effect mechanic searching
I need someone to check me on a null hypothesis I'm making.
There are no abilities in 5e RAW which affect both the caster and a target in a different way (excluding damage).An example of the kind of mechanic I'm looking for: "When cast, the caster gains immunity to the poisoned condition and a creature within xft gains resistance to it." Plenty that affect all targets the same (and can include the caster in the targets), e.g. Bless. Plenty that affect other things the same and the caster not at all, e.g. Bane. I can think of 2 spells which have different 'hp effects' for caster and target: - Life Transference makes the caster take damage while the target heals. - Warding Bond has an affect on the target but the caster only takes damage.
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Holy weapon almost fits this bill:
First Target gets weapon perks.
Burst to affect other targets negatively.
Divine Word has the potential to affect each individual target differently.
Antipathy/Sympathy goes with Divine Word sorta, though I'm not sure why you'd bother casting it on yourself
Soooooooooooorta Astral Projection? You're able to dismiss it early with an action but no one else is.
Aura of Life sorta as well,
In addition, a nonhostile, living creature regains 1 hit point when it starts its turn in the aura with 0 hit points.This'll have to be coded to not effect you because you'll be unconscious but I don't think that really counts either I'm just going down the spell list one by one
Vampyric Touch is similar to Life Transference.
Ice Knife has two distinct sets of targets (initial target, then aoe around them)
Casting resurrection on a creature that has been dead for more than a year imposes a status effect on the caster
Wither and Bloom also has two distinct target sets (damage creatures of choice in an AoE, heal one creature in same AoE)
Hex is an extra d6 of damage for the caster against the target (which in foundryland is probably a buff on the caster), and an ongoing debuff to the target.
Wait just spotted the "excluding damage", oops
Yeah without damage in the equation, this is a much different problem
Resurrection is interesting
Yeah, I think Hex is the closest thing here. Though it does require more than core active effects to get it working anyway (my implementation is using midi QoL and a lot of macro poking).
I'm sure there's another thing where I've needed to do "one effect on caster, a different one on target", but I can't remember what it was and it was definitely a while ago.
It's an interesting thought that's just incorrect enough that I think I can invalidate my null hypothesis
The next step after this hypothesis was "Any given Item needs a maximum of one Active Effect."
And this we've definitely invalidated.
There's too many examples of spells or abilities that have multiple outcomes which would be best represented as several Active Effects, only one of which is applied to the target.
Thanks Folks!
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Oh another next step I was looking for is:
"Any given Item's Active Effects either apply to a Target or to the Item's Owner."Hex, Favored Foe, Vow of Enmity, etc are problem children because neither direction of thinking about them really works well in foundry-land IMO. The effect is on the target, but the caster gets special behavior when targeting that target with a different ability.
Yeah, the way Hex is implemented in MidiQoL land is via a DamageBonusMacro effect applied to the caster, which fires off a macro whenever the caster rolls damage which checks whether the target has the Hex effect (or can be done using flags on the caster with an ID for the target rather than checking for the Hex effect on the target), so generally requires active effects to be created on both caster and target (which I've done by creating the actor's AE via a macro rather than having it on the item)
I'll be honest I'm still not fully on board the 'using an effect to run a macro' train. For now I'm limiting my thought experiments to only what core can pull off, and maybe some light changes to the system in the spirit of core's abilities.
I think the fluidity of having a spell that lets you compute things in a fully fleshed out language (e.g. the macros) is indeed very valuable if not entirely for D&D 5e where the simplicity generally makes it not required but just generally.
there's been stuff to add formulas etc. but unless that becomes turing complete (and more importantly a nice language) there's problems a system can't solve through effects and the problem I forsee is the legal gray area of distributing the mechanics of a copyrighted spell/etc.