Personally I think the players coming up with some cool new trick for each encounter sounds pretty good. The problem is when they find one cool new trick that works for everything. Like, casting Create Water in someone’s lungs sounds awesome the first time you do it, but you don’t want a whole campaign of just that. But even if the players agree that that would be boring, it’s hard not to do that without justifying why it wouldn’t work, and if it wouldn’t work every time, why would it have worked the first time?
You can have it work as a roll for arcana vs the victims survival, or just plain roll a d20 for the victim to cough it up and be angry, and ofc set the challenge much higher for stronger creatures, etc. I think there are lots of ways around it within the mechanics of the game.
Some DM have a general rule you can’t re-attempt the same skill check over and over, you can try it in the future on a different person but not again on the same person in that moment. So that’s another possible barrier to abuse. That only applies out of combat ofc.
Another option is world build against it - allow it the first time, but then word spreads about this tactic and any well off people find defensive countermeasures or learn to create potions to counteract the effects. Then it would be re-attemptable just in rare situations where you just travelled to a new and information-isolated region.
Now I know the create water trick is just an example but it’s a flexible system and I think with some creativity you can counteract things like that being too OP in a way that’s still fun
Personally I think the players coming up with some cool new trick for each encounter sounds pretty good. The problem is when they find one cool new trick that works for everything. Like, casting Create Water in someone’s lungs sounds awesome the first time you do it, but you don’t want a whole campaign of just that. But even if the players agree that that would be boring, it’s hard not to do that without justifying why it wouldn’t work, and if it wouldn’t work every time, why would it have worked the first time?
You can have it work as a roll for arcana vs the victims survival, or just plain roll a d20 for the victim to cough it up and be angry, and ofc set the challenge much higher for stronger creatures, etc. I think there are lots of ways around it within the mechanics of the game.
Some DM have a general rule you can’t re-attempt the same skill check over and over, you can try it in the future on a different person but not again on the same person in that moment. So that’s another possible barrier to abuse. That only applies out of combat ofc.
Another option is world build against it - allow it the first time, but then word spreads about this tactic and any well off people find defensive countermeasures or learn to create potions to counteract the effects. Then it would be re-attemptable just in rare situations where you just travelled to a new and information-isolated region.
Now I know the create water trick is just an example but it’s a flexible system and I think with some creativity you can counteract things like that being too OP in a way that’s still fun