Crimson Longinus
Legend
OK, let's talk vague.
In the 4e PHB 2 the Warden class has an ability that says: "You lash out with nature’s wrath at a foe that has attacked your ally and diminish its defenses." WTF is going on here? What does this lashing out consist of in concrete terms? What is the warden actually DOING? How is he diminishing the target's defenses? Is he eating away with them with acid? Tying the target down so it can't move well? How does this relate to marking? What even IS the warden's mark? The warden's marking power is Nature's Wrath which just says "Once during each of your turns, you can mark each adjacent enemy as a free action. This mark lasts until the end of your next turn" which doesn't explain anything. How is the warden marking people? What does the warden mark do in fictional terms? What does it look like? The whole thing is nothing but one big fat pile of vague to me.
Now you're saying "Daztur, you're missing the whole point, the mechanics are crystal clear." And that's right, the mechanics are crystal clear, but that doesn't mean much to me if what fiction the mechanics are trying to model is clear as mud or "dunno, just make something up." I want to have some clear flavor to make rulings based on if there's a weird edge situations where things aren't working out the way they normally do and all I get is "there's some nature power that does stuff because reasons" which clears up precisely nothing for me.
For me, meanwhile, 5e Command is crystal clear. The caster says a word and if the target understands it and can't resist the magic's power he has to obey that word (with certain restrictions that are clearly spelled out). There's just no vagueness here for me. The spell's flavor is absolutely clear. It gives me all I need to make rulings. Target can't hear? Spell doesn't work. Target doesn't understand WTF the caster is saying? Spell doesn't work. etc. etc.
Now I haven't even mentioned the mechanics of the spell. That's OK. The mechanics are always an imperfect model of the fiction and the fiction always trumps the mechanics. It's much more important for the fiction to be clear than for the mechanics to be so. The mechanics give me guidelines to follow to model the fiction if things are working normally and the flavor description gives me the ironclad rules of how the spell works that the mechanics have to bend to if there's any conflict between the fiction and the mechanics.
Fiction first, mechanics second. As long as the fiction is clear I'm good. The mechanics are there to serve the fiction, not the other way around.
Yeah, you describe perfectly the thing a lot of people found off-putting in 4e. Whilst I don't believe 5.5 will take us back quite to the levels it was in 4e, there definitely are some steps that seem to be going into "mechanics first, fiction as an afterthought" direction. The new stealth rules for example seem to be affected by this.
To me the main purpose of mechanics is to represent the fiction. I have no use for rules that "work" but which are not connected to the fiction.
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