I’d like to give my party the ability to control an unstable godling in combat. Do you have any suggestions on how to make this fun?

I have four party members. I’m thinking that on the godlings turn, each party member will be able to declare a target enemy and an ability to activate. If more than half of the party members declare the same target, then the target is selected, ditto for the attack. If they fail to meet that bar, something random will happen to a random target (including the party).

They’ll probably be fighting 7ish clerics and cultists, and the godling will probably have two-ish attacks.

Edit: Any suggestions on how to make the control more fun for the players? I want a strong element of chaos, but more than half of the attacks should be controlled by the party.

Here’s the context: My party has gotten involved with an almost-extinct god that has been revived. It’s an unstable bundle of power that throws off random miracles. It has manifested a set of curse/boons for each party member. The godling had a portfolio of growth, but it’ll probably get rebirth/reincarnation.

  • Iunnrais@lemm.ee
    2·
    2 years ago

    In the end, using your idea will only work if you really know your players. With an arbitrary random group, I figure the result would be either 100% success rate (they all agree with each other and coordinate perfectly) or a close to 0% success rate (they rarely cooperate). Neither situation is what you want.

    Luckily, when you want a certain percentage of success, that’s exactly what dice are for! Now, my group tends to be one of those “cooperators” so I’d tend to want to balance it assuming the party will always agree on what they want the godling to do. Then, maybe use a combination of religion, arcana, and diplomacy checks across the party to determine whether their characters are able to successfully pull off coordinating themselves to control the nigh-uncontrollable thing. I’d still use the “they have to agree on the action it will take” thing but then use the dice to add uncertainty.

    If, on the other hand, you expect a lot less agreement amongst your players, you can still use dice, but this time, make the skill check determine whose commands get followed, with close results or consistently low results across the whole party leading to no one’s commands being obeyed and it doing something random and chaotic instead.

    In the case of a cooperative party, we’re using dice to lower the success rate. In the bickering party, we’re using dice to increase the success rate. But in both cases, we have in mind a certain target success rate, and it is dice that will get us there.