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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5780381" data-attributes="member: 54877">Nope, you didn't use the term, and I appreciated it. Really should have put my P.S. in another post, because it wasn't directed at your post. My apologies. This one is good too, as is the one you followed it with. What I'd like to see to square this particular circle is optional metagaming/narrative mechanics that are built into the system in such a way that they can be used to replace "bad simulation". And by "bad simulation" I mean, simulation that causes you trouble--it may be fine for some people. Among other things, that will also help people that want some particular simulation, but don't want the default. Where a simulation goes really bad is when it gets so embedded into the system that it is hard to touch without unforeseen repercussions. For example, take fire magic catching things on fire: You want to make the default that certain spells catch stuff on fire, and fire creatures are immune to it? No problem. But even if you are going to do that and get away from 4E, still use the "fire" keyword for those spells. Then it is real easy for a person with a narrative focus to decide that the keyword drives events, and the DM will decide if things catch on fire or not, and that for fast pace play, he'll let the fire spell affect fire creatures. And another sim guy that wants the more traditional usage can decide that such creatures take half damage, and use some kind of object saving throw method to determine if things catch on fire or not.  What I don't want is leaving the "fire" keyword out as redundant to that default, and then having to depend on text. So "fireball" is easy, but what about "heat metal"? What about "flaming sphere"? And so on. And certainly, don't embed the text in every such spell and make us go look.  Not only is it a pain to change, you now have to address how much of "fire" stuff was flavor and how much was for balance.  With the keyword, you know what the designer intended--anyone changing fire magic systematically should include these items. This is necessarily going to leave some redundant information for those that want to play the default straight. But it seems to me a small price to play to make the game accessible to traditionalist with different campaign assumptions and non-traditionalists alike. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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