Forked Thread: Its the terminology that kills me...

[The Green Adam]

Forked from: "Looks like we're going to win this battle . . . in about 90 minutes from now."

Minor, possibly grognardish rant/observation. Take a gander at this description of a 4E encounter...

For instance, I was in a battle where the characters were going up against a controller, a few artillery, and two or three brutes, and due to some early luck and good tactics (the team put down a Wall of Fire *here* and hit the baddies with an Ice Storm *there*), we managed to clearly gain the upper hand and take down one of the brutes and severely wound another. We also found that while the bad guys have wads and wads of hit points, the average attack most of the remaining baddies did was only doing 7-10 points of damage, and they only hit half the time.

One of the elements of 4E that puts me off the most is the act of identifying the classes as controller, striker, leader, etc. For example, in the above paragraph, the player characters are a wizard (I assume), a few...um, guys with arrow or guns and a couple of fighters. Or were they warlords? Are those the leaders?

I'm not a big fan of 'class/level' systems but it seems liked if your going to have them one benefit is an easy means of designation. With previous editions, players might say, "That's when my Wizard cast lightning bolt at the orc guard". Now its 'my controller'. Totally ruins the mood and atmosphere for me.

Anyone else feeling this or have you found it pretty easy to get into the spirit of the game with brutes, lurkers, leaders, etc.?

AD

 

[Intense_Interest]

Anyone else feeling this or have you found it pretty easy to get into the spirit of the game with brutes, lurkers, leaders, etc.?

I've found that the terms, both the PC and NPC versions, are common on the internet and uncommon at the table; seeing as for most discussions, abstractions are all we have to go by.

I don't see how other people's games on the internet can subsume your game at the table. It might make you more prickly on message boards, but so could the continual use of "Skill Monkey" and "Tank", from what I can tell.

 

[jdrakeh]

Anyone else feeling this or have you found it pretty easy to get into the spirit of the game with brutes, lurkers, leaders, etc.?

The thing is, at pretty much every table I've played at since the early 1990s, every group already had some kind of slang that they used in the same manner that D&D 4e uses these terms (e.g., brick, bruiser, CODzilla, DEX monkey, meat shield, etc). In fact, some of that slang was pretty edition specific. It seems like all D&D 4e did was try to formalize things by introducing some of those terms on the frontend.

 

[Tinker Gnome]

That is one of my problems with 4E as well. For some reason I do not mind unofficial table slang, but making official slang bothers me for some reason.

 

[am181d]

One of the elements of 4E that puts me off the most is the act of identifying the classes as controller, striker, leader, etc.

The OP was talking about the monsters, not the PCs.

 

[Shroomy]

Just because I'm pedantic and anal, those terms are technically an example of jargon, not slang.

 

[EATherrian]

The thing is, at pretty much every table I've played at since the early 1990s, every group already had some kind of slang that they used in the same manner that D&D 4e uses these terms (e.g., brick, bruiser, CODzilla, DEX monkey, meat shield, etc). In fact, some of that slang was pretty edition specific. It seems like all D&D 4e did was try to formalize things by introducing some of those terms on the frontend.

Really? I've never heard these kinds of terms until I played WoW and I've been playing D&D since 1980. I'm more story focused and I try to keep meta-gaming as far away from the actual game as I can, but if others do it I can see the use of it.

 

[EricNoah]

It's very off-putting to me.

 

[Mercurius]

Chalk me up as another that doesn't like the terms. But a question: do we lose anything by completely ignoring them? I mean, aren't they really optional terminology--at least if we don't follow the canonical recommendations for encounter structure and such?

 

[Terwox]

The terms make running the game quicker and easier. They are arbitrary.

It's also silly to worry about. This sort of stuff does not come up during gameplay. The players are still a fighter, rogue, cleric, and wizard, facing off against a goblin wearing robes, three berserkers, and two bowman. The fact that you can easily set these battles up with some guidelines is a feature, and complaining about it is misguided. They are terms for metagame discussion and construction.