D&D 5E Legend Lore says 'story not rules' (3/4)

[Bedrockgames]

I dont know. I want the text to have room to breath. Personally, I feel "less is more" is often overdone. I dont want sprawling text, but I do want text that doesn't feel overly minimalist.

 

[Sunseeker]

I dont know. I want the text to have room to breath. Personally, I feel "less is more" is often overdone. I dont want sprawling text, but I do want text that doesn't feel overly minimalist.

I agree, I don't want it short for the sake of being short(as 4e often does), nor do I want it verbose for the sake of more verbage(as 3e often did). Say what needs to be said, in the best way that it can be said, and it'll work.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I dont know. I want the text to have room to breath. Personally, I feel "less is more" is often overdone. I dont want sprawling text, but I do want text that doesn't feel overly minimalist.

Long, short, it isn't really about that. Clearly there CAN be too long. What I mostly do NOT want to have to do is keep wading through the flavor text every time someone at my table casts a spell. That got old REAL fast and is a HUGE advantage of 4e. Have all the flavor text you need, go crazy, and then give me range, area of effect, keywords, attack and damage expressions, etc. I am never ever again wading through the text of 'Sleep' to try to figure out if the way the player is arguing it works is just annoying munchkinism or not. Nope.

 

[Manbearcat]

I'd like to see fluff and standard combat usage (Action economy, range, att vs def, effect, keywords, etc) text compartmentalized. Spell descriptions about the size of the fluff text of Backgrounds should suffice; 3 - 5 sentences. 1 sentence to give the visceral description of what happens in a standard casting; "A globe of orange flame coalesces in your hand. You hurl it at your enemies, and it explodes on impact." The other 2-4 sentences should be plenty to cover out of combat/unorthodox usages of the spell and its interactions with the world.

Anything more than that is too much.

 

[Pour]

I'm not saying they need to explicitly duplicate MTG cards, only that there is an important distinction between "prose" and "textbook"

I'm agreeing with you a lot today, shidaku. I'd take this one step further and say the distinction has to be visually clear for ease of reference, even if the flavor is italicized and the rules reference boxed, bold, or something along those lines. And it should be separate and not intermingled.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Long, short, it isn't really about that. Clearly there CAN be too long. What I mostly do NOT want to have to do is keep wading through the flavor text every time someone at my table casts a spell. That got old REAL fast and is a HUGE advantage of 4e. Have all the flavor text you need, go crazy, and then give me range, area of effect, keywords, attack and damage expressions, etc. I am never ever again wading through the text of 'Sleep' to try to figure out if the way the player is arguing it works is just annoying munchkinism or not. Nope.

I do think making good use of the entry block format so all the important info that fits is there is a good idea. 4E did do a soid job front loading stuff in that portion of the power and spell entries. But I also think spells sometimes need a bit of space not just for flavor but to explain their limitations and variable uses. I want clarification, flavor and I want it to be compelling, not dry or too perfunctory.

Really though, I wasnt htinking so much about spells initially. My bigger concern was with flavor related to supplements and GM material. I cannot speak as well to 4E supplements, so for all I know those were fine. But by the end of 3E I became highly disatisfied with wotc's approach to flavor, campaign material and Gm advice. It just wasnt getting me excited to play. Honestly even if the system isnt that great, if the text and the flavor is good, that can often be more important to me than the mechanical foundation. To me it is a pretty big deal. I had lots of games back in the day with questionable mechanics that I still played enthusiastically because the flavor text was so strong.

 

[Sunseeker]

I'm agreeing with you a lot today, shidaku. I'd take this one step further and say the distinction has to be visually clear for ease of reference, even if the flavor is italicized and the rules reference boxed, bold, or something along those lines. And it should be separate and not intermingled.

I personally would agree with that, though I understand that some people consider that a step too far. Provided the text is clear, I don't mind the two being combined.

As per my previous example:

Fireball:
Combining a mystic chant(V) and arcane materials(M) you draw mana into a superheated ball of flame(damage type: fire), launching it from your hands to a location within 10 yards, blasting all adjacent(burst 1 or 15x15 feet) targets(does not differentiate between allies, enemies, or objects).

Or more perhaps: You combine arcane materials with a mystic chant, drawing mana into a superheated ball of flame, which you then propel from your hands to a close location you can see where it explodes in a localized burst of flame.

----

Getting the specific terminology down that makes it understandable what "close", "localized", "location" or other such words actually mean would take some effort though. I'm not against obvious crunch, but neither am I against phrasing to make it feel less clinical.

