I disagree that you can have both. The problem is that an effort on creating a coherent world creates an opening for breaking the rules and causing large imbalances.
After all, if there is a spell in the game that turns rock to mud and it affects 500 square feet of rock, it makes perfect sense to allow this spell to bury 10 enemies at once so deep in mud that they can't breathe and they all die(if they were all standing on rock). On the other hand, game balance is hurt by allowing it. It means that the spell, which was often balanced against similar spells of its level because the designers were thinking of it in terms of non-combat uses, is now often the best choice at it's level by far.
To some extent, this is inevitable, and part of the fun of the game. Sometimes entire encounters can be won before they even start just by saying the right thing to the right person - is that "overpowered"? Or, if you push someone off a cliff into a pit of lava - that's a one-shot kill, even for a solo (though with reduced chance). Sometimes, some choices simply will have an abnormally impact.
But that's not to say it's a good thing
all the time. So, isn't the easy solution to just not permit those kind of things? You can have a consistent world-view without the spell mud-to-rock, so, in the name of balance, why not just leave the spell out? Or, in 4e style, make it a ritual that takes too long to be of use in any combat.
It also means that this spells has far exceeded what other people in the group can accomplish. Why ask the fighter to attack on enemy with a sword for 20 damage when you can do 500 points of damage to 10 different creatures with one spell?
I guess if being "simulationist" means deciding on abilities purely on grounds of what sounds appropriate on a fantasy setting and seeing where it leads with no regard to the balance of the result, then clearly that's something that only possible at the cost of balance.
But we can design a world and game
with the consequences in mind, and decide
beforehand that some abilities are incompatible with balance and should not be included. In a sense, there's quite a few realistic things that are removed from D&D in quite that fashion.
After all, creatures can survive multiple sword-blows and a coup-de-grace may leave no lasting mark. That doesn't sound
realistic. But it doesn't have to be, as long as it's
consistent (in game). So, in 4e, a sword-blow is usually just a flesh-wound or a merely a jarring, exhausting shock to your armor, not particularly dangerous. All such "wounds" are like that, and that makes it fine by me.
Similarly, it doesn't matter if a 4e PC can jump "realistically" far, what matters is that the distance that can be jumped in determined in the same fashion when in the same circumstances; and that better jumpers jump further, particularly poor circumstance may decrease distance, etc. It's the
relative balance that matters.
So you are left with a decision: Disallow the use of the spell to immediately kill enemies, even if means the believability of the story is slightly hurt. Or you can allow it and cause an imbalance between spells of the same level and between characters(which can cause hurt feelings/boredom in some players).
Get rid of the spell! I don't think it harms believability at all, and it definitely helps balance.
Besides, there is consistency in the way powers work in 4e. You can grab anything with a power that says "the target is grabbed", it's extremely consistent.
You're talking about an entirely different concept here, however. This consistency you talk of is at a meta-game level. At that level, consistency has lots of value in that it makes the rules simple, and no value in making the in-game world make sense.
Ideally, we'd have both kinds of simplicity, of course.
In fact, it's the other way around that creates the inconsistency. Devotion to "World" first tends to cause situations like "You can grab someone, unless they are a swarm, or insubstantial, or have phasing, or I determine that they are mostly made of non-solid materials(like fire, air, or water elementals), or they are too slippery, or they have non-grabby magic, and so on". Which is to say, your powers as a player get translated into "You can use these when the DM says it's ok."
Right, so you're talking about keeping the rules for different situations similar. That's a worthwhile aim, but this kind of meta-game consistency has entirely different benefits. I agree that for the sake of simplicity, this kind of simplicity should generally outweigh in-game consistency for any minor details.
This is the core of exception-based design. You add a rule whenever you feel it's necessary to create a more detailed representation of the game; that could be for reasons of inherent verisimilitude or rules to keep the relative balance and tactics of the game functioning.
The fewer rules the better; at what point it's worth it to add an exception for reasons of in-game consistency is a trade-off.
But that trade-off isn't quite that simple. A rule could be particularly poor and removing it (enhancing meta-game consistency i.e. simplicity)
also enhances in-game consistency. Critically (to me)
this isn't a zero-sum game, choosing poorly here can mean both poor in-game consistency and poor excessive meta-game complexity.
