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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5307635" data-attributes="member: 82106">This is silly and we both know it.There are ALL SORTS of situations where casters have reduced capabilities. Since when have I seen an environmental effect that ONLY made swordplay less effective? Yet there are plenty of times where this that or the other spell effects are negated or reduced. TONS of monsters have immunity or resistance to various damage types which are virtually never even inconvenient to a martial character. And consider cases that aren't covered specifically by the rules, a wizard is going to do REALLY well in almost any game with fire spells under water for instance. Besides, just exactly how many cases are we talking about here? This is a mole hill made into a mountain. Really, if you are going to have a campaign full of swarms then you want to tell people about any specific ways you handle them that go beyond the book. If one is going to show up every level or two as an element of an encounter, big deal. Man up.Alex, I think you have looked at things from ONE angle but not from others. For instance, consistency isn't simply internal. There is external consistency as well. There is also internal consistency across situations. You wouldn't allow a player to grasp a pile of stones in one hand and hold onto them all. So why would a swarm be different? We often confuse consistency with believability because things that are termed 'believable' are generally meant to be 'consistent with reality as we know it.' and since reality as we know it is pretty consistent that provides consistency. It isn't the ONLY type of consistency however. Neither is 'consistency with the rules', which are after all simply words written on paper which were the best attempt of someone somewhere to create a fun game. Given that the rules themselves can be fairly inconsistent at times (though 4e is at least pretty good about this) even just adhering to RAW doesn't guarantee consistency of ANY kind.Nor do the rules guarantee fairness. They in fact really guarantee nothing. It is the DM, the arbiter of the game, who creates fairness if it is going to exist (or destroys it as the case may be). Following the letter of the rules is an OK way to be consistent and fair, but I almost guarantee you that the DMs you really want to play with have little interest in that.I mean heck, there are some pretty good ones here. I won't speak for any of them, but I'm betting that adherence to specific rules when it gets in the way of the game is not super high on any of their lists of do's. Being entirely arbitrary probably is high on most really good DM's list of don'ts, but I think we already knew that.</blockquote>

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