D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[The Crimson Binome]

Those are all the 4e PHB1 Warlock at-will powers flavor texts. I don't see any of them as inadequate. They're typical of flavor texts for 4e powers in general. Its not at all clear to me that these things were designed 'mechanics first'. The mechanics generally reflect these descriptions reasonably well.

Those ones are actually pretty good. Not every power had a terrible description, but some of them did. And when a game is making its first impressions, the things you actually end up using may disproportionately affect your view of the system as a whole.

The power in question was Spiteful Glamor, which was posted above: "The mere sight of you is anathema to your enemy."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There's a guideline, which makes sense, with examples. Is a boat as complex as an iron pot? Or is it like a bell? Mechanically, it's probably between a bell and a lock, so worst-case scenario is DC 20.

And in my opinion you just pulled that out of thin air, neither you nor I have ever made a lock or a bell (in all probability), nor a boat (I helped make a canoe once, it was fairly time-consuming and somewhat exacting work). All I get out of their examples is the DC is logically probably higher than 5, and probably NOT higher than 20, but I'm not sure about that last part if I were to try to make the boat fancier.

So it's a Craft (boat) check, with a DC around 20. If I have Craft (carpentry), then that might apply, though the DM would likely impose a -2 penalty to the check. Note that the appropriate skill exists, even if it's not listed; there was never any intent to create an exhaustive list of all possible Craft and Profession skills. But this is consistent, and the player's should easily be able to infer the existence of the Craft (boar) skill.

This is exactly the level of abstraction as is required with any other task. Whenever you want to do something, the DM decides which skill or ability score applies, and the required DC for that check. The DC of a task has a well-defined meaning, with DC 10 being easy and DC 20 being hard.

And in 4e there's a DC chart that shows level 1 DCs to be easy at 8, medium at 13, and hard at 18. So the character says "I want to build a boat" and the DM says "OK, this is not too difficult for ordinary humans, you want a crude boat that will get you down river, well call that a medium DC Nature check" (I'm saying Nature since finding some wood is certainly a key part of this, and its a WIS based skill, common sense).

A rowboat costs 50gp, or 500sp. I need to supply one-third of that cost in raw materials, and then get to work. Each week, I make a Craft check against a DC 20. If I succeed, then I multiply my check result by the 20 to see how many SP worth of progress I've made. If I roll a 25 on the check, then I've successfully crafted the boat. The only vagary that I might not know is the exact DC for the check, in which case my best guess will still be pretty close.

Sure, but again that DC20 was determined by you as the DM comparing boat building with 2 other activities that you know nothing about, and who's DCs were set by someone who in turn just guessed them themselves in all likelihood. For all I know its 100 times harder to make a bell than a boat. Its all a highly dubious chain of guesswork, and the player, even knowing all the 3e skill rules ahead of time, cannot predict what the DM will decree with any certainty.

I'd finally like to note again that there ARE subtle differences here between the 3.5 and 4e case. For one thing 3.5 insists that the character cannot even TRY to build a boat unless he's got some sort of skill. This skill requires him to have expended a valuable proficiency slot on something at best only loosely related to adventuring, and we're not even CERTAIN which skill is directly applicable, this will have to be negotiated. At least in the 4e case any character might attempt to build SOMETHING, and in the course of an SC (which any really plot significant boat building will be) can negotiate the use of various skills depending on how he approaches the task (IE he might negotiate with farmers for wooden planks, Diplomacy, or cut trees, Nature, or steal wood (Streetwise, Thievery, Stealth), etc.

Even assuming 3.5e's skill system was written using extensive primary research into every activity governed by the different skills and formulated to produce realistic results verified against actual numbers its not clear to me it would be MORE FUN than the 4e way of doing it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Which was my original complaint: They used the fact that the description is mutable as an excuse to provide less detail than would otherwise be required in order to explain how the narrative effect leads to the specific mechanical effect.

The mechanical effect is clear enough that it doesn't require tight coupling to a specific description to give you clues how to resolve it. If you can't see how the default descriptions 'leads' to the mechanics, you can substitute a description that does make sense to you. If you want to start with the narrative effect, you can, you just pick the mechanical effect that gives what you feel is the best fit, and replace it's default description.

The only thing that's missing is a pretext to screw over a player by making his power less effective on the grounds that the mechanics don't accurately model what its supposed to do, or, conversely, try to argue that your power should do more than it does on similar grounds. So you cut down on rules lawyering. Not a bad thing.

 

[D'karr]

Which was my original complaint: They used the fact that the description is mutable as an excuse to provide less detail than would otherwise be required in order to explain how the narrative effect leads to the specific mechanical effect.

This might be the case for some powers, as someone mentioned there are thousands, but I disagree this is the case for the majority of powers. The flavor text usually maps rather well with the mechanical effect and the keywords resulting in flavor that is actually backed by mechanics.

