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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 8386243" data-attributes="member: 42856">(slight tengeant on natural language...)Resorting to the dictionary to get the meaning of a natural language doesn't seem ridiculous to me. Natural language promotes rules lawyering, which is an attempt to get a ruling in your favour based on how something is written. Natural language is extremely imprecise, which is a quality for poetic writing but a liability for technical and legal writing. Law isn't written in a specific, complex, and unintuitive (sometimes) way from a layman's point of view to encourage lawyering, but to promote consistent judicial decisions. If you don't define precisely theft, you'll risk inconsistent sentencing because no two judges will have the exact same definition of theft. Lawyering is a residual thing: trying to "exploit" unclear definitions despite the effort put into writing law in a very specific way. It's the same with natural language and gaming: if you use it, of course you won't have people trying to find "loopholes" in the writing of the rules to find narrow ways to achieve greater power than intended, but you'll open yourself to many lawyering opportunities regarding what the terms used mean.Not really. The DM is expected to make many rulings, but he's also expected to be an arbiter, fair and consistent. If he rules that swmming in boiling water does low damage, then later when the party considers crossing steaming waters by swimming and he decides that this time, it will deal 10d6 damage per round, it's possible, but it's not a stellar example of refereeing. The benefit of the legal language of rules is to provide consistency and narrow the lawyering opportunities, which in this case would be "Hey, but last time we dropped a bandit into the Boiling River and he just got out unscathed and now we can't cross it because we'll die after a few seconds, while this totally normal human like us bandit didn't have a significant damage? How come?" Putting on the GM the onus of determining "swiming in boiling water" damage value certainly allows for different ruling from one table to another, which is great because no two tables will have the exact same shared fantasy (and vision on how much being in boiling water hurt a hero), but it doesn't remove the necessity of having providing consistent rulings and each new situation becomes open to discussion. Whether it disrupt plays because it's done at the table or whether it is dealt with after the game doesn't change the amount of work natural language puts on the GM.That's exactly the result of the use of natural language. It empowers the DM... but with the responsability that comes with it. There is no rule saying that changing damage type change the effect of a spell. So if you cast fireball, which deals fire damage and put unattended objects on fire inside a library, you can expect books to burn. Should a player change damage type to cold damage, expecting to save the book since he's basically throwing extremely cold air at the enemy, the GM is totally free to rule that the books burn spontaneously (which can break the immersion when imagining the scene). But it would be something that is known by the character that his frost ball puts things on fire. So yes, sometimes the GM must gives some advance rulings so players know how to play their characters, especially rulings regarding characters' abilities. (If on the other hand, the GM intend to rule that frost ball cover everything in snow, it is also useful to know for the character beforehand, so there is no "right" or "wrong" answer. Simply that the result of the ruling would be known by the character, in game. If everything was in the rules, the rules would give the answer, but as soon as something is left to the GM... it's his responsability. And the effect of the fireball spell would be known by a character who gets it taught at a wizard university, so he could maybe choose another spell if the "damage substitution trick to prevent unwanted arson" doesn't work. So sometimes you need to know rulings very far in advance, when they can effect character building.At some point there was a discussion (that of course led nowhere) on whether the armorer's gauntlet had a value of more than 1 sp (to cast a cantrip on). Some argued that since it has no value in the book it isn't more than 1 sp, other said that since it is part of an armor worth tens of gp, it must surely be worth at least 1 sp. There is no answer in the rules, but surely the player of an artifcer choosing his cantrip at level 1 would like to know if he will be able to use it after level 3 when he gets his gauntlet... If he was told "sure, no problem" at level 1, then told at level 3 "sorry, you'll need to retrain your cantrip next level because you can't because now I am ruling differently" the player would be justified in saying the GM was horrible to him.In my opinion, the choice of using natural language over technical/legal language widened, and not narrowed, the opportunities for complaining about one's GM and made the refereeing job more complicated than it used to be (moving from "finding the appropriate applicable rule and adjudicating in last resort" to "adjudicating quite often").</blockquote>

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