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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9442995" data-attributes="member: 42582">The purpose it serves is to remove the need for the GM to make complex decisions about the balance of the spell economy vs the action economy during the moment of play.It does not presume bad faith to take the view that a game with multiple intricate and interacting economies - action economy, rationed spell slots of varying levels intended to reflect spell power, etc - should tell the participants how those economies work, rather than rely upon the GM to establish and maintain the economy on a moment-to-moment basis.The game notoriously doesn't do that for straightforward combat - the creative action declaration "I chop off the Orc's head!" gets resolved simply as an attack which if it hits does the appropriate weapon dice of damage. (Which contrasts with RPGs that are able to resolve that action declaration literally.)  It's a sheer oddity that there is a history of treating non damage-dealing spells differently.This isn't true in general. I mean, D&D has always had an action economy that regulates the number of attacks a player can declare for their character per round. That is a pretty precise specification of actions! Would the game involve more creativity if there were no action economy? I don't know of any argument that it would.If the Command spell is limited to a specified suite of effects (whether a list of commands, or a list of parameters of action that can be effected - eg movement + action denial) then player can be as creative as they like in deploying those effects.As others have said, these are not primarily "fictional descriptors". They are guidelines for resolution. They point towards some sort of fiction, but as [USER=7635]@Remathilis[/USER] has already said, they do not give a complete description of it.I mean, in the case of the Command spell the fictional descriptor doesn't even tell us if the spell works via direct mind control, via hypnosis, via the victim treating the word as compelling, etc. Why does "drop" always cause the victim to drop an item that they are holding rather than to themselves drop to the floor/ground? The fictional descriptor provides no answer - it is radically incomplete.</blockquote>

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