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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5310243" data-attributes="member: 51942">Your abstraction doesn't clarify things - quite the contrary.  If you believe the argument I made - namely that your claim to be able to grab a swarm by means of moving the swarm back into its square when it attempts to leave implies that you can force it to move with what is a single target (melee) attack - doesn't make sense, feel free to address the argument, not some made-up combination of A's and B's which serves no purpose other than to obscure common sense behind meaningless abstraction.In doing so, you seem to have missed the key element of my complaint entirely, being that abstractions risk dissociation from the underlying fluff, and doing so while explicitly ignoring the fluff in favor of the rule undermines the essence of D&D which is (to me) it's story and fluff.You do see the irony of trying to convince me that the abstraction is appropriate by means of another abstraction that's even further dissociated from the in-game world?Details matter; a melee strike through a swarm might conceivably hit many creatures, more than the handful a grab might hold - and even were the quantity the same, it then makes sense that hitting a few creatures reduces the swarm's size (thus damaging it) whereas holding and perhaps crushing creatures in a grab doesn't immobilize the rest of the swarm, but rather (at best) merely damages the swarm to the extent that missing those members matters.  Admittedly, I find melee attacks vs. swarms tricky - which is why I'm happy to note that there is a compromise in that aspect; swarms take half-damage from melee attacks.  As far as I'm concerned, a reasonable compromise would be if swarms were immune to all non-damaging effects from melee and ranged attacks.There's no question about it: how I apply "what makes sense" is arbitrary in the sense that it's not some quantifiable optimum.  It's a judgement call that is a required part of game-design.  Such arbitrary judgement calls are evidently present in 4e - such as the fact that swarms are immune to forced movement by melee and ranged attacks.I'm saying that the judgement the current rules represent is ill-chosen, and that the motivation to "explain away" the inconsistencies caused by such poor choices by selectively applying in-game logic causes the in-game consistency to suffer and is thus the wrong solution.  The right solution is to actually fix the problem as best as you can, rather than to unintentionally undermine the game by introducing yet more inconsistencies.</blockquote>

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