At times it became quite evident what the power was doing (mechanically) simply by looking at the flavor description. Firing a bolt (flavor text) was a ranged attack (mechanics). A bolt of fire would have the Fire Keyword, a bolt of cold, the Cold keyword. Eldritch energies would have the Arcane keyword, possibly Implement also.

For example if the description (flavor text) of a power was the following:

You unleash a devastating shout that cracks stone and pulps flesh. Supernatural terror goes with your mighty blast, and your foes are driven back in fright.​

This power would have some of the following keywords and game effects based on the description:
Shout cracks stone and pulps flesh - Not low level power - start at mid to high heroic. Attack with appropriate Attribute and Damage for that attribute against either Fort or possibly Will defense. Most likely Fort due to physical description (pulps flesh)
Shout - Thunder
Supernatural Terror - Arcane, possibly Implement and Fear keywords
Blast - Blast attack
Foes - Possibly multiple targets
Driven back in Fright - Forced Movement most likely Push.

Most powers were easily mappable in this manner. So much so that when a player wanted to do ad-hoc things using page 42, it was easy for me to assign keywords and effects in a very similar manner. DMG 2 later codified some of these ad-hoc uses into terrain powers.

The toolbox was always there.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Sure, but again that DC20 was determined by you as the DM comparing boat building with 2 other activities that you know nothing about, and who's DCs were set by someone who in turn just guessed them themselves in all likelihood. For all I know its 100 times harder to make a bell than a boat. Its all a highly dubious chain of guesswork, and the player, even knowing all the 3e skill rules ahead of time, cannot predict what the DM will decree with any certainty.

Real-world verisimilitude isn't all that important. The important thing is that the player and the DM are on roughly the same page - that the DC of the check depends on the difficulty of the task, following these guidelines for relative complexity. I guess there's a chance that you or the DM might actually know a lot about boat-building... in which case you might decide that it's a slightly different DC, still probably between 15 and 25. If the player knows a lot more about boats than the DM does, then the DM will probably defer to player judgment in this case (not that they're going to be very far apart either way).

So what I'm saying is that the player can predict what the DM will decree, with a fair degree of certainty. The system in place for that is fairly well-codified. You know what type of check you need to make, and roughly the DC. You know how long it will take, and how much it will cost you in raw materials.

 

[Bluenose]

Which was my original complaint: They used the fact that the description is mutable as an excuse to provide less detail than would otherwise be required in order to explain how the narrative effect leads to the specific mechanical effect.

I make an attack roll and remove some hit points from a target I succeed at the roll with. Yes, that's really detailed.

Even assuming 3.5e's skill system was written using extensive primary research into every activity governed by the different skills and formulated to produce realistic results verified against actual numbers

That's an assumption which can be tested by looking at what realistic results are and comparing them to the 3.x skill system results. Anyone else think the answer is likely to be "No"?

 

[Tony Vargas]

For one thing 3.5 insists that the character cannot even TRY to build a boat unless he's got some sort of skill. This skill requires him to have expended a valuable proficiency slot on something at best only loosely related to adventuring...
Even assuming 3.5e's skill system was written using extensive primary research into every activity governed by the different skills and formulated to produce realistic results verified against actual numbers...

IIRC, Craft was not a trained-only skill (I could be wrong). Resolution of any Craft skill was based on the gp value of the item. Full Plate, for instance, took something like a year and a half to make, because it was expensive. So if you're in a hurry to build a boat, build a cheap one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Those ones are actually pretty good. Not every power had a terrible description, but some of them did. And when a game is making its first impressions, the things you actually end up using may disproportionately affect your view of the system as a whole.

The power in question was Spiteful Glamor, which was posted above: "The mere sight of you is anathema to your enemy."

Yeah, I can't really defend that one much, but OTOH there are plenty of spells in AD&D that contain no flavor text at all. 4e certainly has some less high quality content here and there, though honestly I thought they were pretty consistent. I don't have any of the 3.x books, but 4e is certainly a LOT more consistent in this respect than 2e, where many of the books are close to just being rough notes.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The mechanical effect is clear enough that it doesn't require tight coupling to a specific description to give you clues how to resolve it.

You don't need the narrative description to figure out the mechanical resolution. You need the narrative description to figure out the narrative resolution.

There's a narrative description, which leads to a mechanical effect, which gives a mechanical resolution, which converts back to a narrative resolution. In order for it to make any sort of sense, you need all of those steps to be in place.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I make an attack roll and remove some hit points from a target I succeed at the roll with. Yes, that's really detailed.

And in a system that only has basic attacks, that might be sufficient. When one attack does "[W] +2 damage, and the target is stunned for a round", and another attack does "[W] +4 damage, and the target can't make opportunity attacks until your next turn", then you need significantly more detail to explain how you got there.