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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 9439565" data-attributes="member: 55680">Maybe we have different inspirations. For me one of my biggest D&D inspirations is fairy tales and players skating through loopholes in spells because they didn't have iron clad clauses is the most fairy tale thing I can possibly imagine. I'd stand up and give that player a high five for being awesome and for acting EXACTLY like the protagonists in the fantasy stories and fairy tales I most enjoy.That doesn't mean you're wrong, we just have very different expectations for what we want at our tables and different sources of inspiration. I just find my way of DMing easier since getting players in fairy tale protagonist mode is generally the path of least resistance and I'm fine with that, while getting players in Epic Fantasy mode tends to require some cajoling and a lot of careful work maintaining the correct tone.That is more or less the sort of play that Gygax envisioned way back in 1974 when he set up the basic assumptions that D&D is based on. Your players are doing that sort of thing over and over and over in campaign after campaign because that's what D&D was built for.Now D&D has changed a lot over the years and it can do many things now, but at the end of the day D&D players are going to act like D&D players most of the time and it's a whole lot easier to embrace that then to fight that. As you've found out that's what you're going to generally get in D&D unless you have a dedicated group that is all very focused and cooperative at maintaining a different tone, which is rare.5e is generally more high magic than I like as well. I've been considering making a half caster Scholar class inspired by d20 Conan that covers wizard/warlock/cleric flavor based on the Artificer chassis for a more low-magic campaign but at the end of the day 5e is a pretty damn high magic system, and 5.5e just makes it moreso.More of an expectations mis-match, as that player isn't a bad player, just a bad fit for what he wants. I'd love to have that player at my table.From my point of view, that sort of thing makes player pay more attention to the situation they're in since they're trying to tailor their abilities to the specific situation they're in rather than trying to apply the same hammer to their problems as always.Now naughty word like instant death create water, will just get eyerolls from me, don't think I've even seen sort of thing crop up that I can remember though...What sort of things you do you in mind here? Because your examples of players being jerks are players doing exactly the sort of things I like, so I wonder what your examples of players being awesome consist of...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.I see where you're going here but the problem is that that just creates the need for so so so many spells. More spells than there is room for in core. Maybe a good solution would be a spell splatbook that's nothing but one big fat book of hundreds and hundreds of spells with some guidance about which ones are appropriate for different campaigns. But there just isn't enough room in a PHB for all of the spells your approach would require so the best solution for a mainstream game like D&D is a slew of spells that work in different ways to create a messy and imperfect compromise, i.e. more or less what 5e does.</blockquote>

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