D&D is not at all at the simple side of this spectrum. We're talking about a game with a
bunch of rules. Lots of them. And many are clearly inspired by a kind of verisimilitude. Distances are measured in squares but have meaning in real-life measurements, and speeds for PC's are vaguely reasonable. There's lots of talk about improvisation and skill checks and DC's for things that don't have a good meta-game representation and yet are still possible options. This isn't a board game with a fixed number of legal moves.
To me, a game is fun when I can contribute fairly equally to the rest of the group. To this end, assume a game has powers like:
1) do about 5 damage
2) do about 5 damage
3) do about 4 damage and move the enemy a square
4) do about 3 damage and root the monster to the spot so they can't move
These are fairly balanced. Each of the 4 players in question would probably feel they were equally adding to a battle.
Now, all you have to do is add a little bit of extra information to those powers and start using "logic" in the game to completely imbalance it:
1) do about 5 fire damage(which means 0 against creatures who live in fire, rock creatures which can't be burned, and so on)
2) do about 5 damage by blowing the creature against a nearby surface with the power of wind(which means it doesn't work on anything that can't be moved, or when there is no nearby surfaces)
3) do about 4 damage and move the enemy a square by moving the ground under their feet(which means it doesn't work against flying creatures or creatures standing on artificial floors)
4) do about 3 damage and root the monster to the spot so they can't move by freezing their feet to the floor(doesn't work against creatures who don't have feet, aren't on the floor, or creatures strong enough to break out of the ice without missing a stride)
And then it becomes a roulette game in each encounter to see which player will not be able to use their powers for the next hour and need to watch the game instead of playing it.
It's interesting you use this example, because the game
does this to some extent. D&D has a concept of typed damage; that's not really necessary and could be removed. D&D has the concept of resistances and immunity to effects. Some immunities are motivated by source (immune to charms, say) and others by consequence (immune to forced movement, say). Different keywords work differently here too.
On the one hand that's a roulette - and on the other hand it
can be a source of tactical fun.
Where do you draw the line?
So, we have three flavors of consistency:
- Realism: necessary to some extent to empathize with the PC's, but non-critical. D&D PC's and NPC's are similar to us because this isn't way-out-there sci-fi. That's a different game. On the other hand, when the game uses terminology and concepts that mirror the real world, it's just confusing to get them wrong. The game shouldn't try to copy the real world, but where it copies the real world, it should try to retain common sense.
- In-game consistency: this is necessary to keep things believable. Since the PC's may and are encouraged to try novel approaches to a problem, it's also crucial to keep the game flowing smoothly and not degrading into a (from the player's perspective) incomprehensible collection of DM fiats. Ideally, the players should be able to predict what the DM will rule before he does so, particularly where there aren't any rules to help you. It's better to completely outlaw an ability than to apply it inconsistently, here.
- Meta-game consistency:i.e. fewer exceptions and simpler gameplay. This is critical to an extent, after all, the game must remain playable. But not all sorts of complexity are created equal. For instance, it's much more acceptable to have exceptions that apply only to particular PC's (e.g. feats, powers) or only in situations that are easy to look up (e.g. rules for flanking large creatures).
I'm convinced that it matters
how you balance those three aspects; and that it's not a lost cause.
So, I'm particularly critical of general rules that matter little (that's a waste of rule-space), or that could have been rephrased to be PC-specific (included in a class or feat). Also, I'm much more in favor of the rock-paper-scissors approach to balance than to mere equality(which strikes me as boring).
So, it doesn't bother me much if a rule change makes PC's less equal so long as you can keep em balanced overall. Honestly, I think that PC imbalances are much more due to poor class design and poor player choices that due to the fact that some monsters are particularly resistant or immune to a particular PC's preferred means of attack. In fact, I like that. It reduces grind!
Adding rules has a cost. Perhaps adding facing rules would help believability, but at what cost? But there are areas where we can improve in-game consistency and perhaps even realism
without adding new rules, or even with fewer rules than current RAW.
In particular for distinctions the game
already makes (such as having special rules for swarms) we might as well make them
work. A sign of a good rule is if it's similar to what the player expected before he's heard of the rule. Given the fact that a swarm is "special" and has special rules
at all: swarms getting less damage from melee attacks and more from area attacks? That's good, people expect that intuitively. Being immune specifically to forced movement by melee and ranged attacks is more along the lines of WTFBBQ. It's oddly specific and entirely unexpected. Not a good rule.
