gimme back my narration

[Engilbrand]

I think that it's there to help establish a flavor for the world. If you want to play "vanilla" D&D, here's what to do and how things look. As time goes on, change things to fit your idea of the game.
I've described Thunderwave as a sonic scream from my Wizard.
The Swordmage utility to add 5 to initiative and take a double move involved him literally turning into lightning and appearing in front of the players.
In the near future, my players will come against an enemy with the Spellscar that basically says, "If the enemy misses you, make an attack against him." I'll describe that attack (from the Warlock, I'm sure) as quickly approaching the enemy. At the last second, though, his hands will sprout blue fire, which will cover the weapon, he'll absorb the attack, and then he'll chuck it back at whoever sent it.
Basically, if you're not reflavoring anything, I have to wonder what game you're playing. It's not a computer game. It's a game of imagination and changing things. The book just gives you helpful ideas. Do you use all of the race histories and cultures as they are, or do you change things to match your ideas? Powers are no different.

 

[Krensky]

Disclaimer: I do not care for or play 4e. It's an interesting read, and it is reasonably entertaining in play, but I do not really enjoy it and will not play it if something else is available. There is no real reason I can pin it on, it just does not engage me. This is a personal opinion; I believe it's me more then it's the game.

Fluff in D&D should always be fungible. As an example, at the moment I'm playing a cleric from an ancestor worshiping culture in one 3.House game. One of my commonly used spells is Spiritual Weapon. The form it takes is a ghostly apparition of one of his ancestors, dressed for battle and beating the spells targets with her sword. The first time I cast it and described the form, one of the other players said: "Cool... What spell is that?" She then got confused when I said it was Spiritual Weapon. It took her a while to fully wrap her head around the fact that the appearance, sound, smell, etc of a spell or power are a special effect.

 

[Umbran]

But like it or not, having that stuff in the rulebook gives it a certain amount of weight.

You know what they call it when you have to repeatedly move weights around? Exercise.

Rather than consider it a problem, think of it as an opportunity to exercise your narration skills. Overcome the bias with how much cooler your narration is.

 

[Jhaelen]

I'm not bothered by the power fluff descriptions. I am bothered by the magic item fluff descriptions. Especially the ones that aren't actually descriptive.

I think for items it's actually important to have a description how the item looks like.
Similarly descriptions are important for monsters. It's just less of a problem since pretty much every subtype of monster has an associated picture.

 

[Irda Ranger]

I understand why the Wotc guys did it. You can't just have a bunch of powers without any color, especially if a big chunk of the book is said powers.

I guess someone's never played Grim Tales. And I understand that this is how Mutants & Masterminds works too.

I also find the flavor text very distracting. It "imposes" on my sense of how the world works, even if it's not "the rules."

 

[Irda Ranger]

You know what they call it when you have to repeatedly move weights around? Exercise.

Rather than consider it a problem, think of it as an opportunity to exercise your narration skills. Overcome the bias with how much cooler your narration is.

You know what I call it when products have features that make it harder to use them the way I want to? Freaking annoying. Sure, I can "exercise" my computer skills by finding the tools to strip the DRM from AAC files, but I'd rather just buy from the Amazon MP3 store than iTunes.

I think the OP's complaint is fair. 4E would be improved without all the over-the-top fluff text. Much improved.

 

[Mark]

I generally tell folks to ignore the parts of games that they do not like, or come up with alternate text or rules as necessary, but I often am rebutted by those who feel tied to using the game they purchased as fully as they can or moving on to another system that suits them better. The more changes you have to make to enjoy a game, the less value the original game may intrinsically seem to have. It is certainly understandable.

 

[1Mac]

Jhaelen begins to hint at my thought: Haven't we been seeing many discussions about how awful it is that the powers in the MM lack fluff text? Which leads me to three observations.

1.) You can't please everybody.

2.) It's interesting that the retort for complaints about too much fluff is the same as for too little: (re)skinning is easy.

3.) Less confrontationally, I wonder why the respective authors of the PHB and MM went different routes when it came to fluff text and powers. Especially since the format for player power descriptions and monster stat blocks were more or less standardized from the early stages of the game's design, as I understand it. It's an interesting discrepancy.

 

[Mallus]

This problem does not compute. If you don't like some flavor text, rewrite it. If you don't like a particular rule, house-rule or discard it. Part of playing D&D has always been tweaking it into the game you and your friends really want to be playing.

I don't mean to sound like an old coot, but back in the old days this process of customizing D&D usually entailed writing a whole new homebrew game system that bore some passing resemblance to the game we purchased. Importing whole sections of other game systems was commonplace. And then there were the flavor-changes...

Seen it that light, ignoring or rewriting a few pieces of descriptive text seems an insignificant task.

 

[billd91]

I don't have a problem with the narration of the moves in 4e. I've been playing online for a little while, trying out the rogue and ranger classes, and I've been able to easily ignore the flavor text in favor of what the maneuver actually does (though it is hard to figure out, sometimes, what that maneuver actually does given some unfriendly names of the powers).

I can, however, sympathize about being turned off by too much flavor text. Back when the Spell Compendium came out and consolidated a lot of spells from different sources, I found the flavor text really repetitive and cheesy. I suspect I'll find the same as more 4e books come out. I'd prefer more matter of fact than narrative simply because I want clarity rather than be kind of bored by multiple variations on the same thing.

For what it's worth, it's not at all the narrative elements of 4e rules that lead me to be a critic of it.