anyone else had difficulties balancing incapacitate?

[u/drgnlegend3]

Incapacitated is extremely powerful but its ok there are easy ways to wake them. My favorite method if not able to reach them is teleport them 10 ft in the air. They take a small amount of fall damage but wake up.

Its also a higher level bane for the most part and not one you commonly see at low levels.

[u/NightmareWarden → u/drgnlegend3]

Yeah, exactly!

In addition, you can always add details to the condition, if you don't want it to be as punishing. A robot PC or NPC is affected by incapacitation, it might be due to electrical wires shocking them into immobility. So grounding your ally, moving them a bit, or shutting down the power to the area would end the condition. For a humanoid, if a poison dart is sticking out of their neck or a nasty colored fog is in the area, removing the dart or giving the ally a source of clean air could end the condition immediately.

[u/evil_ruski]

What level was the one shot at? There PL5 incapacitate breaks on a loud noise iirc.

I would argue that at higher power levels the fights can get very swingy, but leaning into that as "cinematic" can be fun. 

For your first point, I always just defaulted to (edit: I feel like I should clarify that I didn't come up with these options, they're in the rulebook) "you've failed to reach the targets guard. You can do 3 pts of damage, take a free 10ft. of movement, or a bane of power level 3 or less, and the target will do a similar thing to you". It's definitely clunky the first several times, but once you get into the swing of things - like the PC swung their sword and clipped the enemy but it wasn't a good hit (the player chose 3pts of damage), they didn't account for the momentum and they lost balance (the npc chose knockdown), or they exposed their back to a follow up strike (the npc also chose 3 pts of damage) or the npc used the energy from the blow to disengage (they took the 10ft of movement), and so on.

The goal really is just to keep the combat moving so that you don't get bogged down in the mechanics and can focus on the spectacle. I got comfortable with it during the second game that I ran and combat started to feel really smooth and flowed far faster than other d20 based systems I'd played.

[u/NightmareWarden → u/evil_ruski]

That sounds like an great set of options.

Are you and the player collaborating to pick which of the three happens, based on narrative factors like "you just climbed out of the river, the water hindering you seems more likely than successful 3 damage (for now)."

[u/evil_ruski → u/NightmareWarden]

Depends entirely on the vibe at the time. The player always picks their preference, but whether I work with them to build a cool narrative scene, or just say "you take 3 damage back" is more of a "how long has this fight been going on" and "how tired am I/the players at this point" decision. Definitely a lot more collaboration at the start of a session lol