 

[Libramarian]

I'm glad someone picked up on that part of my post! And thanks for the reply - interesting stuff.

Does this relate to the project you mentioned on another thread of trying to bring the classic D&D experience, or at least its accesories, closer to a board game style?

Yeah, I don't know anything about boardgame genres and theory though, so I don't have the vocabulary to make any interesting connections... I'm just vaguely poking at the boundary between D&D as an RPG and as a boardgame, guided by the ideas that a)challenge is more important than story or macro-scale world/history sim, and b)the imaginary transportive element is less about pretending to be someone else and more about pretending to be somewhere else.

Pretending to be somewhere else is still pretty weird for a boardgame. I'm not aware of any boardgames that go in that direction. Except for Jumanji...

When I say I'm interested in pushing it into more of a boardgame direction I'm really talking about Jumanji, not Monopoly or something.

But for now I'm just trying out some different ways to track and organize things so we can actually use all the rules without wasting a lot of scrap paper.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I do think making good use of the entry block format so all the important info that fits is there is a good idea. 4E did do a soid job front loading stuff in that portion of the power and spell entries. But I also think spells sometimes need a bit of space not just for flavor but to explain their limitations and variable uses. I want clarification, flavor and I want it to be compelling, not dry or too perfunctory.

Really though, I wasnt htinking so much about spells initially. My bigger concern was with flavor related to supplements and GM material. I cannot speak as well to 4E supplements, so for all I know those were fine. But by the end of 3E I became highly disatisfied with wotc's approach to flavor, campaign material and Gm advice. It just wasnt getting me excited to play. Honestly even if the system isnt that great, if the text and the flavor is good, that can often be more important to me than the mechanical foundation. To me it is a pretty big deal. I had lots of games back in the day with questionable mechanics that I still played enthusiastically because the flavor text was so strong.

Yeah, and I can see having more flavor than PHB1 powers generally did. They were usually obvious enough what the concept was, but its OK if there's some pizzazz to it. As for how people treat flavor text (is it defining narrative limitations of the spell/power or not) I think that's really up to the players.

As for other material's flavor. Yeah, there's such a vast number of ways to write and present that stuff, and such a big range of tastes and needs it is tough to say what is best. I think 4e varied a good bit. You had things like say Martial Power, which has no 'story' to it at all. It isn't void of flavor, each option is introduced and matched to some basic story ideas. The vast majority of the book is clearly crunch though. Then you have say Heroes of the Feywild which is built around the story of the place it presents character options for. It is considerably less crunch intensive, but it does still have a pretty good amount of good crunchy bits (coming as late in 4e as it does they aren't usually the most common options). The fluff is cool though, and the stuff pops, witches, skalds, satyrs, weird quests, fairy tales, etc. I mean I dunno. I liked most of the 4e books even though they had a wide range. Probably my least favorite is the DSG, the last 4e book I assume that we'll ever see. It has some OK options, even good ones, but I felt like it was stretched thin. They didn't really have enough to say that was new, there's already BEEN an underdark book for the DM, and there just weren't a vast number of cool player options left that needed doing. Still, it was well written.

Overall I just have a hard time really faulting 4e much for its fluffy bits. I think maybe it is a bit too polished, maybe it doesn't do as much storytelling as it could overall, even though it talks ABOUT stories. I dunno. It certainly isn't perfect, but I don't think it is inferior to the other editions overall. Anyway, DDN is welcome to create its own style in that sense, and if it draws heavily from 2e that won't hurt my feelings any. I can't even say a lot about 3.x in that regard as I've read little of it, but 2e I think was maybe the best written overall.

 

[Balesir]

I do think making good use of the entry block format so all the important info that fits is there is a good idea. 4E did do a solid job front loading stuff in that portion of the power and spell entries. But I also think spells sometimes need a bit of space not just for flavor but to explain their limitations and variable uses.

I want that stuff to be implicit in the classification, keywords and such, not spelled out in a novella, to be honest. With the old "fluffy rules" approach you got guidelines too specific to a list of situations; I want the specification in system language to be giving me enough of a clear idea of how the thing works that I can actually work out for myself whether or not a wacky, non-standard use idea will work or not. Instead of leaving room for creativity by having partial rules, have the rules deal with classes and mechanisms so that alternative uses come as a natural extension of the way things work, not because the GM lets them work if s/he likes them.