Recent content by Shaangor

I agree that parsing the relevant game rules out of the block of text is slow and prone to errors in translation. Also, how often does targeting objects with spells/powers actually come up in other people's games? For my group, it's pretty much never. No one really cares what happens to the...

I agree with this. The fluff is separate but shouldn't be ignored. A lot of the people I know that dislike 4e always make comments to me that it's too much like a board game or an MMO, and I think that's partly because they have a hard time meshing the separated rules with the separated fluff...

My apologies, I wasn't meaning to bring up the short rest argument specifically. I was trying to point out my preferred design philosophy is crunch separated from fluff, and explicit, precise rules over natural language, interpreted ones.

I agree. Short rest is an action the players can take that has a defined result, but that doesn't mean it succeeds. There are plenty of situations where they won't get that rest even though they tried, but what matters to them is they know what the result potential of the short rest is. That's...

For my group this isn't the case. As I mentioned in my earlier post, for my group we prefer to have explicit well-understood rules instead of slightly-less-so, open-to-interpretation rules. The reason isn't because of RAW rules lawyering (nobody in my group is the rules lawyer type). My players...

This is definitely a play style preference. I do not like the block of text style for spell and ability descriptions for the single reason that they combine description (fluff) with rules (crunch). My issue is that reading the spell block it's not always clear if a sentence is a rule or just a...

I don't think he meant that he insists the GM actually roll it all out, but merely that the outcome is objectively determined in a way that models the game rules. I interpret it as the GM shouldn't just arbitrarily make up the result, and maybe doesn't even know what it is himself until he...

I can understand your reasoning, as you've said you play the game as a process sim, which if your group is into that then it makes sense. Your characters are just cogs in the machine, and everything has to follow the same rules. But for my group and I, ensuring that sort of consistency is way...

Why does that matter though? Why does it matter what the monster's stats are when there is nothing observing it and isn't involved in the story at all? I'm genuinely curious, because as a DM I have never cared about the stats of anything in my game world except when my PCs are actually...